John Cheever (48 page)

Cheever was already an emotional wreck when the hoax call reached him. The day before, his one and only brother, Fred, had died. The man he had lived with during his youth in Boston, the person he had loved and hated all his life, was gone, and in the wake of his passing John had only tender thoughts for the nurturing brother who had once meant more to him than anyone else in the world.

Despite periodic dry spells, Fred had never been able to stop drinking permanently. Alcoholism had cost him several jobs and dissolved his marriage. Toward the end he was selling space for a newspaper on the South Shore and living, alone and divorced, in a furnished room in North Scituate. Desperately ill, he came to see his younger brother in May. “I killed you off in
Falconer
,” John told him. “Oh good, Joey, good,” Fred replied, “you've been trying all these years.” It was, both brothers knew, a final meeting.

The funeral was held in Hingham on June 3, in a church whose windows opened on the surrounding fields and the salt smell of the sea beyond. The other mourners bothered Cheever. The men all had “sailboat tans, white hair, and mannered wives.” As he strode down the aisle in his cuffless pants, he heard one of them mutter, “He must be a Spanish dancer.” But the ceremony itself caused him no pain. A psychologist might say, he speculated afterward, that while he parted easily from his brother he might for the rest of his life seek in other men the love that Fred had bestowed on him.

Not even death could dampen his spirits. He had sloughed off the depression that had plagued him for so long. In a bicentennial comment for
Newsweek
, he took issue with those who played the role of Seeksorrow. The Yale literary magazine had written him asking if he thought things were going to get worse. “If people ask questions like that,” he answered, “things are
bound
to get worse.” Optimism and pessimism were interwoven through his life, but he no longer granted pessimism the last word. “The decline of the west is the easiest thing in the world to prove,” he observed, but still one was alive, one could love, one could find usefulness in work, and one could walk in woods “full of light and cool clean air.”

The future looked bright to him, not bleak, despite his reservations about the ill consequences of progress. In Romania he had discovered the roads of the past all but obliterated in an America crisscrossed with interstate highways. They took him back to the two-lane highways of his youth, to a serene human scale where you could see the geraniums in the farmhouse windows and the roadway followed the contours of the land. He visited Dracula's castle in Transylvania and the monastery at Voronet: everywhere the passing scenes seemed to signify another, earlier time. The fourteen-hour return trip brought him back to the twentieth century with a jolt. The 747 from Frankfurt was crowded and noisy. When he finally arrived at Kennedy, exhausted, there was some trouble in customs and it looked as if no one had come to meet him. Then he felt Federico's hand on his shoulder and the world righted itself.

On a bike ride a few weeks later, Cheever ran into some soft gravel and went “cock-a-hoop over the handlebars.” The accident opened a nasty gash on his forehead. Phil Schultz, who had been riding along with him, was aghast, but Cheever declined all assistance. He would not be taken to the doctor, he would not go to the hospital, he would not even accept help with cleaning the wound. They walked their bikes back to Cedar Lane to wait for Mary and Susie. When the women returned from a walk, they looked at the two men in the living room—John with his bloody forehead, Phil with his ashen countenance—and both of them rushed over to comfort Schultz. He looked absolutely stricken. As it happened, Cheever's wound healed nicely, leaving only a small scar. It did nothing to interrupt his busy schedule of campus visits.

The Bennington trip in November began with a comedy of errors. Stephen Sandy, the poet in charge of Cheever's campus appearance, told him that he'd be met at the Amtrak station by an attractive young lady, Melissa Fish. At the last minute she could not run the errand, and Sandy sent another student, a tall young man named Peter Pochna, in her stead. Sandy instructed Pochna to look for a small, sprightly man with a twinkle in his eye, probably natty in tweeds and chinos and “no longer young.” Unfortunately, Pochna took in only those last three words and did not espy Cheever getting off the train. After the crowd dispersed, Cheever sat in the station looking for Melissa Fish and watching a tall young man approaching the seedy-looking habitues of the station one by one. Eventually Pochna asked an old codger sitting near Cheever if he was by any chance John Cheever, and the two identified each other at last. Matters improved only slightly after that inauspicious beginning. The dinner before the reading, with Bernard and Ann Malamud among the guests, lasted much too long, and Cheever took the platform half an hour late. Yet the next day Cheever generously returned his check to Pochna and Sandy. He didn't need the money
that much
, he said, and he wanted it used for support of the student literary magazine. This was a gesture he repeated often on college campuses, always to the surprise and delight of his hosts.

At Cornell early in December, Cheever not only gave his customary reading (“The Death of Justina” and “The Swimmer”), he also read a paper on Chekhov. The writer James McConkey invited him to speak on Chekhov as the first among a number of contemporary authors who, McConkey thought, would feel a particular affinity for the great Russian. He was right about Cheever, who in fact had already been compared with Chekhov for his portrayal of a provincial world sensitive to divisions of social class and inhabited in part by genial eccentrics, where people and things contrived to seem funny and sad at the same time. In preparing his eleven-page paper, Cheever could find little in Chekhov to quote. What he did instead was to fashion two stories—one as the Russian master might have written it, brilliant in its perfect ear for talk and illuminated by the significant detail, the other an example of modern imitators of Chekhov who ruined the effect by accumulating too many details.

In the imitation a woman dresses and leaves her home. “We are told the color of her dress, the shape of her door key, the condition of her front porch.” She goes to a store and buys a deck of cards. The clerk tells her that his favorite cockatoo has died. She returns home and puts the deck of cards in the refrigerator. The telephone rings and she has a long conversation with a neighbor about making celery soup. Then she decides to play solitaire, but can't remember where she put the cards. “On this note of mystery … the story ends,” except that the would-be contemporary Chekhov might throw in sexual intercourse or perversion to attract reader attention. Not even crypto-pornography could rescue such vulgar parodies, imitations that lacked Chekhov's “discipline, his wit and stamina.”

People sometimes complained, he observed, that nothing happened in Chekhov. Alone in the empty house, Firs can hear the ax at the end of
The Cherry Orchard
and the world will never be the same again, but no one has been murdered and the plans to the nuclear submarine have not been stolen. The question to ask about the short story, Cheever insisted, was not “Does anything happen?” but “Is it interesting?” On these grounds one could not do better than Chekhov.

When it was time to leave Cornell Sunday morning, Frederica Kaven—a student in McConkey's graduate creative writing class who greatly admired Cheever's work—volunteered to drive him to the airport. But the plane was delayed an hour, “for mechanical reasons” the ticket agent said, and Cheever decided on the spot to find some other means of transportation. He arranged to take a bus that left Ithaca about 1:00
P.M.
, giving Kaven and himself a few hours to kill. In the course of that time he rather poignantly demonstrated his vulnerability.

Over coffee Kaven told him, for example, that she would laugh so hard reading some of his stories that she could scarcely go on. Just at that moment, she caught a glimpse of the hurt in his eyes. “It was clear that I had wounded him,” she recalls, and the way he looked so disturbed her that she could not bring herself to say what she knew to be true: that his stories were not only funny but serious and moving, that her own laughter often hovered on the edge of tears.

They arrived at the bus station well in advance, and began looking for a nearby restaurant where they could buy a sandwich for Cheever's trip. About the only places open, on Ithaca's west side, were workingmen's bars. They tried several of these, but none would fix a sandwich for the road. At their last stop Cheever, dressed in impeccable tweeds, pleaded unsuccessfully with the bartender while the morning drinkers in plaid shirts and jeans regarded him askance. He looked small and defeated in the hazy blue light that filtered in through the windows, as the bartender slowly shook his head no. “Let's go,” Cheever finally said. “I don't want anything.” So back they went to the bus station, where he put some quarters into the vending machine, pushed the button for chicken soup, and out came … hot chocolate. It was that kind of a day.

Back in Ossining, he entered into a letter-to-the-editor debate with Elizabeth Hardwick, who had written an article for the
New York Review of Books
proposing that the widespread paranoia in contemporary society threatened to devalue the importance of anyone's personal downfall and to render guilt impotent. Could the novel well survive without the prospect of individual ruin and private guilt? In response, Cheever cited his own lively awareness of original sin, and moved on to a generalization. Each generation was liable to claim that its own parlous times were such as to invalidate the novel, yet the generations passed and the novel survived. In fact he thought the novel “the only art form we possess that has approached any mastery” of the complexities of contemporary life. About the novel as about the story one should ask if it was interesting, with “interest” connoting “suspense, emotional involvement and a sustained claim on one's attention.” That was the standard that counted. That was what he had been aiming at in
Falconer
.

Waiting for the novel to come out, Cheever spent a week at the University of Utah late in January. On the surface, there was nothing to indicate that this trip would drastically change the rest of his life. As on other campuses he read students' stories, met them in conferences and classrooms, and gave the obligatory public reading. The poet Dave Smith, then head of the university's creative writing program, offered Cheever a choice of accommodations: he could stay at the rather grungy Lake City Motel on the edge of campus or at a hotel in Salt Lake City five miles away. Cheever chose the motel, to be within walking distance of campus. Every day he complained about how crummy his room was, and every day Smith offered to move him downtown. Cheever would not be moved, though; he seemed to enjoy the bitching. Otherwise Smith thought Cheever an ideal guest, insightful with the students, generous with his time, and a delight in conversation. For exercise during Cheever's stay, Smith arranged for a couple of sturdy skiers to take him cross-country skiing. His heart was in good condition, now that he'd stopped drinking.

It was after a morning of cross-country skiing and an afternoon seminar that Cheever met and fell in love with a young man named Max Zimmer, a teaching fellow at the university who was working toward his doctorate in creative writing. John had looked over the work of the more talented students in advance, was impressed with Zimmer's story “Utah Died for Your Sins,” and asked to meet him. Zimmer was not particularly enthusiastic about the meeting. He knew the story was good, and had been told so by other visiting writers, including Grace Paley and E. L. Doctorow. Doctorow had even asked to see his projected novel. Nonetheless he turned up in the hallway after the seminar, and off they went in Max's car. “I've got to make two stops,” Cheever said. “Liquor store and supermarket.” At the liquor store he bought a quart of Jim Beam for Zimmer, and at the supermarket two six-packs of Diet 7-Up for himself. Then the two men went to Cheever's motel room and talked into the night about writing and reading, love and sex, and Max's future.

According to Smith, Zimmer was the sort of student no teacher ever forgets, “the kind of person about whom legends accrete.” He was the product of a combative Mormon family, and his academic relationships were sometimes volatile (he and Smith had quarreled, briefly). Yet everyone liked him, and clearly the talent was there as well. Cheever was irresistibly drawn to him. “Lonely and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings and the superficiality of standing in reception lines,” he wrote in his journal, “I fell in love with Max in a motel room of unusual squalor. His air of seriousness and responsibility, the bridged glasses he wore for his near sightedness and his composed manner all excited my deepest love.” Max did not consider himself a homosexual, then or later, and felt an initial revulsion when John made sexual overtures. But they got along perfectly otherwise—their senses of humor meshed well—and for the remainder of Cheever's visit Max more or less took over as host, coming by for breakfast each morning and driving him around campus and into the surrounding mountains.

Before he left Utah, Cheever had persuaded Zimmer to come to New York. Much as E. E. Cummings had told him to get out of Boston, he advised Max to give up Salt Lake City in favor of New York City. A Ph.D. would do Zimmer no good as a writer, and might be actually harmful, Cheever argued. New York was still the best place for writers to get their work recognized. Max did not need much convincing. He had stayed in Utah long enough, and was ready to cut his ties to the university. Besides, Cheever offered help in getting him started in the East. He seemed to regard him as a kind of surrogate literary son, Max thought. In correspondence he reassured Max that he genuinely liked his work. “That I love you has nothing to do with the case,” he declared. Still he did what he could for the younger man's career. He tried to place “Utah Died for Your Sins” with
The New Yorker:
it was rejected, primarily because of its use of one rather common but indisputably obscene word. More successfully, he lobbied for and got an invitation for Max to spend the summer at Yaddo. “If you don't take him,” he told the Yaddo board, “I quit.” So it was settled that Max would come to New York as soon as classes were over in June. The arrangement was confirmed when Max came East briefly in March and he and his sister visited the Cheevers in Ossining. After lunch John took him to see the Croton dam. They became lovers then, and remained so until the end.