John Cheever (50 page)

In June, Max Zimmer stopped at Cedar Lane on his way to Yaddo. He had driven forty-five hours straight through from Utah to New York, and was somewhat disoriented. Nor did he work well at Yaddo. He was put off by the rather genteel atmosphere of the place and by the pretensions of some of the guests. He was also annoyed to find that he was regarded as having been invited solely because of Cheever's influence. He could and should have made it on his own, he felt. At Yaddo, however, he met Lewis Turco, poet and professor at the State College of New York at Oswego, and Turco offered him a job teaching creative writing at the college. He taught at Oswego from the fall of 1977 to the spring of 1979. During this period Max was first married to a young woman studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and then divorced. He saw Cheever only three or four times a year, but was ever assured in conversation and correspondence of John's love for him.

Late in the spring, Cheever traveled to Bulgaria to attend an international conference titled “The Writer and Peace: The Spirit of Helsinki and the Duty of the Masters of Culture.” The American participants—William Saroyan and Gore Vidal in addition to Cheever—had been recruited by Lyubomir Levchev, a charming Bulgarian poet and first deputy chairman of his government's committee on art and culture, during a whirlwind visit to the United States in late January and early February. Cheever was repeatedly advised not to make the trip. Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark thought he was “almost criminally naive” to validate such a repressive regime by his presence. Amnesty International sent him lists of Eastern European writers recently thrown in jail. Tanya Litvinov, living in London, strongly advised him not to go. But he believed, as he told Raphael Rudnik, that any art that was any good was by its nature heretical, and to expose any people to art was therefore to act against a totalitarian state.

Mary Cheever accompanied her husband on the Bulgarian trip. First they stopped in the Netherlands, to visit the Rudniks. On June 4, Cheever gave a highly successful reading at the United States Information Service Center in Amsterdam and delighted the American ambassador and others by refusing an honorarium. Then it was on to Bulgaria, where the conference turned into the expected “love feast, stage-managed from opening speeches of self-congratulation to final resolutions on peace.” The American writers were unanimous in thinking that as political propaganda the gathering was ineffective. The Russian delegates, including Yevtushenko and Vosnesensky, virtually surrounded the Americans, cutting off their access to writers from other countries. And press reports were so carefully manipulated that the reporter from
Le Monde
returned to Paris after the first day of the three-day meeting.

As envoys of goodwill, however, the hosts could hardly have been more ingratiating. There were elaborate dinners “and always,” Cheever observed, “a string trio in long gold dresses.” Saroyan's work was well known in Eastern Europe, his plays often performed. “If this bus overturns,” Vidal said during an outing, “Saroyan is the only one the Bulgarian papers will feature.” On the return trip to the United States the Cheevers changed planes in Frankfurt, and Denny Coates—stationed in Germany—tracked them down at the airport. He found Cheever standing in line, wearing the rattiest, dirtiest raincoat he had ever seen. As they chatted together, Coates spied a familiar face half a dozen places away in line. It was Mary, of course, and he went to greet her, then came back to resume talking with John. They were traveling on the same plane, but not really together.

Cheever spent two weeks of the summer signing copies of the Franklin Library's special edition of
The Wapshot Chronicle
. The Franklin people offered to dispatch him to any island in the world to perform this chore, doubtless expecting him to opt for Bali. He chose Nantucket instead, where he and Mary stayed at the Wauwinet House, which they knew well from other visits. He spent part of each day at his desk, writing his name in the books and trying to hold the pen at the angle recommended to avoid hand fatigue. Such were the penalties of fame. The benefits worked out to two dollars a signature.

He also went to Yaddo, more to see Max than to write. It was obvious, Grace Schulman remembers, that he was in love with Max, but the reunion went badly. When Max moved to Oswego in the fall, Cheever began a relationship with Steve Phillips (not his real name), one of his former students at Boston University. This liaison was not as intense as that between Cheever and Zimmer. Steve occasionally came to Ossining, and the two of them would bicycle along the aqueduct to the Croton dam or drive off to lunch together. On these occasions Cheever commented wittily on books and authors for the benefit of the aspiring young author. In return Phillips gave him the intimacy he required. “Brightness falls from the air” was the Joycean refrain that ran through John's head after their meetings. It was “a summons to life.” Both of them were content to keep the affair easygoing. Cheever, perhaps thinking of Max, worried about its becoming a relationship whose every parting would seem intolerable.

As with Max, he saw to it that Steve had more than enough to drink and smoke. Sometimes Phillips ended up back in Grand Central Station barely able to drag himself off the train. Cheever seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in watching these young men drink. And liquor functioned to relax inhibitions, even for the entirely sober Cheever. He remained agonizingly ambivalent about his homosexual desires, and unwilling to declare them overtly. He liked cultivating an air of illicit intrigue, Phillips thought, but sometimes this led to awkwardness. Once the two of them were biking together when John spied some friends in the distance. “You go on ahead,” he told Steve, and stopped to talk with the friends as if he and Steve had not been companions at all. At times his needs overcame him. When he went into New York to see Ned Rorem, for example, he became embarrassingly insistent almost at once. Ned escaped him, but then Rorem's companion James Holmes came in and Cheever transferred his attentions. After that, he saw Holmes occasionally for backgammon or lunch at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, where John seemed to be in his element. It was not a fulfilling friendship, however. Holmes thought him childishly self-centered in his attitude toward sex.

During the fall of 1977, Cheever was persuaded by David Clarke, a visiting scholar at Yale, to write a piece about architectural preservation. Clarke asked Cheever to undertake the job because he admired the way he characterized places in his fiction. Shady Hill and St. Botolphs were so vividly presented, he thought, that like Thomas Hardy's Wessex they came to function as characters in his fiction. Pleased by that observation, Cheever dashed off a brief essay titled “The Second Most Exalted of the Arts” for the
Journal of Architectural Education
. The burden of his message was that most contemporary buildings would hardly deserve preservation. Architecture revealed the character of the architect, he observed, and current housing developments and motel projects proclaimed nothing so loudly as the avariciousness and stupidity of those who designed and built them. He was also distressed by the incursion of Route 9A on his own property, where it cut within thirty-five feet of his apple orchard. He reposed his hope in the independence and pride of individual craftsmen. On his way to church one Sunday morning, he spied a lone workman on the roof. “Something has to be done
right
,” the Sabbath laborer told him, and he was doing it on his own time.

In November he broke off his long professional alliance with Candida Donadio, a separation that caused both author and agent some pain. In a parting letter of regret, Cheever thanked her for her faith in
Falconer
and for seeing him through some difficult times. Nonetheless he severed the tie, and before hiring another agent tried to handle his literary business by himself, with dubious success. In July 1978, for instance, he turned down a request from X. J. Kennedy to include “The Swimmer” in his popular Little, Brown textbook
An Introduction to Fiction
, and so made that magnificent story unavailable to hundreds of thousands of college students. He was overwhelmed by such requests, he told Kennedy by way of explanation, with “no agent, no secretary.”

The last months of 1977 were punctuated by a series of public appearances and hometown awards. The Reformed synagogue in Chappaqua named Cheever Man of the Year. He and Mary were honored by the Ossining public library. He paid a return visit to Iowa for a reading and a workshop session. Once again he went to Harvard to read on behalf of the
Advocate
, except that this time the magazine charged a two-dollar fee for the right to witness the author of
Falconer
. The following day he wowed the students at Bradford, brightening everyone's day with his “warmth, wit, and boundless laughter.” He appeared at a mass benefit reading in Alice Tully Hall, performing after John Ashbery and Donald Barthelme and before Richard Eberhart, Allen Ginsberg, and Eugene McCarthy, among others. Phil Schultz prevailed on him to read at the YM-YWHA in New York to an overflow audience. Grace Schulman threw a party afterward at her University Place apartment in Greenwich Village. John and Mary's friends attended, the men in business suits and the women in high collars and hats. It seemed to Schulman as if a nineteenth-century soirée had been transplanted to the avant-garde precincts of the Village.

After the new year the Cheevers were off on another overseas journey, her first and his third trip to the Soviet Union. In a kind of perverse preparation they dined with the Romanovs in mid-December. “My grandmother sent a battleship for me,” Vassily said in explaining how he survived the revolution. In Moscow two weeks later, they were met by Frieda Lurie, a colonel in the KGB and a Russian of another color. Cheever's third Russian sojourn was not as auspicious as the others. He came back exhausted; Mary acquired a stomach parasite it took months to purge. The trip was not without its moments, however. The Novgorod high school band greeted them with a version of “Hold That Tiger.” As always Cheever was impressed by the serious attention paid to writers. They treated him, he told Dick Cavett in a television interview, with as much respect as an investment banker commanded in the United States.

Cheever readjusted to Western time and customs at Yaddo. He was sometimes rude at dinner to those who betrayed the least trace of pretentiousness, Hayden Carruth noted. But he also renewed his old friendship with cook Nellie Shannon and watched
Little House on the Prairie
with caretakers George and Helen Vincent. Afternoons he and Carruth skied the seven-mile cross-country course twice over. At first Cheever had trouble keeping up with Carruth, ten years his junior, but by the end of a week he was staying with him and even pushing the pace. Neither of them was getting much writing done.

Much of Cheever's time was spent answering the correspondence that came in from those lonely and intelligent readers, unassociated with journalism or publishing or academia, that he welcomed as his ideal audience. He did not save their letters. He saved no one's letters, for “saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss.” But he faithfully and promptly answered them, usually on the same day they arrived. He was also busy with the organizational and ceremonial duties that devolved upon him in his growing eminence. In 1977 he was elected to the board of the American Academy; by 1978 he was serving as secretary of that august body. The academy called on him, in May 1977, to present Saul Bellow with its gold medal. Then in February 1978 he and Bernard Malamud were asked to make laudatory remarks when the National Arts Club awarded Bellow
its
gold medal. That made two gold medals in nine months, and later he was to bestow still other honors on his friend Saul. At the academy ceremony, Cheever commented on the “genuine brilliance and civility” with which Bellow had faced the hullaballoo surrounding the Nobel Prize. At the National Arts Club dinner, he called Bellow “the master of his time” and singled out
The Adventures of Augie March
, particularly, as a book that “has stayed with me all of my days.”

Much has been written about the competitiveness of writers, yet as Eileen Simpson wondered in connection with John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, were poets really “more competitive than astronauts, art collectors, assistant professors, jockeys, hostesses, ballet dancers, professional beauties?” In Cheever's case he was subject to twinges of resentment when authors he regarded as inferior were honored out of proportion to their accomplishment. He felt nothing of the sort, however, with respect to the writers—Saul Bellow and John Updike among them—whose work he most valued. Among the three of them and such others as Malamud and Robert Penn Warren there grew up a kind of fellowship that made rivalry seem ridiculous.

Cheever and Bellow first met in Eleanor Clark's railroad apartment in New York, shortly after World War II. From the beginning there was mutual admiration between them, and it lasted. Bellow repeatedly placed Cheever atop lists of writers he admired, citing his extraordinary “sleight-of-hand.” As for Cheever, he had thought Bellow the most interesting writer he knew since first reading his description of a woman washing window glass in the 1944
Dangling Man
. In reading Bellow, Cheever sensed a spirit of brotherhood. “We share not only our love of women but a fondness for rain.” The affinity extended beyond the fiction to the authors themselves. A real friendship sprang up between them, though they saw each other infrequently. “On both sides there was instant candor,” Bellow said. Nothing was held back behind costumes or masks. The very difference in their backgrounds—the Yankee prep schooler versus the son of Jewish immigrants—seemed to tie them together, because both proceeded beyond their origins to become, more simply and importantly, American writers. Toward Bellow, Cheever displayed none of the snobbery of certain Yankee WASPs. Instead, Bellow observed, he put “human essences in the first place: first the persons—himself, myself—and after that the other stuff, class origins, social history.” Once Cheever told him that if he had the choice, he would wish to be born the child of Jewish immigrants in the United States. That might bring them closer together.