John Cheever (52 page)

Enjoying fame is one thing, and becoming conceited because of it quite another. Not everyone agreed with Susan that her father misplaced his dignity in going through “a kind of adolescence of celebrity.” As his son Ben remarks, he has “known stationery store proprietors who are more self-important than his father was.” Hayden Carruth at Yaddo detected no pretensions or stuffiness about Cheever at all. “He never made the kind of egotistical remarks that most writers—almost all writers of whatever merit—do,” Carruth recalls. He was far more likely to make himself the butt of jokes. And longtime maid Iole Masullo thought him a humble and simple man, “not like a peacock at all, you know.” What seems indisputable is that he grew more aware of his public image, and more willing to use the media to shape the contours of that image. In “The Cheever Chronicle,” a long article in the
New York Times Magazine
, he cooperated with author Jesse Kornbluth in rearranging a number of details about his family, his post-Thayer years, his army career, and his relationship with
The New Yorker
. He posed on horseback for
People
magazine, encouraging the widespread misconception that he was a kind of country gentleman who kept horses. Margaret Mills at the academy-institute assumed as much when he came by the office in a hacking jacket. Normally, now that he could afford it, he dressed elegantly in well-tailored suits and sport coats accented by large floppy bow ties. He was generous with others, too. In the summer of 1979, Fred was jilted by a girl who told him to grow up and get a car. He was saving up for a Volkswagen when his father bought him a BMW to take back to Stanford.

Much as he was gratified by his acceptance among the elite, Cheever never lost the common touch. He practiced a kind of social schizophrenia, the Thaws concluded. In one aspect he was a snob with a strong sense of propriety and a nostalgia for the days when Boston ladies had their hats and men wore fedoras. On the other hand, he really liked and identified with working people. What he hated was the Sleepy Hollow country club crowd, a cast of moneyed nonaristocratic suburbanites who told off-color jokes in loud voices. The Thaws took him to the country club once, and for weeks he entertained everyone with wickedly sarcastic vignettes of his “dinner at Sleepy.” Aside from these people, he had a gift for talking to anyone and a genuine interest in what they had to say.

At Yaddo, he had for so long been a member of the family that cook Nellie Shannon finally decided to ask him to dinner at her house. He was the first and only guest so honored, for Elizabeth Ames was very much opposed to fraternization between employees and artists. On the appointed evening Cheever arrived with flowers and an autographed copy of his
Stories
for Nellie, and the dinner was a great success. At Yaddo itself, she played a maternal role toward him. When he stuck his head in the kitchen—the first guest down—and said “Good morning, Nellie,” she knew the reply he was hoping for. “Yes, John,” she'd answer, “the coffee's ready.” Through the long years she regularly chided him for his drinking. “Don't you know you're killing yourself?” she said while others remained silent. Even after he quit, the routine continued. On one of his last visits, she fixed him an early-morning breakfast and packed some cookies and a Thermos of orange juice for his drive back to Ossining. “I hope you haven't got any gin in that car,” she warned him. “Now, Nellie,” he said, “my own mother wouldn't lecture me the way you do.” And off he drove, grinning.

It was in Ossining, however, that Cheever showed himself most plain. He came to love the town toward the end, for both its physical beauty and its lack of pretentiousness. In the fall of 1979 he wrote a short piece for the original Ossining Marathon. From his bicycling, he noted, he shared with the marathon runners “an intimate knowledge of the road bumps, and the weeds and wild flowers along the shoulders,” along with an appreciation for the views offered by High Tor and the Tappan Zee Bridge. As he hiked or biked or drove around town, he saw a great many people he knew, but Ossining was not the kind of town where people interrupted his dinner to ask for an autograph. No amount of publicity could induce his fellow citizens to treat him like a celebrity. He was simply “old Mr. Cheever on his bike or old Mr. Cheever with his dogs, which is precisely what one would want.” If he was seen as different from his neighbors, it was largely because he didn't have a job that kept him riding the trains.

In this community he made some of his friends among others—tradespeople, mostly—who also did not have to commute. For nearly fifteen years he bought his gas from and took his car for servicing to Dominick Anfitreatro at Dom's Friendly Service in Croton, and each winter Dom plowed the Cheever driveway clear of snow. Sometimes Cheever drove in just to talk—to tell stories about what happened on his trips, for instance. Dom could hardly wait for Cheever to come by. “When he left,” he said, “he left me on a high for a good part of the day.” Cheever was a regular, too, at the Highland Diner in Ossining, where he'd arrive with a book or newspaper to read and then look around for someone to talk to. At the Ascoli Farm, he and John Bukovsky would perch on the stone wall for fifteen minutes of conversation about the crops and the fox in the henhouse and somewhat deeper spiritual matters. He knew and was liked by so many people in the town that his family used to call him the Mayor of Ossining. He never ran for office, of course, but there was an abortive movement in the wake of the Pulitzer to name a street after him. Cheever was pleased and self-deprecatory about this at the same time. He and Mary and the children sat around the dinner table thinking of what else might be named after him. “Let's see,” he proposed, “how about the John Cheever Memorial Dump?”

He felt a strong obligation to accept invitations to read or speak from Ossining and nearby communities, even when they cut into his time at the typewriter. The Newburgh Kiwanis Club or the Friends of the Peekskill Library or the White Plains Rotary Club would ask him to appear, for example, and he would ask bookman Bev Chaney whether he had to go. He showed a kind of little-boy quality in asking for such elementary advice, Chaney felt, rather as if it were a big world out there and he felt lost in coping with it. What Chaney told him, in any event, was that he didn't even have to
answer
that kind of mail, but usually Cheever did and usually he agreed to go. He wanted to please, and was willing to forgive others their mild trespasses against him. Herbert Hadad recalls one Cheever reading at a public library where the man introducing him went on and on for ten minutes enumerating his own accomplishments, finally ending with an “exquisitely remembered moment” of glory in his career. “And at that second,” the introducer concluded at last, “if there was anyone in the world who could have done it better, it was John Cheever. I give you John Cheever.” With extraordinary charity Cheever simply said, “Thank you for the elaborate introduction,” and the evening's pleasures could then commence. He demonstrated a generosity of spirit in befriending Maureen Willson's son Michael and daughter Hannah. When Michael won a high school literary prize, Cheever wrote him a letter of congratulation, said he'd just won a prize himself (the Pulitzer), and enclosed a check for fifty dollars.

In his post-Pulitzer euphoria, Cheever quit smoking. It was not easy to end a fifty-year, up-to-two-pack-a-day habit, and for a time he was terribly irritable. But the advantages were obvious. He felt much better when he woke up, as his morning smoker's cough disappeared. His sense of smell sharpened, and food tasted wonderful. In a surge of physical vigor, he discovered that he could bicycle up hills in third gear that he'd previously been able to negotiate only in seventh or eighth. Like many reformed smokers, he tried hard to convert others—notably Max Zimmer, who came back into his life as a frequent and much-loved companion in the summer of 1979.

During the September 1977–June 1979 period, their friendship had been conducted at long distance. Zimmer was teaching and living in Oswego, but now he moved with his girl to Dobbs Ferry in Westchester, only a few train stops south of Ossining on the Hudson line. He and Cheever began to see each other three or four times a week, and oftener during Mary's annual visit to Treetops. Zimmer drank a lot during these meetings. Cheever would ask him up for lunch, and hand him a glass of vodka when he arrived. The drinking continued during the activities that followed: the lunch, the bike ride, the backgammon game, the discussion of a story Max had written, the lovemaking. He sometimes consumed a quart of vodka by the end of the afternoon, when he went back to the Dobbs Ferry station to meet his girl, coming in on the train from her job in New York City.

As the drinking suggested, Zimmer felt somewhat uncomfortable about the relationship. He tremendously admired Cheever and came to feel love for him, yet he also wanted to break away, to assert his independence, to say goodbye. Cheever sent out conflicting signals in that regard. His love for Max was “totally unprecedented,” he said. He didn't fully understand his own feelings. It was essential, Cheever sometimes said, that their relationship end, and end happily. Max had to live his own life, after all. Yet it would devastate him, he said at other times, if Max should leave. Eventually Zimmer thought of himself as trapped by his ties to Cheever. And he was scared to death around Mary, though he and John were never caught in the act or chastised. He sometimes hoped that they would be caught, and that she would blow up. That didn't happen, at least not overtly. Once when he and John returned from making love in the woods, Mary was berating the gardener for cutting flowers along with weeds. Her anger was really directed at him and her husband, Max thought. He would have felt better about being John Cheever's lover if their essentially furtive and unacknowledged liaison had not been integrated into the fabric of his family, his house, his woods. At the end of the summer, Max and his girl and another former student from Oswego rented a house in Southampton, well out on Long Island, and thus eliminated the possibility of casual visits to Cedar Lane.

By mid-August, when Cheever flew up to New Hampshire to receive the MacDowell Colony medal, he knew that Max was about to leave and felt very much bereft. John Leonard, in charge of the award committee, spent much of a pretty awful weekend with Cheever. The administrative staff at MacDowell seemed to vanish, leaving their guest of honor to fend for himself. Cheever had to borrow a car to drive himself to the award ceremony from Hillcrest, the handsome old house of Mrs. MacDowell, where he was staying. That night there was a big dance where Cheever kept looking for “someone short enough to dance with.” Perhaps bored and certainly sober among the merrymakers, he slipped away and walked the long way back to Hillcrest in the dark. Leonard found him sitting alone at ten o'clock, drinking the instant coffee he had brought along with him. They talked away much of the night. At first it was Cheever the charmer and Leonard the admirer, but then—and for the rest of the night—all that Cheever could talk about was his loneliness and his need for love. “Sex is very important to me,” he said, “and there is no sex in my marriage.” He was, that night, the most unhappy person Leonard had ever seen.

Among other things he told Leonard that he was thinking of moving to New York City. What he was seeking was a place where being homosexual (or bisexual, more accurately) would not make him conspicuous, but he did not spell this out. Could Leonard help him find an apartment? The proposed move to New York was something he often spoke of in the fall and winter of 1979–80 to Hope Lange, to his children, to Eugene and Clayre Thaw. In due course the Thaws located a furnished apartment on a quiet side street in Murray Hill, ideal as a place to write and close to the Century Club and Grand Central. No, Cheever said, he couldn't stand the idea of living with someone else's furniture. Always there were obstacles preventing him from leaving home. If he left, wouldn't he end up “a lonely old man with a dog on a leash?” If he left, what would he do with his bicycle, and wouldn't he miss his friends and should he come back on weekends? How could he leave Cedar Lane when he'd “turned every square inch” of its soil? In public and private, he proclaimed his and Mary's incompatibility. They did not sleep together, they did not get along well, they did not even like each other. Yet he also suggested that this basic tension made for a “much more workable relationship” than most conventional marriages. Presented with a concrete alternative, he decided to stay where he was.

CANCER

1980–1982

For the most part, the prospect shone bright as Cheever turned a corner into the 1980s. He had achieved wealth and fame, those desiderata he promised his parents never to seek, and frankly enjoyed the recognition that came with them. In March, Ambassador William Luers invited him to come to Venezuela for a week of interviews and appearances and dinners. He stayed at the ambassador's residence, and was feted everywhere. In that cordial atmosphere he was his charming best, fatherly with the children, flirtatious with Luers's wife, Wendy, and virtually aglow aboard the yacht that took them to Margarita island, escorted by a destroyer. In May he flew to Chicago to present yet another prize to Saul Bellow at St. James Episcopal Cathedral. There he was delighted over breakfast at the McDonald's on Michigan Avenue when other patrons recognized him, thanked him for his writing, and asked him to autograph their paper napkins. He showed up at Sara Spencer's one Saturday clutching the day's bundle of mail. “I'm rich and famous,” he announced gaily, waving his letters in the air. Yet the Yankee in him understood that celebrity was as dross to the gold of literary accomplishment, and in that area he had unmistakably slowed down.

As always, Cheever continued to think in narrative. “To spend an afternoon with Cheever,” Steve Phillips observed, “is to hear about forty stories begin to take shape.” But the three-day frenzies that produced many of his stories visited him no longer: he could not concentrate with that kind of intensity. Sometimes, too, he was afflicted with what he called spells of
otherness
. Fixing breakfast, sitting at his desk, or dawdling over dinner, his mind would trip a wire and transport him across time and space to a realm where he knew not who he was. After a few terrifying moments the short circuit would mend itself and he would be back in the house at Cedar Lane, shaken and fearful of madness. How could he write if his mind was not right? His diminished capacities combined with the distractions of fame to retard his writing. It grew harder and harder to get the words down on paper. But as never before—now that he was sober, now that he understood how important it was to his audience as well as to himself—he wanted to write. It was what gave his life meaning.