John Cheever (7 page)

The evidence of “Expelled” and of Cheever's transcripts strongly argues that he was dismissed for poor scholastic performance. As he reconstructed the story in later years, however, the immediate offense became smoking. He was caught with a cigarette ablaze and, he maintained, he wanted to be caught. He did start smoking young. As he wrote in “The Jewels of the Cabots” (1972), a bluestocking came to the school to make a choleric chapel speech against the vice. Could the students imagine Christ on the Cross, lighting a cigarette? Could they picture the Virgin Mary smoking? Didn't they know that a tiny drop of nicotine would kill a full-grown pig? In short, she “made smoking irresistible.” Smoke he did, undoubtedly, but there is nothing in the records at Thayer or in the memories of those there at the time to suggest that it had anything to do with his dismissal.

On rare occasions Cheever proposed yet another explanation. According to this version—and it was not unusual for him to supply alternative accounts of events in his own life—he was expelled for homosexuality, or as he once said extravagantly, because he had seduced the son of a faculty member. Probably he meant to shock his audience. But whatever the merits of this interpretation, and again there is no hard testimony in its support, it is significant that Cheever articulated it at all. Smoking was a subject that might be taken lightly. For a man of his generation, homosexuality was not. The issue troubled his last decades.

BROTHER

1930–1934

John Cheever grew up at risk. From a father dominated by his wife, he inherited a propensity to strong drink, an extraordinary sense of smell, a talent for yarn spinning, and a nagging fear of failure. His mother, fiercely independent, left him her vast fund of energy and strength of will, along with an acute social sensitivity and a deep resentment of powerful women. Both parents shared in bequeathing their second son the most unfortunate legacy of all: the conviction that he was not loved. As Cheever's wife, Mary, came to believe, “that was the trouble” with her husband. “He never had any love. His parents never paid much attention to him.”

In part, this was simply the Yankee way. In the Massachusetts of Cheever's youth a chilly formality reigned. Even within the family, physical contact was taboo. This restraint had its effect on most New England writers. Emily Dickinson's brother bent to kiss his father in his coffin, something he had never dared do while his father was alive. In inland Maine, E. A. Robinson wrote in some exaggeration that “children learn[ed] to walk on frozen toes” and thought passion “a soilure of the wits.” No more than fictional cousin Honora in
The Wapshot Chronicle
would John's parents have wanted to be caught in “an open demonstration of affection.” When drinking, his father would sometimes fondle his mother and blow down her neck, but these attentions were not encouraged. For the most part his parents did not hug, did not kiss. John was brought up not to touch his face, much less any other part of himself, much less anyone else.

In the case of the Cheevers, the physical reserve mandated by New England mores worked to conceal even as it confirmed the split within the family. At least in public, John adopted a similar conspicuous restraint (and later extended it to his own marriage and family). Understanding the cost of the coolly turned cheek, he turned his own first.

There were times when he would gladly have repudiated his heritage. When Leander Wapshot smokes a cigarette in church, his son Coverly—the character in the Wapshot novels most closely modeled on Cheever himself—wishes he were the child of Mr. Pludzinski. Issuing from a position comfortably inside the dominant culture, the remark bespoke something of the author's sense of alienation. His mother often cautioned him not to forget that he was “a Cheevah,” but neither parent had provided him with a clear image of what that was. He had no sure sense of himself, or of his own worth.

The problem of identity was complicated by confusion about sexuality. From the perspective of hindsight—the knowledge that Cheever became vigorously bisexual during the last decades of his life—it seems likely that he must have had both homosexual and heterosexual stirrings in his youth. His journals confess as much, and so did his fatherly advice to his son Federico at thirteen. “You are coming to an age,” he told the boy, “when you won't know who you want to go to bed with, but you'll get over it.” So it must have been for him, except that he did not entirely get over it.

His parents, who did not much concern themselves with young John otherwise, were troubled by what they regarded as his tendencies toward homosexuality. In a number of ways, he fit into patterns associated in the public mind with growing up gay. He was the product of an unhappy marriage in which the mother had become the dominant figure. He was short (about five feet five at full growth) and as his boyhood pudginess disappeared rather slight. He was not very well coordinated, and played on no athletic teams, preferring to swim or hike or skate or bike in contact with the natural world. In the only hint of effeminacy about him, he spoke in rather curious mid-Atlantic tones that blended his mother's English with his father's Yankee accent. He was interested in—even passionate about—the arts, as both a participant and a spectator. Dorothy Ela remembers him as a tease who used to pull her curls at Thayerlands, but there seem to have been no memorable girlfriends during his high school years. His closest friend was Fax Ogden; he missed him a good deal when Fax was sent off to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. John's parents thought any such attachment unhealthy. “I did not respond consciously to the anxiety my parents endured over the possibility that I might be a pervert,” he wrote in 1968, “but I seem to have responded at some other level.… had they been less anxious, less suspicious about my merry games of grabarse I might have had an easier life.”

The difficulty was, of course, that he shared his parents' revulsion against homosexuality. He had heard the words of opprobrium even before he knew what they meant. Queen, queer, fag, fairy, pansy—these were the epithets used to describe others, and others at a distance. It was unthinkable that they should apply to oneself. The attitude of Coverly Wapshot, in his comic preemployment interview with the psychologist in
The Wapshot Chronicle
, probably paralleled Cheever's own.

“Well, I guess I know what you mean,” Coverly said. “I did plenty of that when I was young but I swore off it a long time ago.… There's one in this place where I'm living now. He's always asking me to come in and look at his pictures. I wish he'd leave me alone. You see, sir, if there's one thing in the world that I wouldn't want to be it's a fruit.”

He has also had “bad dreams,” Coverly admits. “I dream I do it with this woman” who looks like the women on barbershop calendars. “And sometimes,” he adds, blushing and hanging his head, “I dream that I do it with men. Once I dreamed I did it with a horse.”

In retrospect it is clear that homosexuality formed a central element in Cheever's fiction both before and after the trials of Coverly Wapshot. But often—as in the example above—the topic is treated humorously, as if it were of slight importance. Cheever assumed much the same posture in discussing his own situation. “Well, have you ever had a homosexual experience?” his daughter, Susan, asked him in a 1977 interview, taking over the role of the
Chronicle
's psychologist. “My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,” her father answered. Elsewhere he spoke casually of rolling off “his last naked scoutmaster.” Such humorous hyperbole was contrived to shock and amuse, and to forestall inquiry. It also provided the mature Cheever, who like most men of his generation had been raised to despise homosexuals, with a way of confessing his inclinations. As a boy he could say nothing at all.

Though uncertain about his sexuality, he knew very early what he wanted to do with his life. He had made the decision to become a writer at eleven, and it lasted. Books became his consolation, as he began educating himself for his chosen career by reading among authors not taught at Thayer. He found the books downtown at the Thomas Crane Public Library, a handsome Romanesque building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. There he discovered Joyce, whose explorations of human sexuality had appalled Miss Gemmel. He read Flaubert in translation (or possibly, as he later said, in the original).
Madame Bovary
, whose protagonist seeks to escape from an ordinary marriage in a provincial community, became his favorite book, his “Yale College and his Harvard.” He read the Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as they came out. He started reading Proust, who both enchanted and shocked him. Through John Donne he fell in love with poetry, and read Yeats and Eliot and the Romantics. He read Hemingway, and appropriated some of the taut sarcasm of his early writing for “Expelled.” He had yet a great deal to learn, but had already found out that he would have to teach himself and that his masters would be those who spoke from within the covers of a book.

The other great solace of Cheever's adolescence was provided by his brother, Fred, who came home to Quincy in the spring of 1926 after two years at Dartmouth. (With his father unemployed, Fred's college tuition became a real burden.) The two years apart had changed the relationship between the two brothers. Now the difference in their ages seemed of less consequence. They began going to the beach together, and hiking into the hills for long talks about sex and art and politics. Fred reassured his younger brother that his sexual development was perfectly all right, and encouraged him to venture into Boston for the burlesque shows at the Old Howard. In effect they formed their own bond as their parents' marriage unraveled before their eyes. As the autobiographical story “The Brothers” put it, “in trying to make something of their lives, to bring some peace and order into the household, they became deeply attached to each other.”

Fred took a number of jobs to try to shore up the family income. When John reached sixteen and got his driver's license, he went to work also, driving a newspaper truck for the
Quincy News
. He hung around the linotype room until the papers were printed, and then drove to the neighboring villages, tossing out bundles of papers at candy and stationery stores. At World Series time the
News
brought out a second edition with the day's box scores, and John delighted in retracing his route by dark, bringing the news of the day's game to the towns along the shore.

At home, matters were worsening. It seemed to the brothers that their mother was “completely absorbed in despising her husband.” As for their father, he began to retreat into fantasy, particularly after the 1929 crash wiped out those few stocks he held as his “anchor to windward.” Frederick Lincoln Cheever “lost all of his money and some of his mind” in the crash, John said. At first he protested as his wife stripped the house clean of anything that might possibly be sold at the gift shop. Then he took to pretending that nothing untoward had happened. Their ship would come in again soon, he said, as he smoked his favorite cigars and told stories about the glorious past. At the same time he became apprehensive about burglars. One night he shot at Fred, who was coming home late and had climbed in a window to avoid disturbing the family. Luckily, he missed.

When John was eighteen, and his parents were separated for the time being, he lived with his father in the old house at Hanover, a small town south of Quincy on the South Shore. John did the heavy work around the place, while his father discoursed on the sins of his mother. One day he came upon his father sniffing at a yellow rose. “I can no longer smell a rose,” he lamented. For father as for son, the way the world smelled was of great importance. If he couldn't smell a rose, the old man went on, he couldn't smell rain coming and he couldn't smell smoke and the house might burn down and trap him inside. The house went soon enough, but not by fire.

Once John had left Thayer, he and his brother oriented themselves toward the wonders of Boston. There they became the Cheever brothers—Fritz and Joey, Joey and Fritz. Fritz the businessman was beginning to establish himself in advertising. Joey was to be the writer, taking odd jobs on occasion—in the summer of 1930 he worked as a stock clerk in a downtown department store, later he had a job as a reporter and occasional reviewer on a Quincy paper—and otherwise relying on Fritz for support. In appearance and personality they were very different. Fritz was outgoing: he used to greet the city's Irish cops by name. He dressed conservatively, as his job required, but he had a hearty appetite for the pleasures of life and was not at all unintellectual. He and Joey went to a sculpture class at the Museum of Fine Arts together, for example, and Fritz drank and talked comfortably with the writers and artists they met. Joey was, as he said, “some kid in those days,” with long hair and a big ring. He was shy in conversation, with a wonderfully engaging humor, “a lovely wry way of taking things.” When he laughed, his eyes crinkled up in amusement. He liked to flirt and was getting good at it.

Boston was developing its reputation for censorship at that time. In 1928 the New England Watch and Ward Society succeeded in keeping Eugene O'Neill's
Strange Interlude
off the stage, and the company packed up and moved to Quincy, where the play had a successful run. In 1929 Boston police confiscated copies of
Scribner's
magazine containing the serialized version of Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
. Still, the city had its attractions, and the Cheevers went together to the theater and the opera, to cabarets and the Old Howard (where they got acquainted with the stripper Boots Rush). Mostly, though, John's orientation was toward the literary and radical element of the community—toward Boston's Bohemia, such as it was.