Odd Jobs (22 page)

He was a gentleman, with a gentleman’s graces and scruples and sometimes a gentleman’s testiness. Expelled from prep school, he educated himself in the “elegant and savage and fleshy” world. He travelled widely and keenly and set some of his best later stories in Italy, where he lived for several periods with his family. He had one wife and often described connubial love. His books preach paternal nurture, and he practiced it with his three children. He served four years in the Army in World War II and wrote almost nothing about it. He could not, it seemed, write about people without imagining a town, without painting a backdrop
of community. In a profession for loners, he was generous with praise and practical encouragement. His letters were as deft, kind, and droll as they were brief. In conversation he could be immensely, cascadingly funny. Like any quest of old, modern life for him was rimmed with the marvellous; his adventurers and adventuresses are beset by enchantments, monsters, sirens, strange lights. He himself, in his reasserted career, lived a redemptive fable. His never-gray hair burned away by cancer therapy, his trim outdoorsman’s frame softened and leaning on a cane, he accepted the National Medal for Literature on the stage of Carnegie Hall two months before his death with a speech that said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.” All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.

July 1985

T
HOSE OF US
even modestly acquainted with the work and life of John Cheever had heard of his first published short story, “Expelled,” written when he was seventeen and accepted by Malcolm Cowley at
The New Republic;
but it is still an invigorating shock to read it now, and to see so many elements of the Cheeverian genius firmly in place at an adolescent age: the declarative swiftness of the prose; the dashes of unexpected color (“the gravy-colored curtains”); the matter-of-factly mordant social eye (“Her skirt was askew, either too long in front or hitching up on the side”); the casually surreal detail (“He was a thin colonel with a soft nose that rested quietly on his face”); and the air of expectancy, a vibrant translucence wherein the momentarily disarmed narrator prepares to yield to the next tug of enchantment.

What happened to Cheever at Thayer is not here (and never was elsewhere) made clear: the circumstances that led the fictional Charles, with his manifest intelligence and precocious sense of style, to be expelled by his school are not explained by the story’s murmurs of leftist protest, of sympathy for Sacco and Vanzetti and their champion Laura Driscoll, dismissed from a “faculty [who] all thought America was beautiful.”
Charles truthfully, five months after his expulsion, finds it “strange to be so very young and to have no place to report to at nine o’clock.” As Malcolm Cowley has described, the young Cheever had a hard row to hoe—on his own in New York in the depths of the Depression, trying to begin as a writer in a world of failing magazines, living in a three-dollar-a-week room on Hudson Street, making do on a weekly ten dollars supplied by his older brother, Fred. Within a few years, Yaddo and
The New Yorker
took him up, but in the meantime the school of hard knocks proved to be the alternative to Thayer; the adult Cheever—a superb, quick learner—was always somewhat embarrassed by the aborted nature of his formal education. A violence of indiscipline is implied by “Expelled” but not pictured, much as the vintage Cheever short stories were written around, but never openly confessed, a central problem of alcoholism. Curious circumstances and specifics are from the start sublimated into a quasi-religious imagery of stark and simple contrasts: “I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows. That is perhaps why I left school.… It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

The contrasting portraits of the two female teachers, the satiric sketch of the colonel’s inconvenient chapel address, and even the brilliantly wry opening section (similar, but for Charles’s unexpected dream of “dry apple trees and a broken blue egg cup,” to the beginning of
Catcher in the Rye
) are all in their material schoolboyish; it is the electric presentation that is alarmingly mature, with a touch of the uncanny, as the rare examples of literary precocity—Rimbaud, Chatterton, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Green—tend to be. True, the young Cheever had borrowed a bit from Hemingway and Dos Passos, and some of the sentiments were taken from their time; an enlightened liberalism generates an image of untypical ugliness and strain: “Because the tempered newspaper keeps its eyes ceilingwards and does not see the dirty floor.” But we feel, as we feel reading Thoreau and Lawrence, that the author has primarily put himself to school with the brooks and the wind, that a miraculously direct access to the actual has been established, in a language as solid as wood, and as quirkily grained. Cheever spoke as he wrote, with a rapid humorous poetic fancy and an ardor of intuition that did not invite revision; his voice is already here, and his keen and careless eye, and his gallant love of a world both magical and out of joint. It is touching and amazing to find these gifts in the possession of a self-proclaimed “lost” boy who, as he puts it, “lacks a place to stand where
[he] can talk.” He was to find a place, and to talk enduringly; but something of the nervous radiance and careening momentum of this first published effort was to follow him all the way to the grave.

July 1990

I
T WAS WITH SOME SURPRISE
that I read, in
The Letters of John Cheever
(edited by Benjamin Cheever, 1988), “Updike, whom I know to be a brilliant man, traveled with me in Russia last autumn and I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnaminity [
sic
] specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.” This was to Frederick Exley in June of 1965; somewhat later in the month he wrote Exley, of the same trip to Russia, “Updike and I spent most of our time back-biting one another. I find him very arrogant but my daughter tells me that I’m arrogant. We dined together at the White House last Tuesday and I did everything short of putting a cherry bomb in his bug juice. It made me feel great.”

These passages, lively and unhesitant in the usual Cheever style, cast a new light upon the time we shared, in the fall of 1964, in the Soviet Union, a time I recalled so affectionately in the words I spoke at his burial service: “The Russians were drawn to his courage and ebullience and became more themselves in his presence. John was a great spirit, and these connoisseurs of the spirit knew it, and loved him.” The impression that I made upon him, it saddens me to realize, was less favorable. I arrived when he was midway in his own month of cultural exchange, just after Nikita Khrushchev had been, in the grand tradition of Kremlin skulduggery, mysteriously removed from office. I came with my wife, where Cheever was alone—insofar as one could be alone amid the ubiquitous Soviet escorts and translators and their jealously watchful American counterparts. Though I was twenty years younger than Cheever, a bit more of my work had been translated into Russian, and my relative youth—I was thirty-two, about the same age as Yevtushenko and Vosnesensky,
the glamour boys of Russian poetry and of the momentary Khrushchevian thaw—was perhaps endearing to our hosts; in the Communist world my eager middle-American naïveté may have been more intelligible than Cheever’s wry East Coast diffidence. I led a rather sheltered existence back home but as a cultural emissary, in a culture full of strangeness and menace and flattery, I became, on stage, quite talkative. At one of our joint appearances, I blush to remember, observing our audience’s total ignorance of Cheever’s remarkable work, I took it upon myself to stand up and describe it, fulsomely if not accurately, while my topic sat at my side in a dignified silence that retrospectively feels dour. Perhaps it felt dour at the time: the thought that I might have seemed officious flitted, batlike, through my mind as the limousine hauled us on to the next exposure.

John Cheever was a golden name to me—a happy inhabitant of
The New Yorker
penthouse all those years I was staring up from the sidewalk. In fact, it was my covetous dissatisfaction with one of his most assured and sardonic tales of suburban life, “O Youth and Beauty!,” that goaded me to write a contrastingly benign story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” which
The New Yorker
, to my undying gratification, accepted. In my youthful innocence I had mistakenly misread Cheever, one of the most celebratory of writers, as a misanthropic satirist. Never mind—my misapprehension gave me the needed push, the crystallizing spark; my debt to him was real. My appreciation of his prose, in the next ten years, as I ripened into a suburban householder myself, had deepened and widened. It is very hard for a young writer to imagine that an older, with a famous name and his books deathless on the shelf, might be unhappy or have feelings that can be hurt. Incredulously I heard Cheever confide, on a night when—our cultural duties for the day behind us—my wife and I and he sat up talking in the hotel, that it had been three years since he had had a story accepted at
The New Yorker
. He found it, he said, a considerable relief. It seemed very obvious to me at the time that
The New Yorker
knew best,
was
best, and that, for all the editors’ sometimes meddlesome perfectionism and, in that era, anachronistic nice-nellyism, its pages were far above all other possible display cases. Cheever’s confession made me sad and, yes, exultant: one less competitor for that delicious glossy space between the cover and the back-page whisky ad. I was so ardent a contributor that even amid the rigors of the Soviet trip, in one neo-czarist hotel room after another, I managed to write and send
off, in pencilled copy, a few poems, which Cheever in a letter to Tanya Litvinov that June, when I evidently weighed on his mind, described as “some assinine [
sic
] poems on Russian cities in the last New Yorker.”

I have read wonderingly, as the rapid posthumous invasion of his privacy has proceeded, of his discontents with
The New Yorker
even in the decades of his prime there, of his financial straits and ruinous drinking, of his sexual straying and ambivalence, of his inconsolable insecurity. Looking back, I can almost see how he might have envied me not only my twenty years’ juniority and my Harvard education and my translated
Centaur
but the companionship, in Russia, of my wife—named, like his own, Mary and, during that excursion, a kind of Russian beauty, with a friendly dimple and a sturdy capacity for vodka. Another of his letters to Exley cooks up a fantastic triangle, in gaudy Cheeverian colors:

The allusion to the Johnsons harks back to the same White House event where he almost put a cherry bomb in my bug juice—a gala for National Honor Students, including an entertainment in which I read. Cheever is cited as an authority on my performance, in a letter by S. J. Perelman
^*
to Ogden Nash: “The very next morning I had to fly to Washington to a reception for Presidential scholars at which J. Cheever was a great help. Also present at this was that eminence gris, J. O’Hara, and that somewhat younger eminence & literatus, J. Updike. The latter read extracts
from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I couldn’t personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page. But Cheever brought me tidings that all three extracts dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike’s. When I asked Cheever whether Lady Bird was present, he informed me that she was seated smack in the middle of the first row. What are we coming to?”

In truth, only one of the passages, from the end of the fourth chapter of
The Centaur
, touched upon (so to speak) masturbation, and so deftly I had assumed only the most sensitive and corrupt of the honor students would get it. The effect, of finding myself discussed with such gleeful malice in the letters of men whom I idolized, and whose works I had pondered in my teens as gifts from above and signposts to heaven, is chastening, perhaps edifyingly so. Aspiring, we assume that those already in possession of eminence will feel no squeeze as we rise, and will form an impalpable band of welcoming angels. In fact, I know now, the literary scene is a kind of
Medusa
’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers. I met Perelman on a few occasions—most memorably at Lillian Hellman’s on the Vineyard, where his pink face, pince-nez, impeccable dress, and dignified bearing, as of a well-established West 47th Street diamond merchant, made an entirely favorable impression—but I really associate him with the comfort his
Acres and Pains
brought me as an adolescent transplanted to some Pennsylvania acres even more weedy than his own, with the admiration we young quipsters at the Harvard
Lampoon
felt for his
New Yorker
contributions, and with the actual hard laughter his amazingly ornate and cunningly adjusted sentences faithfully sprang from my voice box. He was the last humorist of his droll generation to keep practicing, and to think that I was, however modestly, an irritant to his exquisite sensibility is almost a source of pride. To those who yearn to join the angels, even the sound of angelic mockery is music. And dead men shouldn’t be blamed for having their private letters published.