Odd Jobs (23 page)

In reality, Cheever was always courteous to me and increasingly friendly and kind. He took to writing me impulsive, complimentary notes, such as one saying of a book review of mine, “You speak of literature as if it played some part in civilization and I feel briefly that perhaps I’m not ironing shirts in the back of a Chinese laundry.” The year before he died, looking unwell, he had himself driven down to New York so he
could appear on the
Dick Cavett Show
with me and tell the world that my new novel was “important”—a word he kept using, with an effect of litany. That same last year of his, he and Mary gave me and my second wife lunch at Ossining; though he had no appetite, he sat at the table, courtly and witty, and then took us on a brief excursion to his favorite local sight, the Croton Dam. My wife took a photograph of the two of us there, and John is visibly in pain, yellowish and compressed and frowning. Yet such was his vitality, and the dazzling veil of verbal fun he spun around himself, that only the photograph made me realize how bravely ill he was that day.

For eight months, ten years after our Russian episode, he and I lived at opposite ends of Boston’s Back Bay, both estranged from our Marys, both in a brick-lined limbo. He had come to teach at Boston University in bad shape, and got no better. Boston and its settings from his youth weighed on him heavily, and alcohol had reduced his mind to a mumble. I seem to remember seeing the first sentences of
Falconer
on a piece of paper in his typewriter, but the page and the platen never moved, nor did food appear in his refrigerator or books on his bookshelves. The apartment the university had given him on Bay State Road looked no more lived-in than a bird perch. My attempts to entertain him generally misfired. The old Garbo film at the Museum of Fine Arts was sold out when we arrived, and our main adventure of the night was my getting us lost in Roxbury and his jumping from the car to buy a pack of cigarettes at a dark and heavily grated corner emporium. When I came to take him to Symphony Hall one Tuesday night, he was standing naked on the third-story landing outside his door; his costume indicated some resistance to attending symphony but I couldn’t imagine what else, and I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes. We arrived late and lasted until intermission, when he felt compelled to leave and go buy a bottle of gin around the corner, from a surly salesman who failed to realize he was dealing not with an old rummy but with one of America’s most distinguished authors. John pulled his Brahmin accent on him, showed him his ready cash, and got the gin. He had the distracted air of a man convinced that the real fun was elsewhere. Some of the bizarre things he saw in the students’ windows on Bay State Road (which he indignantly called “a slum”) worked their way into the prison milieu of
Falconer
. B.U. to him was prison.

My scattered memories of those eight months—which ended when, having rather miraculously failed to kill himself with alcohol, he took
himself to New York City and dried out for good, finished
Falconer
, and embarked upon seven years of sobriety and celebrity—seem to center on his acts of consumerism. Our first meeting occurred by accident, in the dry sunshine of September 1974, outside of Brooks Brothers, where he had come to buy shoes. He invited me to follow him in. He was somewhat satirical about the tassels on the footwear the salesman offered him, but he bought two pairs anyway. I was struck by that, his carefreely buying two pairs at once, and by the way, in the Kon-Tiki bar of the Park Plaza, where we repaired afterward to renew old acquaintance, he insisted to the waiter that the drinks he was brought be doubles. His insistence was anxious, as if a drink that was merely single might in its weakness poison him. Yet when, after three or so of these, John stood up to go, he exclaimed, in a drawl of surprise, “God—I’m drunk!!”

He did seem a bit wobbly. We walked a few blocks together. I asked him if he could make it back to his place, the shimmering length of Back Bay away. He assured me he could and, holding the blue Brooks Brothers shopping bag full of tasselled shoes, his small figure dwindled down the green and monumental perspectives of Commonwealth Avenue. Rather callously, I figured he would be all right. To me he was less a mortal man than an enviable prose style.

The Letters of John Cheever
is to be valued for its outpouring of that style, for the tender, puzzled notes by his son Ben, and for the jesting gallantry of his last death-defying letters. In one of them, to me, he awards me the magnanimity he had doubted earlier: apropos of a published review of his last novel,
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
, he wrote, “Your magnaminity is overwhelming.” Fifteen years had gone by and he still couldn’t spell the word, but it meant something real and important to him. Evidences of an impulsive, plaintive, insecure, and haughty nature have quickly accumulated, in his daughter’s memoir
Home Before Dark
, in Scott Donaldson’s biography, and in the volume of letters, with some frank, abysmally depressed journals to come. For all that, those who knew him can testify, he was a gem of a man, instantly poetic and instinctively magnanimous—one of those rare persons who heighten your sense of human possibilities.

SPEECHES

O
UR ASSIGNED TITLE
challenges the literary man’s traditional duty to be specific. Like almost everybody else in the world I was born into a tribe, with its rites and obligations and mystic signs. I was early introduced to the flag called the Stars and Stripes, and to the eagle with his claws full of arrows, and the symbols for dollars and cents, and the map showing our national westward expansion. The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and provisions of the state intersected was the postal system. Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house the printed journals—the newspapers and magazines—that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future. In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond. Each day’s mail brought potential treasure. This is still true for me. I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return. It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do. I never see
a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit.

Now, what do these hollow blue monuments on street corners from here to Hawaii tell of how the state imagines? It desires, we must conclude, its citizens to be in touch with one another; the tribe seeks interconnection and consolidation. The state imagines solidarity, and resists secession and nonconformity, which is secession on the personal scale. Its instinct is conservative, I would say, more than, as is often charged, expansionist; only when the territorial enlargement is made to seem necessary to conserving what already exists is the effort of tribal aggression enthusiastically undertaken.

However, a state will almost never, without a fight, submit to its own diminishment; this is true of its government as well. Compared with a human individual, the state is a relatively rudimentary organism. The individual options of altruism and self-sacrifice and weary withdrawal and anorexia are too intricate and perverse for it. It can imagine only a continual health, the vigor of a gently inflationary status quo; this is because its imagination is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wishes to lose his or her job. A democracy wisely provides an electoral process whereby most of the top officials must periodically run the risk of replacement; but the numerous workers beneath them are no longer subjected to such a risk. It is an awesome sight, in Washington, D.C., around five o’clock, to see the armies of government workers swarm like locusts into the mellowing sunlight. Just as bone counters every injury with the production of more calcium, more bone, so government tends, under every stimulus, to extend its connections with its citizens and the services it proposes to render them. Automobile seatbelts become mandatory by law and by law warnings from the surgeon-general are printed on cigarette packages. All this, of course, for the cause of tribal well-being.

The imagination of the modern artist, on the contrary, is committed not to conservation, which is carried on by the libraries and museums devoted to his art, but to exploration and danger, to expansion. It was not always so; the artist for millennia has been in league with the state, and has chiselled its propaganda and its gods on the appropriate temples and mausoleums. But an alternative patron to autocratic government, an affluent and varied popular audience, has arisen, and after it the notion of a perpetual avant-garde—the notion of an art wherein change, like
change in fashion or the climate, is amusing and desirable in itself. The state, like a child, wishes that each day be just like the last; art, like a youth, hopes that each day will bring something new.

It seems to me that the writer’s imagination and the imagination of the state have opposite tendencies and should keep a respectful distance from one another. Myself, I ask mainly that my tribal officials keep the mails operating—no small task, and one where many tribes fail—and continue to safeguard the freedom of expression that my particular state’s founders rashly promised its citizens. This is plenty, and this is enough. I do not know why, in 1965, the United States government felt obliged to create endowments to encourage and fund the arts and the humanities. Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products, an actual audience for their performance. This is above all true for writing, which, requiring only pen and paper and a solitary author’s time, can be cheaply produced and has been, since the invention of printing, a popular art, an art that seeks to draw its support from below and not from above.

P.S.:
Brief as it is, this speech, addressing the stated question with all the honesty and good nature at my command, sticks in my mind as an epitome of discomfort in its delivery. The audience—writers and workers in the literary vineyard, assembled from many countries but predominantly New Yorkers—seethed with barely suppressed anger and was audibly impatient with any utterance other than a straightforward condemnation of the Reagan administration. The common-law wife of Daniel Ortega, the then President of Nicaragua, spoke from the floor in impassioned English about American “genocide” in her country and asked the panel, which included a German and a Pole, what we were going to do about it. The panel’s chairman, E. L. Doctorow, after hearing my remarks, acknowledged the existence of blue mailboxes but said that if you looked carefully you could find a missile site around the corner; the fact of the United States possessing missiles, even unlaunched in their silos, was so self-evidently evil to him as to admit no counter-comment. Rhoda Koenig, reviewing the PEN Congress in
New York
, called my speech “a fairy tale,” but what seemed fabulous to me was the goblin air of fevered indignation and reflexive anti-Americanism that may, for all I know, poison the atmosphere whenever the New York literary community gathers in numbers larger than two or three. If, for most of those citizens present, the United States had proved to be a land of educational
and economic opportunity, with almost unparallelled guarantees of free expression, there was, once my mouth shut, not a whiff of acknowledgment, let alone gratitude.

T
HE CAREER OF
H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
, whose name adorns our lecture series and the history of Albany, invites us to reflect upon the vicissitudes of literary creation. He was born in the summer of 1819 on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, into those circumstances so frequent in the biographies of writers—circumstances of fallen gentility. His father, Allan Melvill, was the younger of the two sons of a formidable orphan, Thomas Melvill, who participated in the Boston Tea Party and was appointed Collector of the Port of Boston by George Washington. Major Melvill, as he was called, held this sinecure for forty years, and shrewdly accumulated a fortune while doing so. His sons, however, inherited the habits, the good self-regard, and the optimism that money bestows without inheriting the gift of making more of it themselves. Allan as a youth went to Europe on the then-obligatory Grand Tour, and stayed for some years; he learned French, collected books and prints, and posed for a dandified portrait. Returning, he entered the import business and for all of his unfortunate commercial life was associated with the clothing trade. In 1814 he married Maria Gansevoort, of a prominent and wealthy family of this city. For four years the young couple lived in Albany, sharing a house with her mother and brother, and their first two children were born here. Allan’s rich relations had set him up in the dry-goods business, but he managed to find the attractions of Albany resistible, and in 1818 moved to New York, where he fathered Herman and five more children, moved from house to house, lived and invested beyond his means, and borrowed heavily against his expectations from both his father and his wife’s family. Sued by creditors, he took refuge back with the Gansevoorts in Albany; returning from a trip to Boston and New York in
search of more credit, he walked across the iced-over Hudson in below-zero weather, took ill, and died early in the year 1832, when Herman was twelve. Throughout January, the dying man had raved like a maniac; this sad spectacle made a lasting impression upon his second son, whose work and career were both to be ever haunted by the fear of madness.