Photo by David L. Ryan/Landov

JOHN CHEEVER GOES UNDER - PART 1

by Blake Bailey

from Cheever: A Life, to be published by Knopf in early 2009

In 1974, John Cheever accepted a teaching position at Boston University, the better to distance himself from his family and drink in peace. One of the first things he did on arrival was order stationery: “John Cheever/71 Bay State Road/Boston, Massachusetts 02215.” This enabled him to write despondent letters about how much he despised his new lodgings, and never mind the “sinister” part of town where he found himself, Kenmore Square (“part student, part slum”), whose most prominent feature was a school for embalming, or so he rarely failed to point out. At his (peremptory and belated) request, an apartment had been found for him in a handsome bow-front brownstone on a leafy street near campus, though it was hardly ideal for a 62-year-old alcoholic with a bad heart: Not only was it four flights up, but the interior was bleak and Cheever was disinclined to personalize it. “[There] is no point in listing the contents of these two rooms,” he wrote a friend shortly after his arrival. “It is much too decorous and efficient although there is dirty clothing on all the chairs.” His main attitude was one of bewilderment: He’d worked hard all his life—attained the pinnacle of his profession!—only to be banished by his family to two furnished rooms in Boston, where he expected to “end up penniless and naked,” what with the predations of the Plymouth Rock Laundry.

His relations with the university began with delinquencies on both sides and went downhill from there. As a last-minute replacement for Jean Stafford (who was allegedly drinking even more than Cheever), the obscure Ivan Gold had been hired to teach the other workshop section; consequently, most students had requested Cheever, whose classes were swamped. He repeatedly asked that the situation be remedied, but found the administration “quite mysterious” at best: The head of the English Department wasn’t returning his calls (he finally met the man by accident, standing at an adjoining urinal), while the head of the writing program, George Starbuck, seemed alarmed at the very sight of him. “I did not rise to the occasion of John’s troubles,” Starbuck later admitted, “did not effectively love or help him, floundered stupidly between catering to him… and pursuing some coherent plan of stern-but-supportive intervention.” And yet his wariness was at least somewhat understandable, since Cheever—quite apart from his disastrous alcoholism—had given signs of being very high-maintenance indeed. First he’d demanded that Starbuck find him suitable lodgings, then he’d let it be known that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he’d taught the previous year) had “provided” him with a graduate student who served as a kind of secretary-cum- mistress- cum-nurse, and he expected BU to do the same. As Starbuck recalled, “There was (carefully) plenty of twinkle in his voice as he urged this. Pixie mischief. But he did urge it, and tell me he needed just that to keep him on an even keel.” Starbuck, however, balked at “playing procurer” even for so distinguished a colleague, whose invidious comparisons between Iowa and Boston usually ended with: “… and every night [in Iowa] there was someone to suck my cock!”

For the first month or two, Cheever was able to function as a teacher. Precisely because he drank before classes (vodka, mostly, since it was relatively odorless), he remained fairly alert and often held forth in an engaging way. His remarks tended to be incisive and sometimes led to worthwhile tangents about his own writing and what seemed to work for him. He found his students “responsive and contentious”—if not especially talented—and made a point of learning their names quickly and finding out what sort of books they liked (Gravity’s Rainbow was the rage, and Cheever also professed to like it—or rather, he liked it better than Vonnegut’s work, which was almost always the other favorite). He assigned “drills,” though these were received with even less enthusiasm than at Iowa. As an exercise in “describing the indescribable,” one of his students—a semi-famous novelist’s son, who fancied himself experimental—read an endless list of synonyms for death from Roget’s Thesaurus. A long silence followed. “It’s a found object,” the young man explained. Cheever threw back his head and studied the ceiling: “From now on,” he said at length (“sounding like Alfred Hitchcock after a pint of gin,” one student observed), “all found objects shall be designated F.O.’s.”

Not surprisingly, Cheever couldn’t be bothered to read his students’ work outside of class, as he seemed to think it was more than sufficient having to listen to it. Asked about a large manuscript on his coffee table—a novel, it so happened, by the semi-famous novelist’s son—Cheever closed his eyes and shook his head; when, however, he returned the manuscript (exactly one week after the epigone had given it to him), he declared it “perfect”: “Submit it to a New York publisher and they’ll publish it right away!” (“I never got it published,” the author reported 30 years later.) All graduate students, in fact, were required to get two professors to read and sign off on their thesis work, and whenever they managed to run Cheever to ground and ask for his signature, he was always happy to give it. “Oh yes very good,” he’d mutter, when they asked if he liked the work in question.

Whatever remained of Cheever’s willpower was entirely reserved for showing up; outside the classroom, he barely functioned at all. His most constant companion was a graduate student named Laurens Schwartz, whom Cheever had recommended for a full scholarship. Schwartz endeavored to return the favor. Since Cheever “had a tendency to walk out of his apartment nude,” Schwartz would meet him several mornings a week to make sure he was properly dressed. Dirty clothes were strewn about the rooms; the butcher-block table in the kitchen was covered with empty bottles and rotting fruit (brought by Cheever’s wife). Trembling from head to toe, unable to speak, Cheever would walk with Schwartz to a seedy hotel bar on the way to campus, where a rock-faced waitress in a miniskirt would wordlessly bring her only customer a double vodka on the rocks. As Schwartz recalled, “Cheever was like one of those toy birds who peck at a water glass: He’d lower his head, sip, come up, and repeat. Maybe halfway through he’d finally be able to pick up the glass.” He’d also tentatively attempt speech, and after a few garbled phrases would begin to make some kind of sense, whereupon he’d become tearful, as if his own words were unbearable to hear. His life was such a mess: He had no clean clothes, the proprietor of the Plymouth Rock Laundry was a bandit, and for the last 17 days he’d subsisted entirely on oranges and hamburgers. On it went. Meanwhile he tried to light a cigarette, the matches falling one after the other from twitching fingers; Schwartz, snatching the embers out of Cheever’s lap, once counted 30 matches to light a single cigarette. Over and over Schwartz implored the decrepit man to see a doctor, but Cheever seemed more interested in maundering about his woes than in doing much about them. “It was like taking care of a child,” said Schwartz, echoing his various predecessors.

Word traveled fast that Cheever was an all but hopeless drunk. The eminent Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray—creator of the Thematic Apperception Test, as well as a notable Melville enthusiast—had thrown a welcoming party for Cheever, a mistake neither he nor any of his guests was likely to repeat. On arrival Cheever shoved an armchair into the middle of the living room, where he drooped slack-jawed for the rest of the evening, cigarettes turning to ash in his fingers and crumbling to the carpet. Michael Janeway had found Cheever’s condition “heartbreaking”: As a boy he’d received a kindly, encouraging letter from Cheever, who was friends with his mother, Elizabeth. Now a 34-year-old editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Janeway had arranged to meet Cheever at the Ritz Grill with the magazine’s editor in chief, Robert Manning, another of Cheever’s old acquaintances. Any hope of soliciting a story dissipated over the course of lunch, as their guest emptied multiple mini-carafes of martinis amid a sodden monologue on his ruined marriage and the like. As Janeway recalled, “The message was (his and mine), ‘You don’t want to get too close.’”

As for John Updike, he too was estranged from a wife named Mary and living in Back Bay about a mile from Cheever. The similarities ended there. They’d met by accident in September, outside Brooks Brothers, where Cheever had invited Updike to join him while he blithely purchased two pairs of tasseled loafers, though the tassels gave him very slight pause. (He subsequently told Schwartz that he’d “trained” Updike never to inquire about prices when shopping for clothes.) That done, the two adjourned to the Kon-Tiki bar at the Park Plaza, where Cheever instructed the waiter with great urgency to bring him doubles (“as if a drink that was merely single might in its weakness poison him”). Saying good-bye on Commonwealth, Updike paused to watch his “wobbly” elder colleague walking away under the elms: “I felt badly,” he remembered, “because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.” Cheever likewise noted the “conspicuous ego clash” between the two and yet remained galled (as ever) by Updike’s failure to cultivate warmer relations. “Updike never calls me,” he complained. “We bump into each other and it’s like old times, but he never calls me!” Updike did, in fact, call him—but at measured intervals. Before a night at Symphony Hall, Updike had helped the drunken, naked Cheever get into his clothes, and another time he took him to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an old Garbo film, which proved to be sold-out; dining instead at the Cafe Budapest, Updike was startled afterward when Cheever bolted out of the car in Roxbury to buy cigarettes “at a dark and heavily grated corner emporium.”

Later, reading Falconer, Updike seemed to recognize the novel’s first sentences as the same ones he’d spotted on a sheet of paper stuck in Cheever’s typewriter—always the same dusty sheet, unaltered. Whether Cheever made any further progress in Boston is unlikely. A visitor from nearby Bradford College, James Valhouli, had read parts of Cheever’s Boston journal (later destroyed) and found them “incoherent,” while Laurens Schwartz observed that Cheever could hardly type: “He used his forefingers, punching out each letter at one-second intervals…. He wrote two lines and suddenly faded out.” The reason he made that one attempt in Schwartz’s presence—drunk, late at night—was because he intended to rewrite one of the young man’s stories (“I’m going to get it published for you”), having mentioned that he’d rewritten other students’ stories and even parts of Updike. This, of course, was the pathetic braggadocio of a man who hadn’t done a first-rate piece of work (as he saw it) since his novel Bullet Park six years before, and had begun to suspect his career and perhaps his life was over. When his agent, Candida Donadio, sent him a copy of the acclaimed new novel by Joseph Heller, Something Happened, Cheever read a few pages and threw it out the window. Because he liked it.


The other famous person in the BU writing program was the poet Anne Sexton, whom Cheever found “aggressive” and mostly avoided. The two had met at a faculty dinner hosted by the dean, where both engaged in a kind of caustic banter meant to shock their less illustrious colleagues and perhaps each other. Ivan Gold remembered sensing a “visceral distaste” between the two, while the poet John Malcolm Brinnin and Starbuck tried to distract the dean and his wife at the other end of the table: “Did they overhear that?” the two men worried with each new explosion of naughtiness from Cheever and Sexton. Whatever their incompatibility otherwise, Sexton somewhat endeared herself to Cheever by spiking his coffee with vodka at tedious faculty meetings.

Sexton killed herself on October 4, 1974, and Cheever “never quite got over this.” Despite the fact that Sexton had been suicidal for most of her adult life, nobody really expected it: Her friend Brinnin was under the impression that she’d “never been so happy,” while Ivan Gold had found her “sardonic, nervous, full of a crazed energy.” For his part, Cheever seemed to regard the tragedy as emblematic of the whole ghastly situation—aspects of which included the apathetic, feckless administration of a “fourth-rate” university near an embalming school in an utterly, utterly dismal part of Boston. Cheever boycotted the memorial service, threatening to resign on the spot and go home.

But home to what? Over Thanksgiving his family tried to rouse him out of his funk with some hearty persiflage at the dinner table, an occasion to which Cheever was decidedly unable to rise. “Susie said that I put on a rather bad show,” he wrote a friend afterward, “and I shall try to do better at Christmas.” This was not to be. Returning to Cedar Lane a month later, Cheever appeared to be on the verge of death—an impression he soon confirmed by coughing uncontrollably and turning blue. This was the usual heart trouble, and once again he went to Phelps Memorial hospital and stayed a few days to dry out. Perhaps to underline the gravity of his predicament, a young priest visited his “extraordinarily bleak” room. Cheever, wearing pajamas, bemusedly knelt on the linoleum floor and received Holy Communion, then said, “Thank you, Father,” and watched the man depart.

Back home he demanded a drink, and when his family protested, he asked if he might take a valium instead; given the go-ahead, he swallowed three and poured himself a drink. During the Christmas feast, a hush fell over the table as he tried to eat peas: Time after time, suspensefully, the trembling fork ascended, only to spill its savory burden at the crucial moment. At last, a spoon was suggested. “I regret to tell you,” said Cheever (putting the fork aside), “that you have a father who is dying.” A look went around the table, and Federico said: “We have a father with a taste for melodrama.” This eased the tension somewhat, though it was precisely the sort of thing Cheever was apt to find “unfeeling.” On New Year’s Day he became enraged when his family advised him to eat lentils “in order to ensure an income”: Crashing upstairs to his room, Cheever yanked the cover off his bed and fell over backward, unconscious.


TO BE CONTINUED
JOHN CHEEVER GOES UNDER | 1 | 2 |

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