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JOHN CHEEVER GOES UNDER - PART 2

by Blake Bailey

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

Though he’d almost died over the holidays, Cheever returned to Boston for the spring semester and the situation duly deteriorated. Sadly he reported to friends that the place was “straight asshole” and his students had become “sluggish.” He’d persuaded Updike to visit his combined classes for a two-hour Q&A session that Cheever abruptly terminated after less than an hour (evidently startling Updike), because his overawed students had proved unresponsive. “You had an opportunity to ask John Updike questions,” he subsequently told them in a seething voice, “and nobody said a damn thing.” After that, he seemed to give up. He went through the motions, more or less, but didn’t bother to disguise his drunkenness or do much in the way of teaching. He also kept a rather flexible schedule. “Should we go looking for him?” his worried students murmured one day when he was 15 minutes late for class. An expedition was forming when they spotted their teacher shuffling past the door. “Mr. Cheever?” they called. “Mr. Cheever?” An elegant voice floated down the hall: “Ye-esss…?” “We sort of talked him back into the room,” one student recalled. “He returned with this big grin and went around the table kissing all the women and shaking hands with the men.” That was a relatively good day. More and more, Cheever seemed utterly unprepared and would either read one of his own stories or just sit there looking depressed until his students gradually drifted away. One youth expressed his contempt by removing his shirt and climbing on top of the circled desks, stalking around the room while Cheever gazed at him in quiet puzzlement.

His last month in Boston was a free fall. An old friend named Raphael Rudnik—who’d heard of Cheever’s distress and had an intuition that he was about to kill himself—tried to cheer him up with a visit, but found him “unreachable.” The only thing Cheever wanted to think or talk about was drinking. When Rudnik tried to get him to eat, Cheever said, “If I eat, can we go out to drink?” Rudnik pointed out that he was already on the verge of passing out. “Yes,” said Cheever, “but you’re not.” Perhaps the last social engagement (formal) that Cheever kept was a dinner with Sally Swope at her father’s house on Louisburg Square. He arrived an hour late in pouring rain, slipped on the steps, and cracked his head on a newel post; a maid bandaged the gaping wound, and Cheever tardily joined the others at table. From that point on, he tended to decline invitations and discourage visitors. Meanwhile, if indeed he was dying, then he supposed he might as well indulge the rest of his appetites, too. Buying a “cock magazine” struck him as “a blow for common sense” (though he couldn’t quite decide how to dispose of the thing), and he also brought at least one male prostitute back to his apartment, “hurry[ing] him out the door” once their business was concluded.

Around this time he sat next to a bum in the park and asked for a “pull” from the man’s bottle, and soon he began hoping he’d be hit by a car while walking in traffic. When his student Rick Siggelkow stopped for a visit, Cheever insisted on giving the (much taller) young man a pair of dark, lightweight Brooks Brothers suits: “Now you have two suits to use for a summer funeral,” he remarked. (Siggelkow mused that this was a “very Cheever” thing to say: “Everything was always evocative of something else. In other words, he didn’t just give me two suits, he gave me ‘two suits to use for a summer funeral,’ and the way he said it you could see yourself standing at that funeral wearing those suits.”) While the two were drinking, Cheever began to cough and gasp for breath, finally asking Siggelkow to call for an ambulance—then, quite adamantly, changing his mind. “You really have to go,” he said, closing his eyes and sitting rigidly back in his chair, “or something’s going to happen we’re both going to regret.” Siggelkow protested, but Cheever demanded he leave immediately, and when the student glanced up from the bottom of the stairs, Cheever was looking down at him with a forced, cordial, miserable smile (this a matter of “New England breeding,” Siggelkow figured).

At the insistence of his older brother, Fred—who lived in nearby Plymouth and called each morning to make sure John was still alive—Cheever resigned his teaching position in late March, though not before calling the department head a “delinquent asshole.” His bitterness was general, and when a man came by his apartment to collect the telephone, Cheever ripped it out of the wall and threw it at him. Toward his students, however, he was nothing but apologetic: Speaking with averted eyes, he allowed that he’d been treated shabbily by the university, but his problems ran deeper and he simply couldn’t go on. For the remaining six weeks of the semester, he told them, Updike would take his classes and the students would be far better off.

Free at last, Cheever spent his final days on Bay State Road in the usual manner. The Sunday before his departure, he gave Ivan Gold a call: “I’m faring rather poorly,” he announced, asking whether he might borrow a bottle of gin. Gold happened to have an almost untouched fifth of Gordon’s on hand and was even willing to throw in a bottle of Noilly Prat: He and Cheever had not been close, and Gold saw this as a belated chance to “talk with a master.” But when Cheever arrived (the two lived only a few brownstones apart, which was doubtless part of Cheever’s rationale in choosing a donor), he gave no sign of wishing to stay. Gold’s three-year-old son thought Cheever looked like a monkey and said so repeatedly (Gold explained he was actually saying marquis), and Cheever regarded the boy and the two convivial cocktails in Gold’s hands with equal dismay. “I scrubbed the plan and ushered him out,” Gold remembered. “From the window I watched him scurry with the loot back to his dark sanctuary.”

When Fred failed to reach John on the telephone (unaware of its sudden removal), he became concerned and rushed to Bay State Road, where he found his brother naked and incoherent. He got him dressed and drove him home to Ossining. The next day, Fred wrote his son a circumspect account of the episode, noting that he was “in deep concern” about John: “He is such an extraordinary person, not only very knowledgeable and bright, but kind and loving, [and] it would hurt many, many people if anything were to happen to him.” Such was Fred’s haste in rescuing his brother that he didn’t bother to retrieve any manuscripts, or, for that matter, John’s false teeth and Academy of Arts and Letters badge, which were eventually found in the bedroom dresser.


“I must have been quite drunk and mad,” Cheever wrote a few weeks later, as he realized he remembered nothing of the drive back to Ossining (during which he’d drunk a bottle of scotch and then urinated into the empty bottle), or even his subsequent hospitalization at Phelps, where he was found to be suffering from a degree of brain damage in addition to a failing heart. Given one more chance to choose between life and death, Cheever seemed on the whole to prefer living—defiant of the expectation that he should go on fulfilling the “Orphic myth.” Where he differed with his wife and doctors was in how, exactly, to proceed with his recovery. His psychiatrist had arranged for him to be admitted to the Smithers Rehabilitation Unit on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which involved an “intensive” 28-day in-patient treatment program. Balking at the prospect of incarceration, Cheever phoned his daughter and insisted she find out whether the program was affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous, as he refused to get mixed up with a “bunch of Christers.” Susan did so, and someone at Smithers denied the connection—falsely, but in accord with AA’s principle of anonymity. Cheever would later concede that the lie had saved his life, but at the time he was decidedly ambivalent and even tried to jump out of the car when Mary drove him to Smithers on April 9.

All things considered, he was in remarkably good fettle on arrival: He seemed fairly lucid, and his vital signs were normal. After his typewriter was turned upside down to check for contraband, he was given the abbreviated Shipley IQ test (scoring, as ever, in the high-average range) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It was the screening interview that gave counselors pause: Cheever’s memory was “apparently poor,” they noted, since he denied ever having blackouts, DTs, or any psychiatric treatment (aside from “some marriage counseling” five years before), though his medical records plainly contradicted him on all these points, and never mind the patient’s claim that “all his trouble began [my italics] with the suicide of a close friend [Sexton!] last year.” Despite such “minimization,” he seemed otherwise cooperative, relating well (if reservedly) with staff and patients alike. “A bummer; not really bad, but not good,” he wrote in his journal that second day. “At breakfast I am asked not to sit at a particular table. We do not play musical chairs around here, says an authoritative woman of perhaps forty, a little heavy.” But he hadn’t much time to dwell on his social progress. Between meals (“meat and rice and Jell-O”), he was shunted from lectures to group sessions to individual meetings with one humorless staffer or another, and such free time as he enjoyed was supposed to be spent poring over the wisdom of AA founders “Bill W.” and “Dr. Bob.” As he wrote a friend, “The indoctrination here is stern, evangelical, protestant and tireless.”

The main objective of such a program is to break down the alcoholic’s denial, and Cheever proved a difficult patient precisely because he seemed so tractable, at least for a while. Asked about his appetite (he loathed the food), he’d answer, “Fine.” Sleeping all right? “Fine.” Are you an alcoholic? “Yes.” But in fact he found it almost impossible to believe that he had much in common with the other “dismal” patients, the milieu being nothing if not democratic. “I share a bedroom and a bath with four other men,” he wrote. “1. is an unsuccessful con man. 2. an unsuccessful German delicatessen owner. 3. an unemployable sailor with a troll’s face and faded tatoos [sic], and 4. a leading dancer from American Ballet.”

For the most part, Cheever’s demeanor was detached and vaguely ironical. One doctor, becoming emotional during a lecture, noticed the quick look of amusement on Cheever’s face. Which is not to say his judgments were always dismissive or that he was anything less than attentive; rather, he was keeping his own counsel and doing his best to stay out of harm’s way, since he found Smithers a brutal place where vulnerability was apt to be punished. “During group analysis a young man talks about his bisexuality and is declared by everyone in the group but me as a phoney,” he observed in his journal. “I perhaps should have said that if it is phoney to have anxieties about bisexuality I must declare myself a phoney.” Years later, Cheever was still complaining that the staff had been “pitiless” about the young man’s bisexuality, even to the point of hounding him out of the program. That the director of Smithers, LeClaire Bissell, was herself an open lesbian would suggest he’d willfully missed the point—namely, that one shouldn’t use sexual issues, one way or the other, as an excuse to drink. “The director,” he noted, “toward whom I have some complicated vibrations, says that a healthy person can adjust to acceptable social norms. The banality of a TV show, certainly acceptable, is what makes me want to drink.” That was the kind of attitude (the world is to blame in all its deadening banality, especially given one’s higher sensibility—etc.) that provoked the staff into insisting, after a week or so, that Cheever stop writing so much in his journal and start concentrating on the Twelve Steps. Resignedly he wrote his brother Fred, “They don’t want me to work and it seems best to play along with this and everything else.”

So Cheever played along, or so he might have thought, but it only got worse. He was heckled mercilessly for his affectations. For example, he’d long cultivated a tendency to pause with a kind of strained look, as if groping for words, gathering strength, before coming out with some mellifluous pronouncement; observing this, one counselor noted that he seemed “on the verge of belching” and was “very impressed with self.” As for his literary reputation (“he insists [his novels] have been very successful”), only a handful of people at Smithers knew Cheever from any other drunk, and nobody really cared in any case. Sensing as much—though naturally wishing to be identified with his achievement—Cheever “almost surreptitiously” presented an autographed book to his personal counselor, Ruth Maxwell, who promptly returned to the subject of his drinking. At length Cheever responded as if he were forced to chat with some tiresome guest at a dinner party—as if he were bored to death with the same old subject but willing to go along as a matter of politeness. “I’m really all right but I can’t say so here because only the hopeless lush claims to be all right,” he wrote a friend. “That’s a point of view I’m discouraged from taking because I’ve ruined my life with false light-heartedness.” This was irony, of course, and yet even Cheever’s friends had often wondered at his constant, nervous “outward tremor of laughter” (as Shirley Hazzard put it), sometimes at very odd moments; as for the people at Smithers, they were openly startled by it. “Why are you laughing?” they demanded again and again, as Cheever tittered at some grindingly miserable memory from his youth, or some cruelty he’d inflicted on his children.

Bullied at every turn for his “false light-heartedness” and “grandiosity,” Cheever retreated into a vast, fraudulent humility. “Oh but of course you’re right,” he’d mutter (in so many words) when challenged. Nobody was fooled or amused. Carol Kitman, a staff psychologist, remarked that Cheever reminded her of Uriah Heep: “He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus,” she wrote in her progress notes. “He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time…. Press him to deal with his own humanity.” Told he was just like John Berryman, Cheever (“humbly”) replied, “But he was a brilliant poet and an estimable scholar, and I’m neither.” Yes, said the counselor, but he was also a phony and a drunk, and now he’s dead; is that what you want? Cheever affected to take this sort of thing in stride, though in fact it was a ghastly humiliation. “Non posso, cara,” he’d weepily tell his daughter during his daily call from a communal pay phone. “Non posso stare qui.” He sounded so defeated that Susan worried he wouldn’t last another day, and began parking her car outside the Newsweek building so she could leave work immediately and rush him to the gentler Silver Hill in Connecticut, where she’d made a reservation just in case. “Fifteen patients have fled since I joined the fun,” Cheever reported to a friend on April 21. “It’s quite sad in this part of Siberia.”

But Cheever stayed put and gradually began to make progress. A more tolerant attitude toward his fellow patients seemed to help. At first he’d been appalled by the “human garbage” he had to share quarters with: They stole from each other; they refused to clean their pubic hair out of the bathtub. Unable to dissemble his distaste, Cheever himself became roundly disliked; when it was his turn to wait on tables, he was so anxious over potential hazing that he spilled a dish of peas into a woman’s lap. Confronted in group sessions for being aloof and snobbish, Cheever finally broke down and assured the others that he was taking things “very seriously” indeed. By the time his family came for a Sunday visit, Cheever appeared to be almost at peace with his environment. “Alcoholism seems to be an infirmity of the lower classes,” Mary observed, peering around the dining room, but Cheever’s own gaze was humorous and fond. “I always liked running with a crowd of whom my mother disapproved,” he later remarked, “and Smithers did that.” Around the middle of his stay, “a lame black who knits and crochets” moved into his room and proved every bit as disaffected as Cheever had been two weeks ago: “He says that if he were strong enough to carry his suitcase down the stairs he would leave. I’ve offered to take his suitcase down but he doesn’t answer.”

Toward the end, it was the prospect of leaving that sometimes worried Cheever. “I call Mary from time to time and she is full of complaints,” he wrote William Maxwell. “The bank can’t add, the dogs (4) are muddy, the lawns are dry, Susie has followed a worthless man to Chicago, and by innuendo her husband is in a dryout mansion on east 93rd.” In his journal he wrote a more somber account of the conversation (Mary had been “very bad-tempered,” mainly because his lost bank statements—abandoned in Boston—had led to a $2,000 overdraft): “This sort of thing provokes my drinking,” he concluded. “It makes me afraid to return.” The staff at Smithers was also somewhat afraid on his behalf. When Mary failed to appear for a scheduled conference, one of the counselors gave her a call; with glacial politeness she explained that they couldn’t tell her anything about her husband she didn’t already know after some 35 years of marriage—but not to worry, as she had no intention of leaving him (“he’s an old man who needs to be taken care of”). “She seems to operate in a very passive aggressive way,” the counselor noted, “and to have given up on her husband who is now just somebody she’ll have to care for until he dies.” Informed of her position, Cheever seemed unsurprised if a little self-pitying, remarking that he’d always been the more “giving” partner in the marriage.

When Cheever was released on May 7, his prognosis was “guarded” (“Consensus is that p[atien]t is so wrapped up in self that there is no room for anything else”). Ruth Maxwell had laughed out loud when Cheever suddenly announced that he’d never drink again, but Dr. Robert de Veer was convinced Cheever had actually accepted the fact that he was an alcoholic and therefore had no excuse—be it a bad marriage or a banal TV show—for drinking, ever. One of Cheever’s students in Boston had been particularly skeptical that such a drunken man could ever get sober, and one day he received a postcard from his old teacher with a terse message:

“See?”


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	Sweeney, on Aug 21, 2008 wrote: For years now the Swimmer has been one of the more disturbing stories I have read... I had no idea had no idea that his own life mirrored that to such an extent...