John Cheever (11 page)

In any event, this was a onetime chore and could not long keep the wolf from the door. Conditions for the free-lance writer could hardly have been worse. By 1935, book royalties had dropped to 50 percent of 1929 rates, and book sales were also cut in half. Magazine advertising linage was dropping steadily; editors were reluctant to build up any backlog, for fear their magazine might go out of business at any moment. The editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
declared in 1934 that he bought only one out of every four hundred manuscripts submitted. Sherwood Anderson, after two decades of professional writing, found himself “always in need of money, always just two steps ahead of the sheriff.” For beginning free lances the outlook was still dimmer.

To help brighten this dispiriting picture, the New Deal formed the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) as a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and appointed Henry Alsberg as national director on July 25, 1935. Exactly two months later, Cheever wrote Alsberg seeking employment. The major undertaking of the FWP was to be the writing, editing, and publishing of guidebooks to each of the forty-eight states and a few of the major cities. He could be of use, Cheever argued, because of the “clarity, ease, and meaning” with which he handled the English language.

He might have been hired at that time—he had not overstated his qualifications, certainly—but ran afoul of a provision of the law requiring that 90 percent of all employees must be on relief at the time they were employed. (Later the figure was lowered to 75 percent.) But he couldn't go on relief, Cheever wrote Cowley late in October, because he didn't have a residence. If Malcolm knew of anything he could do, he'd like to hear about it. Instead it was Yaddo that once more gave him sustenance. He spent the entire winter of 1936 on the grounds, along with Lloyd (Pete) Collins, Collins's dog Oscar, who looked like a dandelion, Leonard Ehrlich, Daniel Fuchs and his wife, Sue—Sue could come, Elizabeth Ames decreed, if she promised not to “disturb the artists”—and of course Elizabeth herself. The group got along famously. Both Fuchses were impressed by Cheever's capacity for friendship. “You felt good when you were with him,” Dan said. There was a dignity about him too, and a sense of honor. “He was a man who would have been mortified to hurt or disturb anyone else.”

Still, he was restless for success. All four of the men were fiction writers, though only Cheever and Fuchs—author of the Williamsburgh (New York City) novels and later an Oscar-winning screenwriter—were to achieve notable careers. The two of them used to sit in the bar of the New Worden Hotel and talk about the future. “What are you waiting for?” Dan asked Cheever. “For the world and my life to get integrated,” he answered. Yaddo housed and fed him, but otherwise he was broke. At
The New Yorker
Maxwell remembers getting a call from Maxim Lieber. “Could he have the check in a hurry?” Lieber wondered. His client was living in straitened circumstances upstate.

Hopefully he started working on his novel again, expanding it to a family saga. It was to be called
The Holly Tree
. For exercise he went skiing on the skis he'd brought with him. He and Fuchs constructed a miniature ski jump in front of the mansion. Cheever sailed over without mishap. Then Dan tried it; first he fell ass over teakettle, next he broke the skis. Cheever made no fuss, but Fuchs, seeing he was distraught, went to town and bought a new pair of skis.

Cheever stayed on at Yaddo well into the spring, earning his way as a kind of all-purpose caretaker. The winter residents departed, to be replaced by Nathan Asch, Eleanor Clark, and Josephine Herbst, all writers and all politically left-wing. Herbst was Stalinist in her orientation and Clark a Trotskyite, but Cheever remained largely untouched by their disputes—“a political innocent,” Clark thought. Instead he stuck to the task of writing his book. He finished the novel at his parents' small house in Quincy on May 25. To celebrate he drove to the Cape, where the high waves were crashing. The following week he set out for Triuna to take over the job he'd angled for the previous summer. Simon & Schuster had agreed to give his novel a reading. Waiting for a response at Triuna, he ran the enormous Fay & Bowen motor launch, turned out stories, and generally enjoyed himself.

It was at Triuna in the summer of 1936 that Cheever met Anton (Ref) and Lila Refrigier. Ref, a painter of Russian and French parentage, was teaching stage design at the theater school Yaddo was running to bring in summer revenue. His new bride, Lila, taught costume design. Cheever immediately endeared himself to the Refrigiers by rearranging the sleeping accommodations. Elizabeth Ames had assigned them to a room with two twin beds and had given Cheever quarters with a large double bed all his own. Without authorization he undertook to switch his double bed to their room, a maneuver that, according to Lila, made Elizabeth furious. Lila appreciated that kindness, and liked Joey—as she called him—in other ways as well. He had a “delicious” sense of humor. He was a “very loving man.” She could not imagine anyone disliking him. And he took pains with his appearance. He had a pair of gray flannel trousers he wore with an old but well-kept tweed jacket with patches, a button-down shirt with black knit tie, and carefully shined shoes. “He always looked good,” she recalls.

Cheever was immediately attracted to Lila, a blond girl with a fetching ponytail. On a trip to Yaddo, they took a walk together around the stables at the racetrack. “The only other woman I've known a horse would whinny at was Dorothy Farrell,” he told her. He shared his successes with her, too. When he sold a story to
The Atlantic Monthly
, he smuggled a bottle of warm champagne into Triuna. He and the Refrigiers drank it down in toothbrush mugs to celebrate the sale. “Champagne never tasted better,” she remembers. “An extra dollar then meant more than ten thousand dollars later.”

At midsummer the theater school collapsed in the wake of a dispute between the faculty and the administration. The students had prepared a play for parents' day, but at the last moment the school's director called it off. When the Refrigiers went to Ames to object, she upheld her director and told them all—students and faculty alike—to go home. As a consequence the Refrigiers left Triuna and rented a house in adjoining Bolton Landing for the rest of the summer. Cheever often came over for dinner, and Lila chided him for staying on. Elizabeth was making a pet of him, she said, treating him like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Why didn't he just leave Yaddo? But jobs were still scarce, and he valued the haven Yaddo provided. In a very real sense the place had come to seem like home to him. He had no permanent residence during those mid-1930s years. There were extended stays at Yaddo. The rest of the time he divided between visiting his parents and brother and sister-in-law on the South Shore and bunking in with friends in New York.

In the city he saw a great deal of Lila Refrigier. Together they explored New York on the cheap while her husband was working on his canvases or on occasional commissions to do nightclub murals. They rode the Staten Island ferryboat for a nickel and rode the Fifth Avenue bus up and down Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Harlem. They walked up to Central Park to spend hours in the zoo and to go horseback riding. Cheever rode like a jockey, with his stirrups way up. They went to twenty-five-cent movies and to the track at Belmont. Later as he became marginally more prosperous he took her on picnics in his Ford Model A and on visits to see Josie Herbst at her Bucks County house in Erwinna. He also escorted her to cocktail parties at Muriel Rukeyser's and Eleanor Clark's. At Eleanor's, he remembered years later, he was talking with her father when the poet Horace Gregory fell at their feet, drunk. To celebrate sale of one story, he took Lila to Charles's on Sixth Avenue, where they drank half a dozen dry manhattans before dinner and went on to the Brevoort for after-dinner kümmel. He also confided to her his innermost feelings about his family, and particularly about his brother, Fritz, whom he seemed alternately to love and to dislike. In short, they became intimates.

Frances Lindley (Frances Strunsky by birth, and then married to Pete Collins) recalls a poignant conversation with Anton Refrigier about this relationship. He was disturbed because when Cheever telephoned them at their flat in Chelsea—where Zero Mostel “rented” Ref's studio one summer without paying the rent—he did not even speak to Ref but simply asked for Lila. “Frances,” Ref said, “I have to ask you something. Is Lila in love with John?” Frances sighed with relief at the way the question was worded. It was a question she could honestly answer “I don't know.”

Cheever struck almost everyone who knew him in those years as aggressively heterosexual, very much a woman's man. He was “pretty promiscuous,” Frances Lindley reports, but that was hardly unusual in the Greenwich Village of the 1930s. The Village's heyday as a center of political and sexual radicalism had passed, but it was still a place where young artists of both sexes could meet and talk and drink and make love without raising eyebrows. Science also made intercourse less risky. It may be significant that most of the women he knew and was attracted to were married when he met them—this was true of Hazel Hawthorne Werner and Dorothy Farrell and Lila Refrigier and Frances Lindley—and therefore posed no threat to his bachelorhood. Simultaneously he was developing his unusual capacity and need for friendship with women who would cherish and encourage him as his own parents had not. Josie Herbst took on the role of a fond older sister, ever interested in his welfare. Elizabeth Ames became virtually a surrogate mother. On the male side, Cowley acted like a father, advising and advancing the career of a talented son.

Forty years later, Cheever wrote a young gay friend that he and Walker Evans had briefly been lovers when he first came to New York. In a letter he vividly described ejaculating all over Evans's furniture and art works before departing at three in the morning. This account, obviously written to amuse, may contain no truth at all. Frances Lindley, who has read Evans's private papers in her capacity as editor, thinks it highly unlikely. Evans had lovers of both sexes, but nowhere mentions Cheever as among them. Besides, it was clear to her as John's devoted friend at the time that his sexual orientation was toward women.

In particular, Frances liked Johnny (as
she
called him) for his kindness. “There was a kind of sweetness in Johnny that was really very nice,” she observed. They had dinner at Malcolm Cowley's soon after Malcolm's mother had died. In bittersweet reminiscence Cowley dug out his childhood silver spoon, and Cheever was immediately tender toward him. On the whole he was less sympathetic to other figures in the literary establishment. He fell asleep listening to Anderson drone on about himself. Dos Passos he thought “dull but pleasant.” He and Edmund Wilson “detested one another” on sight. His hero was fellow Yankee Cummings, the tall patrician poet who bestrode the Village like a Colossus from his Patchin Place apartment, the lovely Marion Morehouse at his side. “It was Estlin Cummings who, through at least a similarity in background, made it clear to me that one could be a writer and also remain highly intelligent, totally independent, and married to one of the most beautiful women in the world.” That was what he wanted out of life too.

Cheever hoped that
The Holly Tree
would help him achieve a measure of that independence. It did not work out that way. In the fall of 1936 he got word from Simon & Schuster that his book needed revision. He had submitted a digressive and episodic book with a shifting point of view; the publishers wanted something much more conventional. So he headed upstate to Yaddo, aided by a loan from Cowley, planning to “go over the whole novel again, word for word.” Despite the loan, he had to turn out stories to make ends meet, and so the novel languished. His financial condition, as of December 1936, was the worst in two years. At Yaddo, the snowdrifts were piling up outside and the walls beginning to close in. He needed to escape, and did.

He spent much of January in Quincy, his longest visit in years. His father got to reminiscing about the impoverishment of Newburyport after the Civil War. Both parents lamented the more recent decline of New England. Brother Fred had even written a book—“not a very good book, but a book”—on the subject, he reported to Elizabeth Ames. But no one resented the collapse more than John himself. Even sadness seemed inadequate to deal with the story, he wrote in a book review for
The New Republic
. “For the glorious seaboard of the China trade means to most of us now a four-way turnpike and a few brilliant old women and the main-stem girls in Portland and empty harbors and fugitive mill towns and the smell of the tourist camps and a cretin at a gas station.” The glory days might be over, but with his brother he was eager to declare that the tradition was still vigorous, if temporarily quiescent, that there was more to their native land than crazy old aunts in the attic.

Cheever next went to New York for a week, where he stayed with the Werners and saw Dorothy Farrell, now divorced. He'd been away from the city for so long that he felt like a yokel: at the Lafayette he stared at a couple who were drinking champagne and playing backgammon. Either he or Max Lieber must also have had a conference with Simon & Schuster, for the publishers came through with a four-hundred-dollar advance, and by the first of February he was back at Yaddo, revising the novel. He had the time to do the job now, but no matter how he sweated and strained he could not bring it off. His publishers demanded a kind of novel he could not or would not produce. In the end he abandoned
The Holly Tree
entirely, returned to New York, and—according to a latter-day yarn—chucked the only typescript into a trash can. No copy has ever surfaced.

By 1937 the Spanish Civil War was stimulating political passions among his friends in the city. The Refrigiers marched in protest against Franco and collected money for Loyalist Spain. “Come on, join up, Cheever,” Ref urged him. He sympathized, yet refused. He did tramp down Fifth Avenue in the May Day parade with Josie Herbst and sixty thousand others, their banners proclaiming Solidarity Forever. And he made plans, at least, to attend the Writers' Congress held in New York later that summer. But he signed no manifestos and joined no political organizations. “John sailed through the thirties without getting allied to any group whatever,” Cowley said. His heart was in it, Lila Refrigier observed, but he wouldn't make a commitment. “Security meant an awful lot to him.”