John Cheever (22 page)

This discouraging news sent Cheever reluctantly back to work on the Field Version. Over the years he had become increasingly frustrated by his lack of progress on the novel, but now he plugged away once again. Late in 1951 he sent Random House a hundred pages of the book, and anxiously anticipated the reaction. In his imagination he tried out various editorial responses. Parts of it are fine, they might say. Or we lost the manuscript in a whorehouse, as once happened to E. A. Robinson. Or why can't you write something like
From Here to Eternity
?—then a runaway best seller.

What actually happened was less humorous and more devastating. Random House greeted the manuscript with “a limp handshake … and an all around air of profound embarrassment.” Cheever was terribly discouraged and deeply hurt. The extent of the injury was reflected in the way he eventually transformed the rejection into a more sinister exchange between himself and Linscott. He went to have lunch with Linscott and talk about the book, this story had it. At the end of the meal, the editor finally confessed that he thought the manuscript was without merit. Then he added, “You wouldn't do anything foolish like kill yourself, would you?”

The 1951 rejection did not drive Cheever to suicide, but it certainly set his career timetable back. It would be two years before he could return to yet another version of his family chronicle, and six years before
The Wapshot Chronicle
actually appeared. Meanwhile, he began looking for sources of additional income.

Television was undergoing a period of tremendous growth in the early 1950s, and Cheever was one of those hired to supply the fresh material the new medium required. Midway through 1952, Ezra Stone—forever famous for his role of Henry Aldrich—was developing a series called
Life with Father and Mother
, based on the Clarence Day, Jr., memoir and the Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse Broadway hit. As producer, Stone wanted to hire writers whose work was not totally rooted in radio or very early television situation comedy. Looking to
The New Yorker
for talent, he went after St. Clair McKelway, Patricia Collinge, and Cheever. McKelway and Collinge turned him down, but Cheever accepted the challenge. Stone teamed him with John Whedon, an experienced radio writer and “a quiet man with a twinkle,” like Cheever himself. The two got on well, came up with a couple of premises, got the go-ahead on one of them, and wrote a script. Each was paid about three thousand dollars, Stone recalls.

By November 1952, prospects for
Life with Father and Mother
looked bright. A CBS television release announced that Dennis King would star in the weekly half-hour dramatic series, scheduled to begin “shortly after the first of the year,” and Martha Scott was hired to play Mother to King's Father. Difficulties then began to emerge. According to Cheever's 1982 account, he and Whedon attended an eight-person conference on their script where they “listened to captious observations on the fall of a line, the possibility of cretinous misunderstanding, and a good deal of personal reminiscence.” At the end of an hour the writers quit in disgust, slamming the door as they left. Actually, Stone remembers, the problem was not with the script: “that was in the bank.” Instead the show foundered because of rather overzealous supervision from Lindsay and Crouse and, especially, from Clarence Day's widow. In any event,
Life with Father and Mother
became
Life with Father
, the whole project was moved from New York to Hollywood, Fletcher Markle took over for Stone, and different writers were hired. The show, a mild television success, ran for a couple of years.

Despite the contrary indications of the marketplace, Cheever eventually located a publisher for the book of stories Random House had turned down. It took him over a year, and the publisher turned out to be a firm better known for printing dictionaries than fiction. In February 1953, Funk & Wagnalls brought out
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories
. Artistically the stories in this volume represented a giant leap forward over those in
The Way Some People Live
, but the collection was not a success, either financially or critically. A few of the reviews were very bad, and in each of them he was tarred with the
New Yorker
brush. Book reviewers are often intellectuals, and intellectuals have consistently tended to undervalue writers identified with the magazine. It took Richard Stern a long time to discover how good Cheever was, he admits, since he “was locked in the intellectual's perception of
The New Yorker
as the home of formula fiction.” This prejudice was so strong that it kept Norman Mailer from reading Cheever's stories until after Cheever died in 1982. When he did, Mailer found “gem after gem” and felt “a great sense of woe. Why didn't I know that man?”

The bias against
New Yorker
fiction derived from the belief that it was a fiction of manners, rather too comfortable and confident in its social and moral assumptions. The stories that appeared there, according to one observer, “viewed the worst excesses of modern civilization with distaste and sometimes with alarm, but never with despair. For, no matter how black the present, how fraught with peril the future or how quaint the past, the fiction and poetry of
The New Yorker
walked forward hand in hand with the advertisements … toward the vague, but discernible horizon, the glow of which indicated at least the possibility of The Good Life somewhere up there among the Delectable Mountains and just beyond the reach of the clean fingernails of the Ideal Reader.” The magazine's fiction seemed, to such jaundiced eyes as these, to be almost exclusively concerned with the activities of a particular stratum of urban society and to present that milieu in a realistic, hard-edged prose that was content to reveal a facet of character and then fade away. The stories were all cut from the same cloth, people complained. “Nothing happened” in
New Yorker
stories, they said.

In rebuttal, William Maxwell argues that there has never been a typical
New Yorker
story or “a
New Yorker
writer.” In what sense, he points out, can contributors as different as Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw, Edward Newhouse, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Daniel Fuchs, Cheever, Maxwell himself, and more recently Philip Roth, John Updike, and Donald Barthelme be transmogrified into one stereotypical
New Yorker
writer? Moreover, even if one could outline a conventional realistic
New Yorker
story, it was obvious that Cheever's fiction, with the emphasis on fantasy and myth that grew stronger throughout his career, did not fit that mold. But Cheever
was
quintessentially a
New Yorker
writer in the sense that he was a writer people associated with the magazine.

Discussions of the
New Yorker
connection in reviews of
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories
ranged from the mildly critical to the vituperative. His characters, one reviewer objected, were all “the middle-class, upper middle-brow, white collar people who subscribe to
The New Yorker
.” Arthur Mizener suspected that the stories were written to conform to a preselected moral of the sort
The New Yorker
liked, and damned the results with faint praise. The stories were clever, ingenious, neat, refined, well made, skillfully worked out. He did not like them. William Dubois's daily
New York Times
review cut even sharper. “The melancholy fact remains that a little Cheever goes a long way. Like all special formulas his is most effective when taken in small doses—preferably in single installments with plenty of [cartoonists] Addams and Arno in between.” Dubois thought the stories too narrow in social setting, almost all of them concentrated on the upper-middle-class East Side of New York. They were also too narrow in outlook, full of unhappy characters beset by nerves and the need for something “beyond the concrete coffin they inhabit” yet lacking the willpower to escape.

The people were expertly presented, DuBois conceded, a point that James Kelly concentrated on in the Sunday
New York Times Book Review:
“No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever. He can reveal New Yorkers to themselves or explain them, just as persuasively, to the reader in Steubenville, Ohio.” Yet the stories, almost all of them written before the move to Westchester, focused on a depressing urban world that sometimes resembled hell. Cheever was chided, in reviews and correspondence, for the pessimism of his outlook. (It did no good, he commented, for self-appointed intellectuals to tell him to “cheerup, cheerup.”) Only Morris Freedman, in
Commentary
, detected the light of hope that Cheever had left shining in these stories. “At first reading,” Freedman commented, “one comes away with a sense that Cheever's characters are sunk in a mire of unrelieved hopelessness.… But the volume as a whole reveals the secret of coping with the eternal imminence of disaster which is living.” The secret as always in Cheever's fiction was love, and most often love within the family, as in such stories as “The Pot of Gold,” “The Cure,” and “Goodbye, My Brother.” In “Clancy in the Tower of Babel,” Cheever also invested homosexual love with a saving grace.

In effect, Cheever laid ten years of his best work on the line in
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories
and was largely rebuked for the effort. (The reviews in Great Britain, where Victor Gollancz published the book, were much better.) It is tempting in retrospect to deprecate the blindness of most reviewers to a book that contained two of the century's best short stories—“The Enormous Radio” itself and the superb “Goodbye, My Brother”—and half a dozen other very good ones. Similar cases of shortsightedness abound in literary history, as for example Virginia Woolf's disparagement of early Hemingway and Clifton Fadiman's dismissal of early Faulkner. The effect of the reaction was to drive Cheever yet again back to his unwritten novel. The novel form seemed “bankrupt,” he wrote Cowley in mid-1953, but it was apparently the only course open to him. Cowley was not so sure. Cheever could write a play, he suggested in reply, or even a nonfiction book. And if he did write a novel, it did not have to be along conventional lines. He could write a longer fiction book that began with one of his family stories like “Goodbye, My Brother” and worked backward until the characters were fully rounded out. Or he could weave several stories together. Apparently encouraged, Cheever began to work—between stories, hesitantly—on his narrative of the Wapshot family.

However discouraged Cheever may have been by the response of publishers and critics to his work, he was sustained by the knowledge that he was growing in his craft. It is arguable that he wrote the best stories of his life during the half-decade after moving to Westchester. Preeminent among these was “Goodbye, My Brother,” the first story he wrote after leaving New York City. As he promised the Guggenheims, he used his grant for longer stories, stories in which he would have the time to explore the intricacies of individual personality and family conflicts.

“Goodbye, My Brother” covers enough ground for a novel in brief. It deals with a subject—the dynamics of family life—and takes place in a setting—a summer home on the Atlantic—that Cheever was especially skillful at bringing to life. An almost painterly light falls over Laud's Head, the summer house where the Pommeroy family has assembled for a reunion. Daily life is splendidly evoked: the swimming, the cocktail hour, the backgammon games after dinner. Against this surface a deeper psychological story unfolds. The trouble begins with the much-disliked Lawrence, or Tifty, one of four Pommeroy siblings assembled, midway through life, for the reunion. The depressing Tifty, who seems to have inherited the dark side of the family's Puritan heritage, apparently does his best to ruin everyone else's vacation. He predicts that the house will fall into the sea within five years. He tells the cook she ought to join a union and demand higher wages. He disapproves of his mother's drinking and his sister's promiscuity and his brothers' gambling. Finally his carping becomes so unbearable that the narrator, one of his brothers, strikes him from behind, knocks him down, and bloodies his head. Tifty then leaves, and the story ends as the narrator's wife and sister come out of the ocean “naked and unshy,” their uncovered heads “black and gold” in the water.

“Goodbye, My Brother” obviously represents an attempt at exorcising the dark brother. What is less clear is that the brother lies both within and without, just as Cheever had a brother he simultaneously loved and hated and was himself inhabited by both the demon of depression and the angel of joy. The clue is that Tifty does and says very little to deserve the narrator's judgment that he's a “gloomy son of a bitch.” Almost all of his “sad frame of mind” is attributed to him by the supposedly cheerful narrator. But it is easy to miss this point, as most readers have done. In first draft, “Goodbye, My Brother” was not the story of two brothers at all. There was only the narrator; Lawrence did not exist. And even in the final version the narrator supplies most of Lawrence's opinions. In a widely quoted passage at the end of the story the narrator asks, “Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?” These questions are directed not at any second party, but at a portion of himself—and the narrator, almost surely, spoke for the author.

The close and curious relationship between Cheever and his real brother was complicated when, in 1952, Fred and Iris Cheever and their four children moved to Briarcliff Manor, the town adjoining Scarborough, and the brothers became neighbors. As advertising manager of the Pepperell Manufacturing Company, Fred had been working out of New York and weekending at his home in the Boston suburbs for several years. When he decided to move the family to Westchester, it was natural that he should have found a place near that of his younger brother. John was not pleased, however. He and Mary dutifully entertained Fred and Iris, but John did not want them as intimate members of their social circle. The brothers' wives did not get along at all. Besides, by the 1950s Fred had started the descent to the depths of alcoholism John would later undergo. On one occasion, John arranged a mixed-doubles badminton game at a local gym involving Eddie Newhouse, an accomplished club player, and Fred Cheever, who played only a backyard game. Newhouse and his partner won easily, and then Eddie swatted the bird back and forth with Fred. “Quit clowning around,” yelled John from the sidelines. “Why don't you two play a set?” But eight or ten people were watching, Newhouse knew he would have trouble losing a point—much less a game—to Fred Cheever, and he would have none of it. John seemed to want his brother badly beaten, Newhouse thought.