John Cheever (24 page)

His mother suffered through the decade after her husband's death with arthritis, a stroke, and a broken leg. None of these ailments received medical attention. Mrs. Cheever preferred the consolations of Christian Science, and even maintained that a reader in the church had prayed over a tumor and arrested it. At the end she was virtually immobile and alone in her duplex, except for the oppressive company of the claw-footed furniture that survived the loss of the house at 123 Winthrop. John saw his mother shortly before she died on Washington's Birthday of 1956. She spoke calmly about her approaching death. “You must not be upset when I die,” she told him. “I am quite happy to go. I've done everything I was meant to do and quite a lot that I wasn't meant to do.”

Later he was to say that she ordered a case of Scotch and drank it down to ease her passing, but that story probably had its origins in his own troubles with alcohol. At the time of his mother's death in February 1956, he told no such tale. Like her husband before her, she died at eighty-two. Gus Lobrano, who edited Cheever's early stories for
The New Yorker
and taught him how to fish, died later that same week.

Benumbed by the double loss, he set off for Yaddo to recover by working on
The Wapshot Chronicle
. For twenty years, the novel had been building up inside of him. Now it came pouring out. To make it do double duty, he sold sections of it to
The New Yorker
. “I don't like to cut it into small pieces,” he commented, but his financial situation left him no choice, and the magazine was accommodating. Four chunks of the novel ran there in advance of publication.

As his novel grew, chapter by wonderful chapter, so did Cheever's reputation. In April he got word of a thousand-dollar award in literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Malcolm Cowley, then president, signed the citation to John Cheever,

who with constantly increasing precision of style, sharpness of eye, and wry sympathy of heart, has commemorated the poetry of that most unpoetical life, the middle class life of the American metropolis and its suburbs. He knows the comedy and the pathos of his subject and he is a master of his form.

At the party for grantees and new members in May, Cheever enjoyed himself more than he thought he should have, and afterward he delivered a homily to Susan. Honors didn't matter, he told her, work was all that mattered. But it was not easy to get back to work. Soon yet another distinction descended from Saratoga, where he was elected to the board of Yaddo.

Despite these interruptions, by June 21 the novel was done and in the mail. At least it
looked
like a novel, John wrote Eleanor Clark: it cost more postage than a short story. The other piece of good news came from Hollywood, where Dore Schary of M-G-M bought film rights to “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” for forty thousand dollars. With that money in the bank, the Cheevers made firm plans to go to Italy in the autumn, a trip they had been contemplating for years. In the meantime they spent six weeks at the house of Arthur and Stella Spear in Friendship, Maine. There Cheever anxiously awaited a reaction to his typescript from Harper & Brothers and engaged in that fictionalizing exploration of other people's houses, other people's lives that was, for him, part of the charm of rented summer places.

These places usually summoned up at least the beginning of a story. Summer cottages revealed their past in the books left behind, or the absence of them, and in the paintings or other displays on the wall. At Wauwinet on Nantucket, pencil markings recorded the growth of children who had lived there for the past sixty years, and Cheever could not resist inventing tales about them. At Nantucket's Surfside, in the Yates-Shepard cottage, Cheever conjured up a divorce. She was a watercolorist and he a slim young man from New York. Why did they quarrel? When did he leave?

Perhaps because he knew the Spears too well, Friendship did not arouse such story-making instincts. The place refused to “unfold” for him. A village sixteen miles south of Rockland, the town featured the capricious weather of the Maine coast. Looking out the windows on a foggy day was like “looking at a stone.” Yet when the sun shone, it seemed like “the top of the world.” She would recognize Friendship from her Maine days with Robert Lowell, he wrote Jean Stafford: “Bostonians … sunsets … and at dusk the whole point awash in tea.” On July 1, the tea gave way to beer during a clambake on an island in the bay. Everyone drank too much waiting for the lobsters and clams to cook. To sober up, Cheever dived into the sea, often.

The Friendship sojourn was over and the Cheevers back in Scarborough before Harper's responded to his manuscript. While he waited, John composed both congratulatory letters (“Dazzling,” “Brilliant”) and discouraging ones (“Write it off to experience”) in his mind. Finally Mike Bessie called, said how much everyone liked the book, and invited Cheever down to lunch at the Vanderbilt Hotel. Still apprehensive, Cheever announced before the meal that he had two things to say. “First, if you don't really like the book I'll be glad to give you back your twenty-four hundred dollars.” At this point Bessie interrupted to reassure him. They thought
The Wapshot Chronicle
was wonderful. Fellow editor Evan Thomas thought it the best thing that had happened to Harper's fiction list for years. “We are proud,” Mike said, “to have the chance to publish it.”

“Well,” Cheever said, “the second thing I want to say is that you may think there are too many smells in the book, and I just want you to know I'm not going to take any of them out. I am a very olfactory fellow.” Bessie had in fact noticed the preponderance of smells in the novel—they are used, often, to summon up place and period—but under the circumstances said nothing at all about that. Instead he spent most of the lunch telling Cheever how much he admired him for what he'd done, and what a good book he'd written. So little editing was required that Bessie felt he hadn't done his job.

With
The Wapshot Chronicle
in production, the Cheevers began to prepare in earnest for their trip to Italy. They planned to spend a year overseas. The Scarborough house was rented to young novelist Stephen Becker and his family. Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren, already living in Rome, were enlisted to help look for a suitable apartment. John booked passage on the
Conte Biancamano
, leaving October 17 and arriving in Naples on November 1. It was hard to get any work done with the trip in prospect. All his ideas “turned to smoke at the thought of leaving.”

Cheever recorded the details of the voyage to Italy in “Atlantic Crossing,” the only one of his journals so far published. Keeping a journal was an important part of Cheever's writing regimen. The habit came down to him, he said, from the sea captains and sailors among his ancestors, men who habitually set down the weather and the events of the day. He used his journals not only to report what happened, but also to warm up for his fiction, to report anecdotes, to chastise others, to daydream about men and women he was attracted to or was having affairs with, and to entertain private thoughts.

“Atlantic Crossing” is much less inward-looking than most of Cheever's thirty-plus journals. Instead it reads like an extended diary, invigorated by the author's sensitivity to places and the people who inhabit them. The family went first class, partly because Mary, thirty-eight, was more than three months pregnant. At sea they ran into a week of bad weather. Nearly everyone got sick, including the orchestra and the assistant bartender, but Cheever did not. The ship itself seemed like “a cross between the Fall River Line and the old Ritz.” Cheever swam in the ship's pool, walked the promenade deck, took Italian lessons, read to eight-year-old Ben (who had smuggled his white mouse, Barbara Fritchie, on board), and singled out drinking companions. At night there were hat parties and flamenco dancing and horse races. Susie, thirteen, roamed the ship as if it were what she was meant for, dancing with the officers and sipping ginger ale in the lounge with other girls her age. The talk of the ship was the Belgian beauty with the three-octave laugh. Cheever watched in fascination as she charmed every male on board with her nearly infinite variety. “She is coarse, she is witty, she is a countess, she is a little girl selling matches in the snow.” He spoke also with the Southern woman in whose voice could be heard, “not unpleasantly, the notes of a hound dog.” He observed the scrawny Dartmouth professor and his boyish secretary with the scarf tossed gaily over his shoulder. “Do they? Don't they?” he wondered.

During its second week at sea the
Conte Biancamano
stopped at several ports of call. They raised Portugal on October 24, and spent a day in Lisbon. Then it was Casablanca, where their guide from Cook's seemed dreary and defeated. “Why is it,” Cheever wondered, “that with their command of language, their knowledge of history, their love of beauty and their admirable piety” all such guides seemed down at heel? There was trouble in Morocco, and the Arab quarter was closed because of the riots. Arab boys surrounded them as they waited for their bus. “They make the hoods at home seem gentle, for this is not the contest between youth and age exacerbated into brutality; this is the contest between wealth and grueling poverty, between the Protestant and the Moslem religions, this is the borderline of whole principalities of sexuality, morality, and religion. We return to the boat, our cozy home.” His sympathy was with the Arabs against the French, who were selling their houses and businesses and pulling out. Next there was Barcelona, where at an amusement park he saw a young man use the tip of a very clean handkerchief to remove a bit of soot from his very pretty girl's eye, and Cannes, cold enough for an overcoat in the early morning, with snow on the mountains already, and then Genoa, Palermo, and Naples, where they caught the train to Rome in the rain and sliced through a mountain to emerge into a sunny day and—his journal concluded—“a landscape so various, so beautiful, and impressed so on my memory by postcards, paintings, and the pictures hanging on the walls of the first classrooms I attended that there is a kind of reunion.”

The night they reached Rome,
Playhouse 90
broadcast a television version of “The Country Husband.” Cheever was not sorry to miss it. He had read the script and knew that “they had changed everything but the title.” Besides, he was trying to get acclimated abroad. For the first ten days the family stayed in a rather elegant
pensione
. Daytimes John and Mary scouted for a convenient and affordable apartment, and in the evenings the American colony in Rome—including the Warrens, Peter and Ebie Blume, and Bill Weaver—invited them around for cocktails. Then there were the splendors of the city itself: the Forum, the Vatican, the piazzas. It all seemed a blur; not since his first days in the army had time seemed so distorted. Yet by November 10, Mary had located schools for the children, and with the help of Eleanor Clark they had found an apartment.

Cheever was about to sign a lease for a flat on the outskirts of Rome when Clark stopped him. He mustn't do that, she advised. The city's bus service was terrible, and if they lived away from the center they would never see anybody. Taking the problem into her own hands, she found the Cheevers an apartment in the Palazzo Doria across the street from Mussolini's former palazzo. It cost rather more than they'd wanted to pay, but the apartment was well located and certainly grand. The Palazzo Doria was said to have a thousand rooms, and the Cheevers paid rent along with a hundred other tenants, including banks, stores, offices, one church, and an Englishwoman who daily emerged from a hole in the wall, buttoned up her Inverness cape, and bicycled away. Their apartment, on the
piano nobile
, was dominated by a huge salon and a huge master bedroom. “It was all built for giants,” Cheever decided. There was only one chair in the salon where he could sit and have his feet touch the floor. The room was drafty and magnificent, with a marble floor and a golden ceiling two stories high. It would make a splendid place for signing treaties, he thought, provided that the kings and generals were tall and did not have to go to the bathroom. And it did make a splendid place for entertaining guests—writers, editors, artists—who were visiting or living in Rome. “Well, it looks just like the Library of Congress,” Bill Weaver's mother remarked, and it was just about as easy to take care of. For a month the Cheevers were without help, and then the novelist Elizabeth Spencer sent over her maid, Iole Felici, to help out, and it was love at first sight. The next day, Iole called Elizabeth and asked if she could work for the Cheevers and send her sister to the Spencers instead. “
I Cheever hanno bisogno di me
,” she said, and need her they did. Iole, who had a managerial streak, pretty much took over running the establishment in the Palazzo Doria.

The Cheevers' landlady was the Principessa Doria, “an unmarried beauty of about thirty-five” with wens. She was the sole child of a noble father and the Scottish nursemaid he married. The Dorias had been anti-Fascist during World War II. To escape persecution they dyed their hair, stained their skin, and were sheltered by the poor in Trastevere. It was nothing at all like the stories in Scarborough. In due course he would write about it.

Throughout the fall, Italy was full of rumors of yet another war. The Russians had stepped in to put down the uprising in Hungary, and Europeans feared that the conflict would escalate. The papers ran maps showing how the Russians could conquer Western Europe in a month. “
La guerra, la guerra
,” the vendors called as Cheever walked Susie to her bus stop. Still it was difficult, with his Italian, to understand exactly what was going on. A fine linguist, Mary picked up the language rapidly. Meanwhile, John took language lessons at La Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri, but did not progress as fast as he would have liked. Eventually he gained “a fluent but incorrect” command of the language. There were certain wonderfully pithy phrases he loved, like
senz'altro
(“say no more”) and
magari
(“I'd like to if I could”).