John Cheever (42 page)

“I wonder where a little shit like you gets the balls to come in here,” he said.

“I don't think anyone will hurt me, Lang,” Cheever answered.

As time went on, Lang and Cheever discovered that they had a lot to teach each other, and not only about writing. Lang had spent seventeen of his thirty-one years behind bars, and knew very little about how to act on the outside. But he could, and did, tell Cheever what it was like on the inside. As a visitor to the prison, Cheever was never in a cellblock or the mess hall or the shops. To learn more about Sing Sing, he sat Don down and had him go over the daily routine and tell him stories about the brutality of the place. There was a goon squad to deal with troublemakers, for example. They'd isolate the offender in a cell, and let four or five other guys in to “put a beating” on him. “Dead,” the certificate would read, “by natural causes.”

Lang told him too about the sadistic “asshole” guard named Tiny and the stray cats that hung around the mess hall, about the homosexuality and the fights. Cheever stored the anecdotes away, later to emerge in
Falconer
, his 1977 novel set in a prison very like Sing Sing.

Lang and Cheever became close friends after Lang's release from Sing Sing in December 1971. When Lang got out, Cheever and William Campbell were there to drive him to the halfway house in Poughkeepsie. Two weeks later he was back in Ossining, working for Gray Smith's Street Theater and installed as a boarder in the home of John and Mary Dirks. “This little
pale
black Irish type showed up” on her doorstep, Mary remembers, and stayed for almost a year. Lang would look no one in the eye and had no concept of social obligation, yet there was a natural sweetness in him, he was handy around the house, and he was obviously intelligent. He took the Dirkses to see
The French Connection
, elaborating on the fine points of that world of cops and robbers, drugs and pimps. They gave him for the first time a patterned and comfortable life—he had never seen a fire in a fireplace before—and tried to show him how people who built fires in fireplaces talked and acted and used their knives and forks. At one cocktail party, Lang remembers, he and Cheever were “doing some bullshit” when someone walked up and asked, with real wonderment, “Where did you two meet, anyway?” “Oh,” Cheever answered, enjoying it, “in Sing Sing.”

Cheever took a protective attitude toward Lang, most of the time. When Lang got drunk and knocked out all his teeth falling down a flight of concrete steps, Cheever helped him pay for the dentures. When a car dealer sold Lang a lemon, Cheever went down to the dealer and bitched. When Lang got mixed up in a barroom brawl, Cheever bailed him out of jail. “I would like,” he told Lang afterward, “not to do this again.”

Cheever made him feel he might do something with his life, Lang said. He encouraged his writing, and recommended his satirical “The Pit-Wig Papers” to Candida Donadio. With the Street Theater Lang demonstrated his talents at carpentry and electricity. He also handled the logistics for a touring company of
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
that performed—among other places—within the walls of Sing Sing. Then he struck out on his own doing odd jobs for contractors and working occasionally for Cheever and Art Spear. One spring day, he cut Fred Cheever's hair, using some barbering skills he'd picked up in prison. One summer, Fred worked happily with Lang and his crew of (mostly) ex-cons.

Above all it was Cheever's willingness to accept Lang, despite his criminal record, that solidified their relationship. As a mentor he had mixed results. He could not cure Lang of his habit of showing up without calling first. “You can't do that,” he'd say. “You're interrupting my work.” “What work?” Lang would ask. “I don't see no hammer, no paintbrush.” And he could not persuade Lang to embark on a reading program he'd devised. The best teaching method, Cheever found, was that of example. He took Lang to a restaurant in Croton for soft-shelled crabs; after he ate the whole thing himself, Lang reluctantly did the same. “He taught me a lot by association,” Lang says. “He didn't tell me, but showed me.”

They both enjoyed the outdoor life—hiking through the woods, swimming, ice skating. They made a six-pool journey one day, à la “The Swimmer.” Though Lang was, in Cheever's phrase, “a comely man,” he was not welcomed at every pool. Iole had her reservations about him, too. She was fixing lunch when Lang was working around the house, and asked Mary Cheever, in Italian, if she was supposed to feed
il ladro
too. Lang had picked up enough street Italian to know that
il ladro
meant thief. Occasionally Cheever took Lang into New York City for dinner, where such questions were not asked. Candida Donadio went out with them one night, where it seemed clear to her that Cheever was smitten by Lang.

Whenever they'd meet, he gave Lang a hug. “It took time to get used to that,” Don remembers, but he took it as an indication of Cheever's need for physical affection. He seemed to be terribly lonely. “Do you have any buddies?” Lang asked him. “Arthur Spear's a buddy of mine,” Cheever replied. “You mean, you two old guys are
buddies
?” Lang asked incredulously. Cheever didn't seem to have any “tight friends,” Lang thought. “I don't know who would be a tight friend except for me.”

Once Lang really got to know Cheever, there didn't seem to be any facade to him at all. Lang refused to be impressed by anything he said or did, and with him Cheever shucked off the restraints of suburban middle-class mores. If he wanted to dive into a pond, he did. If he wanted to drink at the Orchid Lounge, a black bar in downtown Ossining, he did that too, matching Lang's beers with martinis and talking away the afternoon. There was a real sympathy between them. “We didn't have to say anything,” Lang recalls. “He'd just read it if I was up or down.” Cheever felt an affinity for the ex-convict, as for all those who dared to subvert the expectations of organized society. In any dispute between the cons and the guards at Sing Sing, he was all for the cons.

Over a period of time, his weekly visits to Sing Sing became burdensome. In the summer of 1972, when the Boyers moved away from Westchester, they donated some of their books to the prison library, including a set of the Harvard Classics. Cheever delivered the boxes, and had to wait in the hot room for what seemed an eternity while the guards inspected each book, page by page, for possible subversive material. They found two old Christmas cards. In the hot weather the prison seemed “cruel and dangerous.” During the 1972–73 year he acquired a couple of new students with talent, but their stories were depressingly similar. More and more he was troubled by “the blasphemy of men building, stone by stone, hells for other men.” Going to Sing Sing was like “participating in an obscenity.” He stuck it out, though, until the spring of 1973.

With so little fiction issuing from his typewriter, the free-spending side of Cheever gave way to the parsimonious one. When Susie and Ben came to him for loans, they were turned down. In the spring of 1972, he was ready to resign from the Century Club as a luxury he could ill afford. His depression extended beyond the realm of finances. It was as if he were ready to drop out entirely. At a Yaddo board meeting he spoke of his own career as finished. It was time, he said, for younger people to take over.

Privately, he rather resented the competition, particularly from the school of fabulists—John Hawkes, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon—whose reputations were flourishing in academic circles. Barthelme was “taking his space” in
The New Yorker
, he feared. It was unfair to Barthelme as a young writer, he told Morris Lurie, to praise him so highly when he had so far written so little. As for Barth, he used to tell the story of a literary dinner where he, Barth, and Jean Stafford were all in attendance. Stafford drew him aside and remarked, “John, your reputation in American literature is very shaky. God knows what will happen to it, but if you put a knife in Barth's back, you will be immortal.”

Television offered yet another threat to his occupation. “Television debases literature,” he said in a May 1972 talk at son Fred's Hackley School. TV shows demanded little or nothing of their viewers: they were designed to be forgotten the next morning, if not sooner. “I'd hate to write a book and think I was competing for the attention of a man who was reading and watching football at the same time.” Literature was one of the glories of mankind, but this new medium put it in peril and so threatened his whole reason for existence. Only occasionally was he reassured, as by a review of Updike's that made him feel writing fiction was more important than “ironing shirts in a Chinese laundry.”

Fred Exley, teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, inveigled Cheever into coming to Iowa City for a reading in the fall of 1972. Cheever arrived well in advance of the scheduled reading, and for three days he and Exley drank and talked together. John spoke bitterly of the state of his marriage, coughed his way through his reading of “The Death of Justina,” and wowed Exley's writing class with some improbable anecdotes. He was more or less enchanted by the twenty-year-old coed Exley had fallen in love with. He was impressed by the interest in writers and writing around the university. People kept greeting Exley on the street in hopes, as he explained, of getting introduced to Cheever. Jack Leggett, director of the writing program, had a dinner for Cheever and proposed that he might want to spend a semester teaching there. Leggett hardly expected an affirmative answer, but he got one. Cheever signed on for the fall 1973 semester. His writing was not going well in Ossining. He hoped that a change of rivers—from the Hudson to the Iowa—would help. In addition, Fred was leaving for boarding school at Andover in September, and it had been Fred's presence at home, more than anything else, that kept his parents from separating during the early 1970s.

In her poem “Gorgon,” Mary Cheever in effect declared her independence while summoning up the very powerful, at least slightly malevolent woman whose image, she believed, was pervasive in her husband's thoughts as in his fiction. He identified this woman (probably derived from his mother) with Mary herself, and nothing she could do would displace the image.

I have sometimes complained, husband,

that as you feinted, shadowboxed and blindly

jived to that misty monolithic woman in your mind

I have been battered, drowned under your blows.

Not knives, not brassknuckles, not poison or needles,

no weapons, no holds between you two

were foul or out of bounds.

Now suddenly in the dawnlight

lying across our bed while you fuss

and nicker at my breast

I can feel myself growing.

I have become immense.

The shadows curve black from my body,

which is glowing moonwhite.

I am beautiful. God, how beautiful!

Dear, if you should decide to take

the gold rings out of my ears,

you will need a ladder.

I would help you if I could,

but my arms have turned to stone.

Cheever was outraged by the poem, but had it practically by heart.

If Mary was growing stronger, her husband manifestly was not. His heartbeat was wildly irregular, and he was often short of breath. Dr. Mutter put him on Xylocaine to numb the abnormal heart rhythm and on Seconal to sleep, but the symptoms worsened. In May 1973, Cheever collapsed and was taken to Phelps Memorial Hospital in nearby Tarrytown. A heart attack struck him down, Cheever always said, but that was not entirely accurate. He was afflicted by dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease (according to Dr. Robert A. Johnson, who treated Cheever in Boston during the spring of 1975) that is sometimes caused by alcoholism and is often fatal. In cardiomyopathy the left ventricle stops ejecting blood, the heart dilates under the consequent pressure, and the lungs fill with fluid. What hospitalized Cheever, technically, was not a heart attack—EKGs showed no evidence of such an attack—but a pulmonary edema brought on by drink.

In the hospital, deprived of liquor, he began to hallucinate. For three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—he was convinced that he was being held in a Russian prison camp, and tried frantically to get free. He detached the oxygen tubes and ripped out his IV. Family and friends took turns at bedside, holding him down. When he was alone, nurses strapped him to the bed and straitjacketed him. In the delirium of alcoholic withdrawal, he refused to acknowledge reason. Susan brought him a copy of a favorable review of
The World of Apples
, his collection of stories that had just been published, but Cheever thought it was a confession for him to sign and flung it on the floor. Finally, though, he was ready to be persuaded that he was in a Westchester County hospital and not a Soviet prison camp, especially after Fred produced a sign printed in English. “Oxygen—No Smoking” it read.

In a letter to Gottlieb, he made light of his illness, as a consequence of which “wealthy and beautiful divorcées” brought him gifts. Still, the experience obviously scared him. Both Dr. Mutter and Dr. Frank Jewett, a psychiatrist, assured him that if he started to drink again, he would kill himself. In consultation with Jewett, he compared the euphoria of alcohol to that of writing something you really like. He resisted the implications of the observation: that if he wasn't writing anything he much liked, he might turn to alcohol as a substitute. He soon abandoned therapy with Jewett, and refused to join Alcoholics Anonymous. But he was frightened enough to quit drinking, temporarily. He felt delivered from the grave. If it was possible to start a new life at sixty-one, that's what he intended to do. “Alcohol seems no problem,” he cheerfully announced early in June. Two months later he admitted to taking three drinks a day.

On May 16, as Cheever lay bound to his bed fancying himself in a Soviet prison camp, five men in New York nominated him for elevation from the National Institute to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Or, rather, they renominated him, since his name was first proposed in 1971 by Robert Penn Warren, Malcolm Cowley, Peter Blume, John Hersey, and Mark Van Doren. The sponsors were the same two years later, except that Van Doren was replaced by Glenway Wescott. “In a series of stories unsurpassed in his generation and in his excellent novels,” Warren wrote in the nominating petition, “John Cheever has reported faithfully a segment of modern America and at the same time has created a world that embodies his personal vision.” Not until November did Cheever get word that he had been elected.