John Cheever (47 page)

Those who knew him before and after he quit drinking detected a substantial change in his attitude. As his writing in the late 1960s turned dark, he became even darker in person. There was an element of viciousness in what he said of others, including family and friends. This changed when he stopped drinking. Still intolerant of slowness and stupidity in others, he nonetheless acquired a new generosity of spirit. He learned from AA, with its membership drawn from all levels of income and education, how vastly different people could help one another. Characteristically, he would not wash dishes after AA meetings, but he would turn out at four in the morning to talk with someone afraid of backsliding. He also went out of his way to help young friends in trouble with alcohol, playing the role of a surrogate parent who had been through it all and who cared about them. “I have too much faith in you and your promise to let you do this to yourself,” he told David Lange, Hope's brother. “You're an alcoholic like me,” he told young Dudley Schoales. “I'm going to take you to Phelps and that's going to be it.”

By such means, Cheever coaxed several of his acquaintances into Smithers. The therapy did not always work. Truman Capote, for example, appealed to Cheever for help in a series of drunken telephone calls. “Truman, the world will lose a great writer if you lose yourself,” John said in some exaggeration. “Let me book you into Smithers.” In due course this was arranged. Capote completed the program at Smithers. Soon thereafter he appeared on the Johnny Carson show, drunk, to sing the praises of his treatment.

Travel provided another way for Cheever to work off his restored supply of energy. He resumed frequent visits to Yaddo, working on
Falconer
there—for instance—both in the summer of 1975 and in the winter of 1976. He took trips whenever he had completed “a lump” of the novel: to Boston early in December 1975, to Stanford with son Fred late in January 1976. During the subsequent half-decade, he journeyed to Romania, Bulgaria (twice), Russia, the Netherlands, Venezuela. He became much sought after on the visiting writer circuit, reading his stories at Harvard and Bennington and Cornell, Syracuse and Oswego and Bradford, Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto, Stanford and Southern Methodist and Utah. As his fame grew, so did the local demands on his time from libraries, colleges, and civic and cultural associations. In addition, there was a substantial volume of correspondence that he answered himself, and promptly. So he passed many hours of his days.

Coming back to Yaddo, Cheever told Nora Sayre in a voice bursting with pleasure, was like “coming home again.” It was still the one “positively ideal” place to work through the long mornings. In the afternoons he bicycled to Schuylersville and back, or cross-country skied the six-mile run through the golf course. At dinner he was in his element, engaging, convivial, full of anecdotes and good humor. Afterward he lost at Ping-Pong, shone at charades, or went into town to nurse his ginger ale and watch the young writers drink. Allan Gurganus was in residence in September of 1975, and so was the poet Philip Schultz. Cheever admired Schultz's poetry and soon was throwing the football back and forth with him in his fathers-playing-catch-with-sons ritual. It meant a great deal to Schultz to be befriended by so well established a writer as Cheever. At the time he was virtually broke, and was planning to move from Cambridge to New York with no job in prospect. Cheever assured him that better days lay ahead, and rejoiced with him when that turned out to be true. He enjoyed taking an interest in the careers of writers whose work he liked, whether he knew them or not. One of the pleasures of growing old, as he remarked, was that sometimes you could call attention to young people's work.

After Thanksgiving, Cheever went to Boston to read for the
Harvard Advocate
. To begin with he was apprehensive about revisiting what he thought of as “a sinister, provincial and decadent” part of the world, but he had something to prove. “I must repair my farewell scenes there,” he wrote. In Cambridge he had dinner with Rob Cowley before the reading, and afterward there was a reunion with Jim Valhouli and Phil Schultz. The cabdriver, recognizing Cheever, refused to collect his fare. “Hot shit,” the cabbie said. “
Apples, Bullet Park
, the Wapshots.” Oddly, another cabdriver in New York later surfaced as one of Cheever's greatest fans. Sometimes it seemed as if he were “driving straight through a Cheever story” in his taxi, New York cabbie Patrick Coyne thought. The next day, Schultz got word of a four-thousand-dollar grant from the Council for the Arts, and to celebrate Cheever took him to lunch at Locke-Ober's. He liked watching Schultz—and others—drink, so long as there was no hint of alcoholism in the air.

The glow of redemption was still on him when Cheever accompanied his son Fred on a week's visit to Stanford in January. Fred looked over the university he hoped to attend—and ended up attending—while his father performed his “cultural soft-shoe” (a classroom visit and evening reading) for the English department. The two of them arrived in identical preppy dress—tweed sport coats, button-down shirts with crew-neck sweaters, gray slacks, brown penny loafers. In these clothes, with his face “reddened and polished, as if by a brisk wind,” Cheever looked at least ten years younger than his sixty-three years. While Fred decamped at once to stay with friends from Andover, John was put up in the institutionally drab guest room of Florence Moore (Flo Mo) House. Instructor Dana Gioia, the poet-in-the-making who was asked to look after Cheever during his visit, was struck by the older man's unusual air of physical calm. His conversation was remarkable for its sensitivity and sudden surprising turns of phrase, but there was nothing of the performance about it. He listened intently to the Flo Mo undergraduates who were his companions at meals, and they were eager to sit at his table. “He gave off,” Gioia wrote, “that almost visible aura of joy and serenity that people have just after they have experienced a genuine religious conversion or suddenly recovered from a long life-threatening illness.” It was the joy of resurrection from alcohol, resurrection from the dead.

For most of the week, Cheever had little to do. He lingered over meals in the Flo Mo cafeteria, spent long hours smoking in the huge Naugahyde chairs of the lounge, and went on meandering walks and drives with Gioia. The undergraduates, Gioia discovered, knew nothing of his writing, so he rounded up some remaindered copies of
The World of Apples
and distributed them to freshmen. Cheever's reputation was at its nadir. The younger generation was reading his contemporaries, sometimes as class assignments, while his work was virtually forgotten.

The literary lion at Stanford that week, however, was not John Cheever but Saul Bellow. Bellow's wife, a mathematician, was being recruited for a position in the math department, and the administration and English department were courting her husband as well. Bellow's star was in the ascendant.
Mr. Sammler's Planet
, his last novel, had won the National Book Award. Before the year was out,
Humboldt's Gift
, his widely praised new novel, was to win the Pulitzer Prize, and he himself would receive the Nobel Prize. His visit to campus was as overscheduled as Cheever's was the opposite, but John betrayed no trace of resentment at the greater attention paid his co-artist and friend. There was warmth between them, and mutual admiration. Both understood, in Cheever's oft-repeated phrase, that “literature is not a competitive sport.”

So Bellow read one night and Cheever the next, in as impressive a bit of campus programming as one could wish. Both were small, graceful men, but Cheever projected a relaxed amiability that contrasted with Bellow's dignified reserve. He was also capable of making fun of himself. Before leaving Stanford, Cheever was persuaded to tape an interview for the literary magazine. He always sounded funny on such tapes, he said. Even on telephone recording machines, his voice came out an octave lower, with a pronounced English accent. One day he'd phoned Sara Spencer and left a message on her machine: “I'm coming swimming in about twenty minutes.” When he arrived, Sara played the recording back to him. “Who's that old fruit with the English accent?” Cheever asked, and dived into the pool.

However curious the accent—and when combined with his characteristic mumble it could render his speech extremely difficult to follow—Cheever's greatest charm lay in his command of language. He was hardly prepossessing physically. Trimly built with nut-brown hair, he looked at sixty-four, John Hersey reported, rather like a thirty-four-year-old who had been to “a hilarious but awfully late party the night before.” At Iowa he was mistaken for a janitor in the basement of the English and Philosophy Building, at Knopf for a deliveryman, at the Ossining public library for an employee of Mr. Cheever come to Xerox portions of the
Falconer
typescript. Yet in good spirits and good company, there was a joyous quality about him that communicated itself in brilliant speech and infectious laughter. At such times, Mary said, people were crazy about him.

One of the problems confronting him after he solved the worst problem of all was who to be crazy about. As a side effect of his liberation from drink, he reacquired a powerful sex drive and continued to seek outlets for it outside his marriage. After the trip to Stanford, for instance, he put Fred on a plane to Andover and went down to Los Angeles to see Hope Lange. It was a very successful reunion. Hope looked marvelous. As soon as they sat down to dinner in a restaurant, Cheever reported, both of them took off their shoes. John had just read
Humboldt's Gift
, in which Charles Citrine and the gorgeous Renata make surreptitious love to each other under cover of a tablecloth. “My,” the hostess said, “you two surely enjoy your food.” Much of Hope's appeal for him derived from her position as Hollywood and Broadway and television star, as the woman Norton Simon sent his jet to fetch across the continent to his birthday party. Proud of her and proud of their affair, he took her to meet John and Harriett Weaver in Hollywood, Bob Gottlieb in New York. He also tried to persuade her to travel with him to Romania and to Venezuela, but she turned him down. He was married, they could both be recognized, and she did not intend to slink around corners incognito. And over an extended period marked by long separations, the passion in the affair dwindled away.

Hope was not the answer, then, and it became increasingly clear that no woman could be. Soon after the drinking stopped, Cheever became more actively homosexual. What he yearned for was a loving manly relationship that did not demand too much of either party. In this way he could avoid accommodating, say, a particular woman's taste for “scalding bathwater and pink wallpaper.” At the same time he was repelled by displays of the gay subculture. There
they
were mincing along in the Arcadian shopping center: the old one with his dyed hair, the youth in all his beauty. He was not like that at all, and could never be, Cheever thought. He had an occupation, he supported his family, he loved his wife and children, and nothing that he might do in the company of another man—he insisted—could diminish that.

Privately he worried that homosexuality might be only a ruinous form of self-love. When he was attracted to a young man, wasn't it a long-ago image of himself, naked on the beach at Quincy, that called out to him? And he was unable, like most men of his generation, to confess his inclinations. What would his sons think? What would his friends think? What effect would it have on his reputation? He worked out the answer in his journals. “Have you heard? Old Cheever, crowding seventy, has gone Gay.… Old Cheever has run off to Bessarabia with a hairy youth half his age.” Unable to face such talk, he stayed in the closet and made his confessions in the fiction, where most readers chose to ignore them.

In February 1976, Cheever was back at Yaddo, jamming away on
Falconer
. He was called home early in March to mind the dogs while Mary and Fred went to Boston to reenact history's first telephone call. Susan Grosvenor, the great-great-granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, telephoned Federico Cheever, great-great-grandson of Thomas Watson, from across the hall at MIT. “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you,” Susan said, just as her great-great-grandfather had a century earlier. “I heard every word you said,” Fred replied, just as his great-great-grandfather had one hundred years before. No interruption could slow
Falconer
for long. The novel came pouring out of him as if it had a volition of its own. On Good Friday, Cheever wrote the last word (“Rejoice”) and went to church to offer a prayer of thanks.

Providence seemed to be in his corner, and with the novel at the typist Cheever turned happily to other matters. He began making plans for a midsummer trip to Romania under the sponsorship of
Travel & Leisure
magazine. He wrote Cowley proposing to nominate John Updike to the American Academy. At the academy ceremonial in May, Erica Jong kissed him and a man said that meeting Cheever made him feel like Cinderella—tomorrow the ball would be over and he'd have to go back to work.

His pleasure in these encounters—his joy in the regular round of daily life—was soon diminished by the shadow of death. Sara Spencer suffered a heart attack in April and spent months in the hospital. Cheever wrote her with fragments of neighborhood gossip and reports on her pool and garden. Finding her pool busy with relatives one day, he went to the Helprins for a swim and had a long talk with their son Mark, who was soon to become a novelist himself. The greatest of virtues, he told Sara, was to love one's neighbor, especially since she was that neighbor. She eventually recovered, but early in June the drumbeat of mortality sounded twice more.

The counterfeit phone call came at 3:30
A.M.
on June 1. “This is the CBC,” the voice said. “John Updike has been involved in a fatal automobile accident, and we were wondering if you had any comment.” Cheever began to sob. “Oh,” the voice said, “I didn't know it was personal.” “He was a colleague,” Cheever explained. The call was a hoax perpetrated by a rival novelist with a sinister sense of humor. But Cheever did not know that, and neither did Updike's former wife, Mary, who received a similar phone call a few minutes earlier. It was midmorning before Updike was located, in the best of health.