John Cheever (55 page)

While this academic recognition was gratifying, Cheever was not at all receptive to the idea of a critical gala in celebration of his seventieth birthday on May 27—a proposal advanced by professors Collins, Frederick Karl, and, spearheading the effort, Richard Rupp. Rupp's letter to Cheever about the proposal could hardly have been more ill-timed. It arrived less than a week after Cheever got the bad news from Ray Mutter. Rather brashly, Rupp suggested that following a day-long symposium at the New York Public Library on his birthday, Cheever might receive his diploma from Thayer Academy, say a few words about his life as a writer, and adjourn with the celebrants for dancing until midnight in Bryant Park to old Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller recordings. As a point of honor, Rupp observed, the organizers would “not accept a nickel of Cheever's own money toward this enterprise.” Unimpressed, Cheever scotched the plans in two curt letters to Collins, the second signed by Max.

Cheever's mood darkened with the sudden decline and death of his favorite dog, Edgar. Edgar, a.k.a. Shithead, was in reality a spayed female whose original name was Tara. “I changed his name,” Cheever explained, “because I was an old man and thought I ought to have a male dog.” Edgar was “very accommodating,” he added, “urinates on trees and all that.” They were close companions, dog and master. For breakfast Cheever fixed English muffins and bacon for both of them. They took walks together in the afternoon, Edgar's jaws clamped around a tennis ball. On trips to Carvel's after dinner Cheever bought Flying Saucers and Lollapaloozas for Edgar and the other family dogs, Bathsheba and Maisie. So he was naturally distressed after his return from Sloan-Kettering when Edgar abandoned his accustomed sleeping place at the foot of his master's bed. After that the dog rapidly weakened, losing mobility and appetite and coughing frighteningly. Within a month, Edgar was dead of lung cancer. Cheever took it hard.

Not knowing the news, Ben called his father. “How's Edgar?” he asked.

“Edgar died,” Cheever answered. Silence.

Later that evening, Ben called again. “I'm sorry about Edgar,” he said.

“That's all right,” Cheever said. And hung up.

Preparing for the end, Cheever rarely permitted himself such incivilities. Instead he was eager to cement old friendships. He sent a conciliatory note to William Maxwell. He played backgammon regularly with Arthur Spear and Roger Willson and Bud Benjamin. Alerted to his condition, Updike called with words of encouragement and support. Bellow offered to fly to New York whenever it was convenient. His illness, Cheever pointed out in interviews, linked him with thousands of others “seeking some cure for this deadly thing.” It was neither depressing nor exhilarating, he said. It was simply “a critical part of living, or the aspiration to live.”

He also joked about his baldness, brought on by chemotherapy. “I had a full head of hair a few weeks ago,” he said. “Then I woke up one morning and there it was on the pillow.” When he showed up at the barbershop in Briarcliff, he reported, the barbers nearly died laughing. Exposed to landscapes of pain he had never imagined, he was determined to be upbeat in public. Moreover, he would no longer resign himself to the inevitable. In letter after letter he insisted that he fully intended to recover. Late in March he wrote Jim McConkey that he planned to celebrate his eightieth birthday “by walking to Croton dam.” When Susie produced his granddaughter Sarah in April, he declared that his cancer was finished. “I've licked it,” he told his daughter. He had two months left to live.

ENDINGS

Cheever's last two major works conveyed the powerfully affirmative statement of a dying man. It was as if the prospect of leaving this life confirmed his appreciation of its great gifts. Both
The Shady Hill Kidnapping
and
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
hymn the glory of the natural world and the wonder of family love. The teleplay (first shown on January 12, 1982, as the opening performance in the
American Playhouse
series) begins with a series of spats among members of the Wooster family. Father quarrels with son, mother with daughter, and finally father with mother. “We must stay together for the sake of the children,” the senior Woosters say, but this is an old family joke and it is love that keeps them together through all arguments and trials. George Grizzard, as the father, most clearly speaks for his creator in two early passages. “What a paradise,” he says, stepping outside his home on a beautiful summer morning. And later, from the heart, “How wonderful it is to have so many people I love sleeping under one roof.”

After a number of comic complications, all the Woosters are together at the end, bound by the force of love. At dusk they go to the station where the daughter is to greet the man she loves coming in on the train. In the closing voice-over, Cheever warns that “we cannot overlook the universal loneliness of our times.” Some of the people getting off the train will be met by dark houses, recriminations, and cruel mates, others by beautiful women who will serve them drinks on a tray. Yet there can be nothing more moving than a homecoming, he concludes, even if “not many of those getting off the train have achieved what one could call home.” Home was what Cheever had been seeking all his life, though other objectives distracted him along the way.

His most striking innovation in
Kidnapping
was to intersperse five fake “commercials” into his script. At well-calculated breaks in the plot, the actress Celeste Holm—Cheever had wanted Hope Lange, but she was unavailable—appears on screen to hymn the virtues of Elixircol. Elixircol, the same expensive nostrum Moses wrote advertising copy for in “The Death of Justina,” claims to restore youth, assure fame and social success, and protect against atomic waste. But the panacea will not work to ward off loneliness, and may have disastrous side effects. As Holm cattily purrs in the final commercial, the surgeon general has discovered that Elixircol causes cancer in animals, “but who knows the surgeon general or his wife?” Then she shifts from plugging the product to a message from the heart. Supposedly reading the ingredients from the bottle, she articulates sentiments very much like those in the ritual grace Cheever fashioned for himself: “We should consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with ourselves and each other and the gods, whoever they may be. Thank you, and good night.”

Cheever was proud of
Kidnapping
, and particularly pleased with Holm's insinuating style in reading the commercials. He was much less sure of
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
, which Knopf published early in March. It was not up to his best, he feared, and he was right.
Paradise
reads rather like a reprise of earlier Cheever fiction and lacks the power of a full-length novel. Yet there are many wonderful passages, even in this novella written under siege. “The tone” of it, as Allan Gurganus observed, is quintessential Cheever. Like
Kidnapping
, this book sings the joy of creation. And it goes beyond
Kidnapping
and even
Falconer
in its portrayal of the capacity of love to work miracles.

The old man Lemuel Sears, living alone in the city after the death of his wife, comes back to his former suburban home to go ice skating on Beasley's Pond. It is an invigorating experience. “Swinging down a long stretch of black ice” gives him a sense of homecoming. “At long last, at the end of a long, cold journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth.” So he is appalled to discover that commercial interests are conspiring to turn this pond into a dump. He sets out to battle against those interests, and in the end, after a complicated struggle in which he is aided by a young mother named Betsy Logan, he is victorious and the pond is restored to its pristine beauty.

At this stage the narrator delivers a generalization. “The liveliness of the landscape had been restored. It was in no way distinguished, but it could, a century earlier, have served as a background for Eden or even the fields of Eleusis if you added some naked goddesses and satyrs.” In effect,
Paradise
drifts back to mythical times, bypassing nostalgia en route. More than anything Cheever ever wrote, it rejects celebration of a historical past in favor of the present. He was as aware in 1982 as in 1962 of the depredations that nomadism and money-grubbing were causing. “That things had been better was the music, the reprise of Sears's days,” Cheever writes, but he recognizes the futility of looking to an idealized past for relief. If miracles are to be worked, they must come through love, and through a love for the creation and all those who inhabit it.

The experience of Sears exemplifies the point. He is not entirely successful in erotic love. The lovely Renee seems to care for him, but rejects him with a repeated catch phrase: “you don't understand the first thing about women.” Eduardo, the elevator man in Renee's building, then becomes his lover, but when their idyllic fishing trip is over, Eduardo goes back to his wife and that, presumably, is the end of that. The satisfactions of sex give life savor, but change nothing. Where Sears triumphs is in a wider devotion to his fellow human beings and the world they jointly inhabit. “Sears means to succeed in loving usefulness,” Cheever said of his principal character, “and actually he is quite useful. He purifies a large body of water. There really is little one can do that's comparably useful today.” In his writing, though, he was striving toward a similar usefulness, with considerable success.

On April 27, Cheever received the National Medal for Literature (and fifteen thousand dollars) in a ceremony at Carnegie Hall. William Styron was chosen to make the presentation, and the two writers foregathered backstage in advance of the ceremony. There Cheever caught a glimpse of the two pages of copy Styron had prepared. “Are you going to say all that?” he asked. “Ah, Bill, just tell them I'm short.” Then he held his hands over his ears in embarrassment while Styron, onstage, praised him as one of those “undislodgeably established in the wonderful firmament of American literature.” When he first began reading Cheever's “marvelous early” fiction—“beguiling tales of apartment dwellers and suburbanites”—Styron did not realize that he was being “lured into another, more difficult territory: the landscape of the human condition.” Now he knew better.

In prose “as sweet and limpid as Mozart,” he went on, Cheever

has told us many things about America in this century: about the untidy lives lived in tidy households, about betrayal and deception and lust and the wounds of the heart, but also about faith and the blessings of simple companionship and the abiding reality of love. Only the greatest of writers have this gift: which is to write of these familiar and homely matters with such understated but powerful insight as to cause us to pause and realize, in wonder, that we have been told secrets about ourselves that we have never known.

Hawthorne had this gift, Styron said, and Chekhov, and John Cheever, and therein lay his usefulness. The National Medal for Literature was being awarded to him, he said in conclusion, “because of our great love for all you have written, which will always be useful to us beyond all measure—and because you are a lord of the language.”

There was an audible gasp when Cheever came out onstage to receive the medal. The sprightly Cheever many in the audience had once known was now a sick old man, bald, and carrying a cane to support his limp. Yet when he spoke his voice was strong. And in his response, he made the case for the ultimate, the cosmic, usefulness of his art. “A page of good prose is where one hears the rain,” he said. “A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle. A page of good prose has the power to give grief a universality that lends it a youthful beauty. A page of good prose has the power to make us laugh.” Then, finally: “A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” Literature had rescued the damned, inspired lovers, and routed despair. Now, perhaps, it could save the world from nuclear holocaust.

Time and again in his last half dozen years, Cheever tried to express what he had been aiming for in his life's work. “Literature,” he proclaimed, “is the only continuous and coherent account of our struggle to be illustrious, a monument of aspiration, a vast pilgrimage.” “Fiction,” he insisted, “is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death. And that is what binds us together,… the bond of agreement that … keeps us from flying to pieces.” His favorite definition of fiction, he told John Hersey, came from Cocteau: “Literature is a force of memory that we have not yet understood.” The writer presents the reader “with a memory he has already possessed, but has not comprehended.” (Hersey was asked by his Yale colleague Peter Brooks, chairman of the French department, to find out where in Cocteau he'd found that quotation. “Come, John,” Cheever said when Hersey inquired, “you know I made that up.”) “Nothing in our civilization is more important than the welfare of literature,” he declared in 1979, for literature helped us make sense of an otherwise bewildering world, and without it “we would have no knowledge of the meaning of love.” Certainly writing helped him make sense of his own life. “Upon being bewildered by any turn of events …,” he said, “I've tried to put it into the language of a story—to see if I could comprehend it.” In the process, he might very well aid others in puzzling out their own confusing lives. And at last he came around to the assertion that literature might save the world.

This barrage of near pontifications suggests how strongly Cheever felt the need to justify his art. It is probably significant that he uttered almost all of these statements in interviews that took place after achieving wealth and fame. He may have felt a pang of guilt that his writing gave him so much pleasure and brought him so much success. It was not enough to do what he was born to do. As a Yankee he felt it imperative to be useful, to serve the common good.