John Cheever (32 page)

In the Cheevers' own very literary family, children and adults alike sometimes read aloud after dinner. As a regular weekly ritual, the clan foregathered in the living room at five o'clock on Sunday afternoons to recite poems they had memorized during the previous week. Ben, at seven, was reciting Robert Frost. Despite such pleasant family entertainments, an undercurrent of sarcasm ran beneath the dinner-table conversation. And for a time at least, John was dissatisfied with the progress of his two older children.

Susie, in adolescent rebellion, was unhappy at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. Her father used to give her books to read, books not in the regular school curriculum—Stendhal, Flaubert, Dumas, Dickens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bellow's
Augie March
—and then keep her up late at night talking about them. The next day in English class, almost inevitably, she would argue with her English teacher. Occasionally Cheever tried to play the stern disciplinarian. When Susie brought home news that she was on probation, he was upset. When she announced that she didn't care, he was furious. Considering her father's hopes for her as a potential debutante, it did not help that she rarely had dates. When a boy did come to the door, her father welcomed him effusively and told him to keep her out as late as they wanted. She felt as if he were selling off the homely daughter.

In reaction, Susie sought ways to declare her independence. She persuaded her disappointed parents to remove her from the Masters School and send her to the somewhat less social Woodstock Country School in Vermont, where she improved both grades and attitude enough to be admitted to Pembroke. In college she took up the classical guitar and started wearing serapes. Summers she worked as a maid at the inn in Wauwinet, as a clerk at Macy's, and as a teacher of the illiterate poor in Alabama. Charles Shapiro from Briarcliff College, leader of the group that went to Alabama, remembers Susie as extremely intelligent and biting in her wit.

Like his parents before him, Cheever was sensitive to the least hint of unmanliness in his sons. At Scarborough, Ben had one friend with effeminate manners. “My father hated him,” he recalls. “He'd much have preferred my hanging around with the kids who broke into candy machines.” In Ossining, John was annoyed by Ben's high early-adolescent voice. “Speak like a man,” he used to command him. Once when Ben was sweeping the floor he angrily snatched the broom away. Sweeping was woman's work. Man's work was outdoors, clearing land and splitting wood. At twelve or thirteen, Ben came in from a spell of such yard work at fifty cents an hour and climbed into the detergent bubble bath his mother had run for him. John happened by and saw the boy up to his neck in bubbles. “Who do you think you are?” he roared. “A movie star?” When Ben went off to prep school at Loomis, his father forbade him to take his teddy bear along.

Despite incidents like these, Ben always regarded his father as a good parent. “He could be so loving, so concerned, so solicitous, so entertaining.” He used to take Ben fishing, and later the two of them went kayaking on the Croton River. When Ben tackled Dostoyevsky's
The Idiot
, his father began calling him Myshkin, affectionately. And he read Ben all of Joyce's
Dubliners
aloud. Ben recalls especially “The Dead,” with the snow, “general all over Ireland,” falling lyrically at the end and leaving both father and son limp with tears.

Certain paternal duties proved too much for Cheever, however. One day Ben, fifteen, managed to get his penis stuck in a zipper, and nothing his father could devise would extricate him. Amid general chaos at the house on Cedar Lane, the boy finally freed himself. As the years wore on, the pattern of dependency was reversed, and Ben found he could sometimes be of service to his father, a man brilliant in his art and physically tough, yet barely competent to deal with some of the simplest problems of daily life. On a ski trip with his father and Alwyn Lee, for instance, the teenager showed Cheever how to turn on the tap water in the railway sleeping car. “Isn't it wonderful that I have this son who can figure things out for me?” his father said. He had a way of making people feel needed, and of presenting himself as the one in need. “Don't you wish I was different?” he sometimes asked Ben. “Don't you wish I didn't drink?” Eager to please, Ben invariably said no, that was all right, whatever his father did was fine with him.

It was different with Federico, called Picci as a lad and then simply Fred. Fred was the apple of his father's eye, and he could say what he pleased. One of his earliest memories is of sitting in his father's lap at dusk, watching the blackbirds wheel by on their way to the Hudson to feed on insects. Whenever harm threatened the boy, John was terrified for him. When the boy came down with a fever, his father spent the night on the floor of his room. When Cheever spilled both his son and himself in a bicycle accident in Nantucket, the damage was minor but both were traumatized. Fred was well along into adolescence before he learned to ride a bike. As he grew older, though, Fred asserted himself with his father. In the corner of the downstairs living room-dining room at Cedar Lane there is a wooden chair. “That chair was broken twice,” Mary said, “when Fred hit his father in it.” It was not that they were enemies, not that at all. Fred loved his father very much and could hardly have felt closer to him. But he was frustrated and angered by his father's refusal to take control of himself. And he was in the house for the worst of it, after his older siblings were packed off to prep school and college.

In addition to liquor, Cheever was victimized by phobias. The worst of these was his fear of bridges, a fear that for many years kept him from crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge to visit such old friends as Eddie Newhouse and Don Ettlinger in Rockland County. In his 1961 “The Angel of the Bridge,” this phobia is associated with a more general condemnation of the ills of modernity: freeways and monotonous housing developments and continuous piped-in music. “It was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge,” the narrator reveals, “that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world.” But what could he do? Go back to St. Botolphs, sit around in a Norfolk jacket, and play cribbage in the firehouse? Instead he goes on as best he can until one day, on the Tappan Zee, he picks up a young girl hitchhiker who fetches a small harp from a waterproof case and sings him across the bridge and into “blue-sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, an ecstatic sereneness” with the folk song “I Gave My Love a Cherry That Had No Stone.”

No such miraculous cure rid Cheever of his phobia. In his fiction he repeatedly attempted to construct bridges between the grotesque real world and the potentially unifying universe of his dreams. In “A Vision of the World” (1962), he explores this obsessive compulsion to forge a link between the two worlds. The troubled protagonist beholds a beautiful woman standing in a field of wheat, wearing the clothes his grandmother might have worn. Like the chimera in the backyard and the folksinger on the bridge, she is an apparition, surely, and yet she seems “more real than the Tamiami Trail four miles to the east, with its Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands.” The woman speaks an incomprehensible language, then the rain on the roof wakes the narrator from his dream, and as the healing waters descend he sits up in bed and exclaims to himself, “Valor! Love! Beauty! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!” The words take on the colors of the earth, and his hopefulness mounts until the litany, together with the vision, render him “contented and at peace with the night.”

Happy endings or not, stories like these confessed to Cheever's deepening dissatisfaction with modern life: its pervasive materialism and weakening ethical standards, its standardized and cheapened mass culture, above all its excessive mobility and rootlessness. No angel appeared to halt his addiction to alcohol, cure his phobias, ameliorate his self-disgust. To some degree, he transferred the self-criticism that cropped up regularly in his journals to a fictional condemnation of contemporary existence in its ugliest manifestations. Throughout 1962 and much of 1963 he was working on
The Wapshot Scandal
, his darkest book and the one in which he most vigorously excoriates the world he inhabits. Writing the novel only intensified his depression. “I can't ever recall having been so discouraged and melancholy,” he observed in September 1962, and this “absurd melancholy” persisted up to and beyond publication of the novel in January 1964.

This depression was so powerful as to lead him to the brink of suicide. “After the
Scandal
,” as he told Lehmann-Haupt, “I was really in trouble, really suicidal.” Despairing, he got up in the night, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and chain-smoked into the early hours. Then in his fitful sleep he dreamed he heard Hemingway saying, “This is the small agony. The great agony comes later.” He disposed of all the shotgun shells and tried to sweat out his malaise by scything the woods. Then, still seeking equanimity, he flew off to Rome for two weeks alone. The family, he felt sure, was happy to see him go.

Cheever's lingering despondency was the more ominous in the light of the novel's success.
The Wapshot Scandal
, generally well reviewed, sold over thirty thousand copies in the first two months. Earlier in life, when his cafard (or cockroach) visited him, there was almost always an assignable reason. The dark eminence would surely go away, he thought, if he made some money, if he finished the novel, if he had a house of his own to live in, if he won the award. It was worse when all these things came to pass and the depression hung on, stronger than ever. What did he want? Was there anything that could banish his cafard?

Though
The Wapshot Scandal
is a sequel to
The Wapshot Chronicle
and deals with the same characters, it is in tone a very different book. As George Garrett put it, “the sins of
Chronicle
are original sin.
Scandal
moves inexorably toward the end of the world.” The difference is nowhere more striking than in the almost total absence, in the later novel, of those “odors of the world, the flesh and the devil” that proliferated in the earlier one. Love has also disappeared, or almost so, giving way to lust. Melissa Wapshot, obsessively conscious of her mortality, seduces Emile the grocery boy and takes him off to live in carnality and unhappiness in Rome. Moses, devastated, resorts to drink and casual fornication. Dr. Cameron, Coverly's boss at the missile center, contemplates apocalyptic explosions without flinching, but he has treated his own son monstrously and can only feel the chill go off his bones in the arms of his high-priced Italian prostitute. Cousin Honora also finds her way to Italy in an escape from the Internal Revenue Service, to which she has never paid a penny in taxes. She comes home to St. Botolphs to die, however. It is where she belongs, but it is not what it used to be.

Faith is fading even in St. Botolphs. As the
Chronicle
begins and ends on Independence Day, two Christmases in the old town frame the
Scandal
. At the beginning, Mr. Applegate, the rector of Christ Church, receives a delegation of carolers in his home. He has been troubled by religious doubt, but as the carolers sing he “felt his faith renewed, felt that an infinity of unrealized possibilities lay ahead of them, a tremendous richness of peace, a renaissance without brigands, an ecstasy of light and color, a kingdom! Or was this gin?” For Mr. Applegate drinks. In fact, he is quite drunk while delivering the Mass on Christmas Eve to a congregation of four (Coverly included). In a burst of rhetoric he presents much of the novel's message.

“Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane-landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the day that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths.… Let us pray for the lecherous and the impure.…”

At this point, the other worshipers leave and Coverly is alone with Mr. Applegate to his amen.

Cheever does not end his novel there, but follows Coverly as he goes back to the Viaduct House to liberate brother Moses from the grip of Dionysus and the arms of the lascivious widow Wilston. The next day, following cousin Honora's old custom, Coverly and Betsey serve Christmas dinner to residents of the Hutchins Institute for the Blind. Once more Leander has the last word, in the form of a scrap of paper found in his wallet after he drowned: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.” The sentiment is reassuring—it was one Cheever often recited—but it can hardly justify the wider universe of the novel, where evil so consistently predominates over good.

One reviever of
Scandal
thought the author's epiphanies too facile, another noted inconsistencies in character and tone, and as with
Chronicle
there were reservations about the seemingly haphazard structure. What Cheever was after was a structural pattern that suited his own fragmented times. Linear narrative no longer made sense in a world “distinguished by its curvatures.” Conventional narrative was designed “to express a sense of consecutiveness,” but he did not regard life that way. So he reached out for something new.
The Wapshot Scandal
, he once said, “was an extraordinarily complex book built around non sequiturs.” And in his notes for the novel, “I think of the book as a collection of forlornities.… I think of the book as a painting, there is the opening, the overture and then the eye moves from the snow storm to [Coverly's missile base] Talifer. From Talifer to [the suburb where Moses and Melissa live] Proxmire. The Chronicle was all thrust and this is very different. This is your world and I have come to tell you so; I am your prophet.” If a prophet, then a Jeremiah with a warning not to be ignored.