John Cheever (36 page)

In advance, Cheever regarded the event as a one-on-one confrontation. He joked about going five three-minute rounds with Mailer. “I'll be wearing white trunks” for the bout, he said. As it happened, he spoke first, and instead of addressing the topic directly he presented “The Parable of the Diligent Novelist.” For him almost anything could set a story in motion, even a request from a scholarly organization to discuss the relationship between the American writer and his culture. So it was a story he machine-gunned to the professoriate in his nervous, elegant, witty, dazzling style, a story designed to parody Mailer's most recent novel.

The novelist in Cheever's tale, like Stephen Rojack
of An American Dream
, goes through life seeking sensation far and wide. He goes to a seminary, for example. Then he quits and holes up in a slum. He rapes and knifes and buggers. He becomes a cop assigned to Central Park's nether world of criminality and sexual perversion. He takes up international spying and in that role meets his death when struck down by a taxicab in Krakow. The point of the parable, clearly, was that the novelist's death/bankruptcy/failure resulted from his “wretched excess” in chasing after every conceivable experience, legal or illegal. Even writers needed to learn the value of moderation. Cheever told the story so cleverly and so engagingly—and it was such a relief, in a convention devoted to close examination of literary minutiae, to actually hear a story told—that he left his audience “ablaze with pleasure.” The academics loved it, though not many realized that he was satirizing Mailer, giving him a “friendly kick in the ass,” as program organizer Robert F. Lucid put it.

Mailer understood well enough, was mightily annoyed, and generated some “fierce eye contact” as Cheever returned from the rostrum. When it was his turn to speak, he gripped the microphone like a bulldog and read a corrosive, dramatic, hit-and-run essay titled “The Dynamic in American Letters,” describing the division of our literature into two rivers, one of manners, one of the voice of the people, and both running dry. Mailer like Cheever brought down the house. Immediately afterward there was more eye contact in which Mailer detected in Cheever an unspoken acknowledgment that he, Cheever, had underestimated his opponent. (Ellison, speaking as usual without notes, was outshone by the two of them, at least on this occasion.) Later Mailer led his fellow writers, along with Lucid, to the Playboy Club, and there the animosity between Cheever and Mailer dissipated with the drinks and their mutual interest in the
Playboy
phenomenon. The novelists did better with the professors than with the Playgirls, who wandered in, sized them up, decided there wasn't a movie producer in the bunch, and wandered out again.

What most struck Cheever was the regularity that
Playboy
owner Hugh Hefner imposed on himself, his club, and his employees. Rigorous rules obtained. Bunnies were not to date customers. The bunny who served him was saving up to cure her father of Parkinson's disease. Every day of the week, there was a set menu. “If this is Tuesday, it must be pot roast.” Hefner circumscribed his own existence, too, never going out, always wearing pajamas, living in a kind of aphrodisiacal paradise that was also a sort of prison. The whole pattern mirrored Cheever's concern for order in lives that might otherwise go off the rails.

When Mailer, Robert Lowell, and other writers made their 1966 march on Washington, Cheever stayed in Ossining. He was opposed to the Vietnam War, but not at all sure what to do to end it. If he went to Washington, he speculated, he would probably suffer an attack of agoraphobia and/or acquire a hangover. Besides, he doubted whether demonstrating would serve any useful purpose other than “making a physical declaration of where one stands.” Actually he came to know the idealism of the 1960s best through his children. A few years later, Ben was to suffer the consequences of just such a public display against the war as his father declined to make. Meanwhile, both Ben and Susan worked for social justice. Susie, now out of college and—during the regular school year—teaching at a prep school in Colorado, spent the summers of 1965 and 1966 as a volunteer instructor in Mississippi. Ben, deep-voiced and handsome in late adolescence, did social work in the black slums of Ossining and settled on liberal Antioch as his college. His children's determination to serve minority causes had its origins, Cheever liked to think, in their family history. After all, hadn't his great-uncle Ebenezer espoused unpopular abolitionist sentiments and been dragged through the streets of Newburyport?

On the social level as in politics, Cheever was not a joiner. He and Mary never belonged to a country club. On the other hand, he was a charter member of an exceedingly informal organization called the Friday Club. The club was simply a vehicle that enabled certain noncommuting males in the area to get together on Fridays for drinks and lunch and conversation. There were no dues, no rules, and to begin with only three members, but Cheever gave them all titles. Arthur Spear, retired but full of energy, was the Founder. Folksinger and songwriter Tom Glazer was the Treasurer, since he could figure out the tab with some accuracy. Cheever himself was the Membership. Around noon on Fridays the three of them would foregather at one of their homes for canapés and cocktails. (Mary, who regarded the club as yet another excuse for her husband's drinking, was less hospitable than the other wives.) Then they went to one local restaurant or another for lunch. The early favorite was a place run by an ambitious Italian and advertised as the Oldest Seafood House in Croton. (Friday Clubbers kept putting a hyphen between Oldest and Seafood.) An irreverent waitress named Pam fit well into the humor of the group. How was the sole? she'd be asked. “I wouldn't advise it today, dearie,” she'd answer. She was designated the Ladies Auxiliary. For additional humor the club expanded to take in Alwyn Lee, a wonderful raconteur, and he became the Entertainment. Usually the men did not get home until midafternoon, and sometimes, well fortified with liquor, sallied forth on a hike through the woods and hills behind Cheever's house.

From these modest beginnings the Friday Club grew to as many as a dozen members, including among others writer Bill Rickenbacker, sculptor John Dirks (the son of the man who drew the Katzenjammer Kids, Dirks was to replace Lee, after his death, as the Entertainment), foundation executive Roger Willson, and actor Barrett Clark. Cheever's letter asking Clark to join them on Fridays captured some of the flavor of the club. The organization was “about as exclusive as a telephone booth,” Cheever acknowledged, but perhaps Clark would join them for Friday lunch anyway, sometimes.

In the summer of 1966 the Perrys were filming their version of “The Swimmer.” It was a difficult film to sell, Frank Perry recalls; his wife Eleanor Perry's script circulated for a year before Sam Spiegel at Columbia Pictures decided to buy in, with Cheever getting sixty thousand dollars for film rights. It was also a difficult film to make, since the story resisted the literal lens of the camera. If he were to do it again, Perry said, he would try to make the movie more suggestive of the undercurrents of myth in the story. Burt Lancaster was signed to play the lead role of Neddy Merrill, and initially both Perry and Cheever thought him somewhat miscast, since he lacked the requisite New England background and idiom. In one scene, for example, Lancaster insisted on reading a line, written “I'm going to send you both a check,” as “I'm going to send the both of you a check.”

The movie was shot in Westport, Connecticut, where the pools were handsomer and less disturbed by highway noise than those around Ossining. Cheever came to the set only rarely. He was impressed during these visits by the way Lancaster managed to seem successively “lewd, tearful, crucified, boyish and infirm.” One day the Perrys arranged for Cheever himself to make a cameo appearance in the film. The scene was a pool party, where he shook hands with Lancaster and bussed actress Janet Landgard. It was not Landgard but another actress, the intelligent and sexy Diana Muldaur, whom Cheever developed a crush on. Muldaur was wearing close-fitting “pool pajamas” during the party scene. “Either they've lowered her neckline since yesterday,” a production assistant observed appreciatively, “or they've raised her bust.”

At Yaddo in the fall of 1966, Cheever had a brief affair with the composer Ned Rorem. They had first met in 1962, also at Yaddo, when Rorem was hobbled by a broken ankle and Cheever was friendly and solicitous about his injury. During the four-year interim, Rorem had published
Paris Diary
with its explicit revelations about his sex life, and Cheever surely knew about the book. He came up to Rorem's room about nine o'clock one night, rather drunk, and made his overtures. At first the composer was reluctant. He was not particularly attracted physically, but Cheever almost broke his heart, he was so wistful. “I simply have to,” he said, and when it was over he was “sentimental about it, like a high school boy,” Rorem recalled. During their three-day affair, they made love under the Ping-Pong table, in the woods, in the car. Cheever was extremely ambivalent about revealing their liaison. Once as they drove off together, Hortense Calisher saw them leave. “Never mind, I want everyone to know,” Cheever said, and then in the next breath, “but oh my God, what will they think of me?”

The unsatisfactory state of Cheever's marriage continued to trouble him. He saw himself in the role of lover and Mary as the beloved. Often he felt “proud of her beauty, her wit, her intelligence, her originality.” Yet at times he thought she seemed to despise him, to treat him as cruelly as the wife in “The Geometry of Love.” In seeking to know why, he resisted clinical explanations based on Mary's unhappy childhood. Similarly, he repudiated her belief that he had been crippled by his mother. And, he reasoned, even if an unhappy marriage was “a full time occupation,” this did not mean that efforts to shore it up were necessarily hopeless.

Liquor gave him at least as much trouble as his marriage. In the summer of 1965, his doctor—Dr. Ray Mutter—put him on tranquilizers as a substitute for alcohol. But the pills left him feeling as “stagnant as the water under an old millwheel” and he soon reverted to bourbon. He saw himself as engaged in a continuous and unavoidable struggle with drink. “I still fight the booze,” he wrote Stern, “but the score seems tied.” The battle commenced each morning, when the first or second thing he wanted was a drink. He went to his desk, determined to avoid drinking until noon, but it was not easy to stick to that resolve, with the bottles in the pantry calling out to him. Often he moved the noon deadline up an hour or half hour, and once the drinking was begun, it did not end until bedtime. In correspondence and in journals he chided himself for “the bitter and absolutely perfect circle of drunkenness and remorse” he had fallen into. But such self-criticism did not indicate any real desire to change his ways. On the contrary, it was as if the process of shaming himself gave him leave to continue his dependence on drink. And he was also prone to rationalizations, among them the notion that liquor liberated his imagination and so was necessary to his work.

He was hooked, he knew it, yet he did not want to confront his addiction directly. When he was bothered by a sore foot, he was reluctant to consult Dr. Mutter, for fear that he would diagnose some ailment that could only be treated by abstaining from alcohol. When at Mary's urging he did go to a psychiatrist during the summer of 1966, he insisted—“Unicorn in the Garden” fashion—the problem was hers and not his and that if she would act differently, the marriage would be fine and his phobias and depressions and drunken episodes would simply evaporate.

Dr. David C. Hays, who saw Cheever between early July and mid-September, was inclined to disagree. Cheever made it clear at the start that he opposed the idea of treatment and had consented only to please Mary. It cut against his Yankee grain to dig deep and then declare aloud what one found. Besides, he reasoned, how could anyone who had not read his work possibly know much about him? As a partial remedy he brought Hays an autographed copy of
The Wapshot Chronicle
. In their sessions he alternated between trying to appear as earnest as possible and trying to entertain the doctor. Hays was surprised at how quickly he went to the basics. If he wanted dreams, Cheever gave him dreams, including a highly erotic one in which he seduced the boyfriend of an old girlfriend. If he wanted family life, Cheever gave him the power struggle between his parents, with his mother, “the predatory sex,” as the winner, and he gave him too the unnaturally close intimacy he felt for his brother. If he wanted bedroom adventures, Cheever gave him a number of affairs and the report that at home he'd “been allowed to have an orgasm.” Usually, he said, Mary ignored him, and he complained when she went off to Treetops. In case Hays might fancy schizophrenia, Cheever spoke of the two John Cheevers, the pretended and the authentic one.

Dr. Hays was both dazzled and dismayed by his patient's performance. Admiring Cheever's wit, he wondered what it was designed to conceal. What lay immediately below the surface was scorn. In a letter to Mary at Treetops, John satirically described his most recent visit to the psychiatrist. Hays beamed down upon him, he wrote, like a dentist with a drill. To brighten the atmosphere, he “regaled” the psychiatrist “with idle and meaningless accounts” of his past. Obviously Cheever was not ready to undergo a thorough psychoanalysis. Besides, Mary thought, he “was too smart for psychiatrists. He had so much quicker a mind, and was verbally so much more sophisticated than they were. He'd talk them up a tree.”

Cheever's resistance grew stronger as Hays made it clear he thought John ought to work toward “a characterological change.” He refused to attend group sessions. He turned up fifteen minutes late for his own appointments. Finally, on September 15, he announced, “I don't like to talk about any of these things,” and that was that. Over such a limited period of time, Dr. Hays could hardly arrive at any definitive understanding of his patient, but he did form a strong impression of what kind of man he was. He felt an excessive dependence on Mary, Hays thought, and the multiple affairs, real and imagined, with women and men alike, were undertaken as a way of reacting against that dependence. He wanted badly to be taken care of and nurtured, and was inclined to transfer his resentment against a neglectful mother to his wife, while attributing to other women who paid attention to him—Sara Spencer, for instance—the qualities of the good mother. His marriage stood little chance of success, Hays told him, unless he was prepared to change. He wanted to change, Cheever replied, to be more compassionate and understanding and a better father to his sons. But most of all, he said, turning the tables once again, “I want a wife.” Wasn't he the injured party?