The Trip to Echo Spring (15 page)

I was beginning to feel a little dizzy. The conference room was very humid. Dr. Karcioglu had finished now and when the conversation turned to immigrant experiences in
The Rose Tattoo
I slipped out and went round the corner to the Hotel Monteleone. There's a famous bar there called the Carousel, which revolves around a central axis, wobbling as it goes. Tennessee used to drink there and so too did William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and Williams's cherubic sometimes-friend and sometimes-enemy Truman Capote. I ordered a lime daiquiri, and I sat on my own in the midday gloom and drank it very slowly.

People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think
about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: capitate, hamate, pisiform and triquetral. It is that intimate a part of me; that deeply implicated in my articulation, the architecture of my being. When I think back to my childhood what I see most often is a set of brass monkeys my granny kept on her mantelpiece, their hands clamped down over eyes, ears and mouth.
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil:
the holy trinity of the alcoholic family.

I first read
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
when I was seventeen, at the sixth-form college to which I'd begged to be allowed to go. It had been built in the 1960s, an unprepossessing snake of low-lying buildings, with a glassed-in cafeteria and an overspill of portakabins by the rugby pitch. The English A-level class met in an upstairs corner room that looked down into a little courtyard. It was autumn and before class started I'd sit on the radiator with my nose to the window and watch the rain sluicing crisp packets and drinks cartons towards the drains.

We read the play out loud and I still remember now the pleasure of speaking Maggie's lines.
One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit. I wish you would lose your looks. It would make the martyrdom of Saint Maggie a little more bearable. You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool
. The boy who played Brick had dark hair and pale skin and was going to be an actor. All his movements were economical and graceful, and it was apparent, though never publicly discussed, that he was gay.

The play poured out into the ugly little room, moving very quickly, like something that had ruptured and could no longer be contained. Brick limped back and forth to the liquor cabinet, wearing pyjamas and using a crutch. Maggie pushed on her bracelets and made her
tough, gambler's bid for a child, and in the Broadway version of the final act Brick went along with her, and in the original he remained ambivalent and unconvinced. I remember loving the lines of direction between the dialogue, which seemed so much more fiercely felt and honest than anything I'd ever read.

In the copy I was given then, and which I've now owned half my life, I scribbled a list in royal blue Quink ink with what would have been a cheap fountain pen with silvery teeth-marks at its end.
MENDACITY
, it reads.
ILLUSIONS/REALITY. ILLNESS/CURE
. On the title page I added in Biro another note that said:
false cures versus real cures. Real involve spiritual/emotional growth.
Dear God. Hardly any wonder I latched on to the play so strongly. It might as well have been a mirror for the situation I'd only just escaped.

In 1981, when I was four, my father left and shortly afterwards my mother met a woman through the personal column of
Time Out.
Diana came to live with us in our house on the common in Chalfont St. Peter, a stone's throw from the convent where I went to school. She was warm, vivacious and funny, with the upturned collars and quick-fire charm of Cagney from
Cagney and Lacey.

She joined our household, which at the time comprised my mother, my sister, our Swedish au pair and two cats, Catkin and Pussy Willow, both of whom came to sticky ends. She was an alcoholic, though none of us knew that then. After a while – three years, four years – we moved to Hampshire, staying temporarily in a rented bungalow on the outskirts of a housing estate. It was the ugliest house I'd ever seen. There was a field outside with a copse of trees and every day I thought about climbing the barbed wire and going out there with a book and a flask. It snowed more heavily that winter than it had for
years. One day my cat disappeared and much later my mother admitted hitting her while reversing the car on the icy drive.

At school everyone hated me and my plummy voice. I read constantly, burying myself in
Little Women
and pony stories from the 1930s. I'd never been an especially happy child, but this degree of isolation was not something I had any idea how to deal with. Then we moved again. All the houses we had after we came south were new, some of them surrounded by raw seas of mud that had until recently been open fields. This one was called Tall Trees. It had oaks in the garden, though later they were blown down in the storm of 1987. There was a huge glass window above the front door and in the morning we'd sometimes find the corpses of small birds that had flown into it, mistaking the glass for sky.

In this house, alcohol began to take on a physical presence in our lives. Diana was often drunk then; often enraged. At night, over dinner, there'd be raised voices, and the arguments would continue rumbling into the small hours, while my sister and I listened, our stomachs tight with panic. It wasn't just the fights that frightened me, but rather the terrifying sense that someone was no longer inhabiting consensual reality.

Years later, I recognised the climate of that period when I first read
Brideshead Revisited.
Charles Ryder describes the effect of his beloved Sebastian's drinking on the household in which he lives in terms like Maggie's:

. . . the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes.

Sebastian Flyte, who uses alcohol as a way of escaping – what, exactly? The terrible weight of his family? He suckles like an infant, the bottle as much of a nursery prop as the bear he totes around. Drunk, he even talks like a child. ‘Been drinking whisky up here. None in the library now party's gone. Now party's gone and only mummy. Feeling rather drunk. Think I better have something-on-a-tray up here. Not dinner with mummy.'

I think of that line about the fire often, because it describes so exactly the house where I grew up: the atmosphere of the air, the condition of the rooms. I think sometimes I can still smell smoke, perhaps on my skin or deep in the fabric of an old sweater. It was the tail end of the 1980s, the era of Section 28, when the Local Government Act forbade councils from ‘promoting the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship'. Towards the end of that period I remember looking through an album with a friend and panicking because I knew there was on the final page a photograph of my mother and Diana with their arms around each other. We weren't supposed to tell anyone about the practicalities of the family setup. Keeping someone else's secrets is a dreadful burden, though I understand why it was necessary. I still remember the rush of terror at the thought of her passing the information back to the girls at school. I knew the sort of things they'd say, the poisonous whispers –
lezza, gaylord
– and I suppose I must have had a sense that there were larger, more substantial repercussions to be had.

The crisis came – when? I must have been eleven or twelve. Late eighties, Thatcher still clinging on. What I remember – though this memory is as blurred as if I too am looking through a glass – is waking to the sound of screaming. Each time, it was like witnessing a possession.
Shakespeare spotted that. When Iago gets Cassio drunk, he falls into the sort of quarrel that is wholly foreign to his nature. The next day, sobered, he cries out in shame and horror: ‘O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!'

The hall in that house was large, with an open flight of stairs and a gallery with a railing, so that you could look down to the front door. In my memory of this scene I'm in pyjamas, huddled on the landing with my sister. Diana is on the stairs, screaming curses at us all. Then, abruptly, the police are there, and they take her and our air rifle into custody – the only detail from that night that has stayed in any way clear to me.

After they leave we pack overnight bags and run away. We stay in a bed and breakfast on Southsea seafront, and at some point the next day, presumably while we're at school, my mother finds us another house: our seventh in ten years. It's on an estate near Portsmouth, already furnished, the walls thin as paper. That's where we start our lives again, among a stranger's books, a stranger's discarded things.

What the hell was I doing in a bar? I paid the check and took a streetcar back to my hotel. But the combination of the drink and the heat and the things I'd been thinking conspired to fuddle me so badly I got on the wrong line. The car was very busy, and among the passengers there was a small family: a mother and father with two shaven-headed boys, maybe three or four years old, with open sores and abrasions on their faces that looked like impetigo. They were dirty
and unkempt, both trailing reins. The father was on heroin, his eyes drooping and vacant, his face and arms covered with a scrollwork of tattoos. One of the boys cuddled into his lap, though even from where I sat I could feel the coiled violence of his presence.

I saw many things in New Orleans that week. I saw a cemetery hidden away amid flowering backstreets, where sweetpeas and roses flourished among the jasmine and hibiscus. There were smashed kumquats on the sidewalk and a dense carpet of weeds had grown up between the graves. It was composed of many different plants, among them scarlet pimpernel, melilot, wild geranium, yellow vetch and banks of clover. There were no bees, and on either side of the path I saw great marble mausoleums and plaster tombs, some broken open to reveal interiors that resembled bread ovens, with two brick shelves lying empty in the dark. The names on the headstones were mostly German:
Koenig, Tupper, Faulks, Vose
and
Scheu.

I saw a bride in the soft evening light outside Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits, red-headed and very pretty, grinning across at the passers-by and clutching a bouquet of creamish flowers. I saw a man painted blue accosting a woman in a wheelchair. I saw an enormous grey-pink mushroom cloud fibrillating into its component parts above the roof of the Super Bowl. I saw clouds of black butterflies and a furred red moth crawling across the floor of a streetcar, one wing crushed beyond surviving, about half the size of a dollar bill. I saw a performance of
The Glass Menagerie
and everywhere I went I heard the sorrowful cry of mourning doves, but of all these things it was the two shaven-headed boys who stayed with me most strongly: a warning, as if I needed it, that addiction is never an abstract matter, but one that brings – and here the small word
hurt
came into my throat and stuck there for a second.

5

THE BLOODY PAPERS

I WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND
Tennessee Williams's addiction to travel; to the quickening of energy that comes when one is about to shift location. At the end of my week in the city, I packed a swimsuit and a few clothes into a canvas bag and called a taxi to the airport. I was going to Florida, and as soon as I slammed the gate to the garden I began to feel buoyed up on the currents of departure. The live oaks were throwing a tracery of shadows on to the sidewalk, and when I looked up their branches were looped with strings of Mardi Gras beads: green and purple and gold, like the flashing on a starling.

In the departure lounge at Louis Armstrong a well-dressed woman was working her way through a stack of resumés. She had her phone crooked to her ear. ‘Oh, I'll show it to you,' she said. ‘I'll show it to you. Well, I will tell you that cooked my goose. Well, she is not head of a graduate faculty. She might be vice president of a graduate faculty, but that is not the same thing. She's trying to distort . . . Well, tomorrow I'm going to slip into your office at some point and show it to you.'

To get to Key West, I had to fly to Charlotte and then on to Miami, where I'd pick up a car and drive the last hundred or so miles. The
sense of motion excited me. Stop too long, and you begin to marinate in your own thoughts, to soak up their vinegar and gall. Better to move, and if you're moving anyway why not veer south, where the water's warm and you can carry out, off-season, those summery rites of anointment and immersion?

The plane was small, and up in the air before I knew it. All around me people were falling asleep in their blue leather seats as we tacked sharply east and New Orleans was lost beneath a reef of cloud. I drank a ginger ale in a plastic cup. The wires were cut. No one would call; there was nothing now that couldn't wait. I could pick over the litter of the past or fret away at the cuticles of the future, but the present was out of my hands, slack as a paid-out line.

A long while back, working on John Cheever's papers in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library, I'd stumbled across a statement about the eeriness of air travel. He described the temporal sleight of hand that comes from watching the sun rise at half past one over the Atlantic, adding a little later: ‘One does not travel so much as one seems incised – a picture cut out of a magazine and pasted onto another landscape.'

I'd copied these phrases down because they seemed to catch at a persistent attribute of his work: a kind of uncanniness produced by radical disruptions in space and time. Now, shuttling through the thin air above Louisiana, I turned them over again, and this time they sparked a different association. In the early 1970s Cheever began to be plagued by spells of what he described as
otherness
, though one could also use the term depersonalisation or fugue states or transient amnesia. These episodes had two components: olfactory, auditory or visual hallucinations and a simultaneous sort of brain freeze that left
him unable to access words and names. Sometimes he'd feel he was being swamped by the past, and sometimes, frighteningly, that he'd lost his place in time altogether: ‘I am not in this world; I am merely falling, falling.'

In 1972, the year before he went to teach at the University of Iowa, he wrote:

With a hangover and a light fever I distinctly get the impression that I am in two places at once. I am aware of my surroundings here – rain and the beech trees and I smell the coal gas and see the furniture in the old house in Quincy. Have I gone mad?

Not exactly. What he was experiencing was the legacy of all those years of drinking: the scoops of gin and hookers of bourbon he'd knocked down in their thousands. By 1972, Cheever had been drinking chronically for almost forty years. He was living in a beautiful house in Ossining, with his beautiful wife, three more or less charming children and his delightful dynasty of golden retrievers: a writer who had by almost all the measures he cherished achieved success. And yet in her memoir
Home Before Dark,
Susan Cheever recalled that it had become ‘clearer and clearer that my father was the worst kind of alcoholic. He seemed intent on destroying himself.' As early as 1959, Cheever was using the word
alcoholism
to describe his behaviour, writing grimly:

In the morning I am deeply depressed, my insides barely function, my kidney is painful, my hands shake, and walking down
Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten o'clock now and I am thinking of the noontime snort.

Alcohol affects the brain in many ways, but one of the most tangible, even to the casual drinker, is the havoc it wreaks on one's ability to recollect the past. In a single night, if you hit it hard enough, alcohol can overwhelm the brain's ability to lay down memories – a kind of anterograde amnesia known universally as blackouts. Blackouts, which are common especially in those who drink too fast or on an empty stomach, fall into two categories:
fragmentary
(partial loss) or
en-bloc
(total loss). After an en-bloc episode, the drinker will be unable to recall anything that happened during intoxication, no matter how coherent or engaged they appeared at the time.

Blackouts occur as a consequence of alcohol's interactions with the hippocampus, the memory centre of the brain. Research suggests that drinking suppresses hippocampal activity by making the cells responsible for memory formation both less active and less responsive to external signals. As such, though short-term memories are still formed, their translation into long-term memories is prevented.

This kind of patchiness of memory – an uncertainty as to what exactly did transpire the night before – had been afflicting Cheever for decades, making mornings in particular a time of blurry and uncertain guilt (‘I cannot remember my meanness,' he wrote in 1966, ‘because my recollections are damaged by alcohol'). The spells of
otherness, on the other hand, were new and far more troubling, though they too were probably related to alcohol's effects on memory and cognition. Over time, heavy and continuous exposure to alcohol badly damages cognitive function, causing reduced capacity for concentration, aphasia, emotional instability and, at its most extreme, alcohol-induced dementia. These distressing changes are the result of what is known as
diffuse cerebral atrophy
, or shrinking of the brain, which affects all regions, including those concerned with the laying down and preservation of memory.

What's more, because of poor nutrition, impaired digestion and reduced or disrupted liver function, alcoholics are often deficient in thiamine, vitamin B1, an essential nutrient for nerve cell function. Thiamine deficiency causes severe cognitive impairment and is responsible for Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder seen almost exclusively in alcoholics. Its symptoms include amnesia, confusion, confabulation (so-called ‘honest lying' or false memories) and hallucinations caused by disruptions in the brain's ability to access long-term memory. Korsakoff syndrome affects in particular episodic memory, the faculty by which an individual locates themself chronologically.

According to Blake Bailey's lovely, intricate biography, a CAT scan performed just before Cheever went into recovery in 1975 revealed severe alcohol-induced atrophy of the brain. This damage was undoubtedly implicated in his attacks, in all likelihood causing both the aphasia and the hallucinations. (Later, he had several seizures.) But one of the strangest things about Cheever's spells of otherness is the way they seemed to allude to some buried trauma in his past – an event that might potentially have set the whole grim mechanism spinning in the first place. The most unsettling among his hallucinations was a
recurrent vision of two friends on a beach, one of whom was singing a song he could never quite place, though he had a sense that if he did he'd be plunged into the deepest, darkest reservoir of unrecovered memory – what, he figured dolefully, ‘psychiatrists would call a traumatic rejection'.

The possibility that his past was somehow indicated in his present plight was not exactly news to Cheever. Over the years he'd submitted to therapy several times, though he had little respect for the formal delvings of analysis. In the same box of papers in which I'd found the lines about flight, there were multiple references to
clinicians
and their tendency to misunderstand the elegant workings of his mind. Each of these relationships, with the exception of the last, was politely terminated when it became clear that the clinicians intended to dismantle the house of fiction he'd built up around his life.

Take David C. Hays, his psychiatrist in 1966. In 1963 Cheever had written ‘The Swimmer', a story that judders forward, gaining its rhythm and its force by way of blackouts. It's these dead zones of memory that convey more powerfully than anything the depths of Neddy Merrill's ruination. While working away at it, a brilliant idea had struck Cheever. ‘Might the seasons change?' he asked himself in his journal.

Might the leaves turn and begin to fall? Might there be snow? But what is the meaning of this? One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon. Oh well, kick it around.

Kick it around he did. Speaking a few years later to the
Paris Review,
he commented: ‘When he finds it's dark and cold, it has to have happened. And, by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some
time after I finished that story. As a matter of fact, it's one of the last stories I wrote for a long time.' As to its relationship to alcoholism and memory loss in his own life, one might note that in a preceding entry of the journal he'd noted ruefully: ‘My memory is full of holes and craters,' and in a subsequent one: ‘In church, on my knees before the chancel, I see, with a crushing force, how dependent I am on alcohol.'

In 1966, ‘The Swimmer' was turned into a movie, with Burt Lancaster as Neddy. Filming took place not far from Ossining, and so in the summer of 1966 Cheever regularly bucketed over to join the fun, obliterating an attack of first-day nerves with a pint of whiskey, some martinis, a few glasses of wine and a Miltown for good measure. To his delight he was given a cameo role, and so it's possible to see him as he was that year: a tanned, elfin man of fifty-four, in a blue shirt and white jacket, shaking hands with Lancaster and kissing
(bussing,
he called it) a pretty girl in a bikini by the glinting waters of one of the location's thirteen swimming pools.

As that alarming first-day prescription suggests, his drinking had passed well beyond normal measures now, even bearing in mind the mores of the time. When he wasn't on location, he wrote in the early hours of the morning
(Bullet Park,
mostly), and by half past ten could be found twitching in the kitchen, waiting for his family to disperse so he could administer the first self-soothing scoop of Scotch or gin. If they didn't leave quickly enough he'd drive himself to the liquor store, where he'd buy a bottle, motor on to some pretty back street, and sit there suckling, inevitably spilling a good slug all down his chin.

This was the climate in which he made his first appointment with Hays, and yet on arrival he announced piously that he'd come for
help with his wife's black moods, which he'd decided were responsible for his insufferable loneliness, misery and depression. His journals are crammed with complaints about Mary: her chilliness, her cutting comments, her habit of putting on a large wash whenever amorously approached. Hays, however, was unconvinced. After interviewing Mary, he informed Cheever on their second meeting that he was neurotic, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, ‘and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife', a diagnosis he reproduced furiously in his journal that night.

The ensuing sessions proceeded along classically Freudian lines (‘When I told him I liked swimming he said: Mother. When I told him I liked the rain he said: Mother. When I told him I drank too much he said: Mother'). By the end of the summer he'd had enough. He broke off relations, though not before he'd presented Hays with an inscribed copy of his first novel,
The Wapshot Chronicle,
which the man had inexplicably not yet found time to read.

It was the banality of Hays's analysis that offended him, the heedless predictability of its assertions, and yet Mother was clearly in there somewhere. In all his writings, Cheever returned repeatedly to the troublesome matter of his origins and its role in his latter-day distress, sometimes in letters, sometimes in novels and sometimes in journal entries that lie in a mixed region between actuality and imagination. Real events are cast in the protective casing of anecdote, with pseudonyms –
Estabrook
and
Coverley
– that are recycled bewilderingly throughout the published fiction.

One of the richest sources of his musings on the subject is a piece of writing he called the Bloody Papers. It was filed away in the Berg Collection in New York too, tucked into a creamish box of typewritten
journal entries and drafts of stories, most of which had been shuffled so conclusively that to find two consecutive pages was a novelty. In contrast, the Bloody Papers presented a reasonably coherent and intact account of Cheever's early years.

On the first page, he describes the precision and dexterity with which Laurie Lee captured his mother in
Cider with Rosie.
‘When I think back to my parents,' he concludes wistfully, ‘I find nothing so lucid and controlled. This troubles me because the disjointedness of my recollections seems to imply that I have never been willing to admit the facts of my own beginnings.'

He steels himself, setting down a clutter of vivid scenes. He remembers that when war was declared on Germany his mother, Mary Cheever, took his father's collection of beer steins into the back yard and smashed them with a hammer. He remembers being asked to sweep the kitchen floor, and having the broom snatched out of his hands because he ‘swept like an old woman'. He remembers carving his name on to his mother's sewing machine and being thrashed with a belt till he bled. He remembers the gift shop she opened after her husband lost his job. ‘After this I was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, “Is there something I can do for you?”'