The Trip to Echo Spring (30 page)

His escape is not planned. A friend, Chicken Number Two, dies, and so on an impulse Farragut leaves Falconer by climbing into his body bag and being carried out as a corpse. ‘How strange to be carried so late in life,' he thinks, ‘and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh – not a fact, but a chance, something like the afternoon light on high trees, quite useless and thrilling.'

The carriers talk casually about cars as they drop the body on the free side of the wall; about a man named Charlie and his problems with his distributor. Then they walk away and Farragut cuts himself out of the bag with a concealed razor, just as Cheever once cut himself out of a straitjacket during an attack of delirium tremens, back in the
thickets of his own addiction. He hears piano music coming from the houses of the poor. There's blood in his boot. He peers in through the bright window of a laundromat, watching clothes tumble through the dryers. At a bus stop he meets a man who's been evicted from his lodgings; a man who takes a liking to Farragut's face and pays for his bus ticket, presenting him, unasked, with a winter coat. The book ends with Farragut getting off the bus at random. Stepping down into an unknown street, ‘he saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice.'

There's nothing ironic about this Lazarus-like return to life. I expect there are people who find it sentimental, even cloying. I didn't, though. It was earned, manifestly earned (‘I wonder,' he'd written at Smithers, ‘if I have the courage to leave confinement and seize my natural freedom'). Nor was it simply autobiographical, in the unidirectional way we tend to understand that word. Instead, the act of liberating Farragut seemed to ripple back into Cheever's own life, buoying him up even as he set it down. It was a confirmation and testament of his own liberation, but also a way of getting ahead of himself, of creating a fantasy he could then, in some magical way, be braced by; even inhabit. It wasn't so far from what Berryman had tried to do with
Recovery,
the difference being that Berryman had used Alan Severance, inadvertently or not, to evade his own duties to sobriety, while Cheever had made Farragut's escape from addiction and imprisonment a way of underscoring and fuelling his.

Among the many positive reviews was one by Joan Didion in the
New York Times.
Often prescient, always cool-headed, she observed that Farragut had undergone:

. . . a purification, a period of suffering in order to re-enter the ceremonies of innocence, and in this context the question of when he will be ‘clean' has considerable poignancy. As a matter of fact it is this question that Cheever has been asking all along –
when will I be clean
was the question on every summer lawn – but he has never before asked it outright, and with such transcendent arrogance of style.

This is a very accurate assessment of Cheever's fiction, but what Didion couldn't possibly have known at the time was how deeply the question of cleanliness worked away at the man himself; how often in his journals he worried over the gulf in his life between immaculate outward setting and dirty, even deviant inward desires. Shaken by a day in which two strangers tried to pick him up, he once wrote in his diary: ‘I mix myself a gin and vermouth. The polished icebucket, the white flowers on the piano, the music on the rack, are all part of some moral fortification that protects me from the two strangers' – though by
two strangers
what he really meant was the experience of seeing his own longing reflected back by them.

Unsurprisingly, this schism wasn't exactly resolved by getting sober, though taking the gin and vermouth out of the equation certainly helped both his outward behaviour and sense of self-esteem (‘I am not better than the next man, but I am better than I was,' he wrote in 1976). Over time, he became far more at ease with the fact that his erotic urges included men, though in so doing he initiated a coercive relationship with a young heterosexual student, Max Zimmerman, who found it very hard – for a variety of reasons, none of them apparently related to sexual attraction – to say no to him. It seems
probable, reading Cheever's diaries, that he would now be diagnosed with sex addiction. Certainly there's a distinct similarity between his desire to ‘wallow, smear, engorge myself' with alcohol and his need for sexual contact, both of which (as he once acknowledged in a letter to his doctor) were ‘brought on by my anxious and greedy urge to take more than my share of brute pleasure'.

Not perfect then. But sobriety doesn't necessarily mean a new character; rather a kind of slow sea change of spirit. Back a while, when I'd been digging through the papers at the Berg Collection in New York Public Library, I'd come across a few typed pages that seemed to be successive drafts of a speech about AA, which Cheever attended religiously in his remaining years.

To be confirmed in an enormous and splendid basilica, deafened by music and blinded by the fire of candles is much easier than it is to say in a smoke-filled Sunday school classroom that my name is John and I am an alcoholic although they are the same thing.

The difficulties of admitting to faith outside organized religion are much more than superficial. We have no history, we have no Dead Sea Scrolls, we have no past at all. In the earliest religious myths and legends, alcohol is one of the first gifts of the Gods. Dionysius is the son of Zeus. There is little if any censure of drunkenness in the Holy Bible. In the cardinal sins drunkenness might be included in sloth but there is nothing specific. The belief that to be drunk is to be blessed is very deep. To die of drink is sometimes thought a graceful and natural death – overlooking wet-brains, convulsions,
delirium tremens, hallucinations, hideous automobile accidents and botched suicides. Several friends said to me that their affairs were in order, their children married, their money soundly invested and they were going to leisurely drink themselves to death. One of them choked to death on whiskey. One of them jumped off a cliff. One of them set fire to his house and incinerated himself and his children. One of them is still in a strait jacket. For a while I somehow thought this comprehensive, graceful, rather as the leaves fall in the autumn. To drink oneself to death was not in any way alarming, I thought, until I found that I was drinking myself to death.

And so we have really no religious history at all. And yet what we do believe is as old as the oldest faith. Religion is the conviction that we can comprehend and conquer death and the fear of death. We state for the first time in the history of religion, that drunkenness is for some of us a guide of death, a mode of suicide. For some of us it is terribly important to avoid the crankiness of temperance societies and pledge unions. We recognize drunkenness as a guide of obscene death and by helping one another we can triumph over this.

And triumph he did. Even when he was dying of cancer, even when all but one of his doctors said he might as well go back on the bottle, he elected to stay dry. He wanted, he said, to keep his dignity, and though poor Max might have had something to say about the mechanisms by which it was achieved, the fact remains that for the last seven years of his life he was stone cold sober: still depressed, still
lonely, still at the mercy of his erections, but also in possession of his wit, and the old, magical capacity for being unsprung by joy.

I'd taken up a station in the viewing car. We were still running parallel to the Skykomish. The water was glass-green, ice-cold. It rushed beside the train, churning over boulders and tumbling down gorges, spray shooting up like foam from a bottle. Everything was moist, seeping, sodden; the trees lagged in luminous green moss.

I could have stayed up there forever, but by mid-morning we'd trundled back down to earth. In fact, we seemed to have arrived in the Home Counties. It all looked absurdly familiar – the grey skies, the tangles of brambles in the damp fields. Funny, to enter such an English landscape, when that afternoon I'd see my mother for the first time in months.

When it occurred to me that I might go to America, one of the first destinations I thought of was Port Angeles, the north-western town where Raymond Carver spent much of his final decade. Years ago, I'd taken
All of Us,
Carver's collected poems, on holiday to Greece. There were still petals of bougainvillea and olive leaves pressed between the pages. As for the poems, they'd sunk themselves into my mind. Many were set out here, or a little further west, in the Olympic Peninsula, a landscape hard-cut and intricately veined with creeks and trout streams: a magical counterpart to the richness of a life in which alcohol was no longer the dominating force.

I'd wanted to visit that place for a long time, and when I asked my mother if she'd like to join me in America I wasn't surprised that this
was the section of the trip she chose. Her flight was getting in that afternoon, and after I'd dropped my bags and had a bath at the hotel I went to meet her at Sea-Tac airport, elated and a little nervous at the prospect of companionship.

The terminal was heaving with soldiers in desert uniform, most of them very young. I watched as one boy greeted his girlfriend. They clung together, oblivious to the crowd. Then, at the back of the queue, I saw my mother, pink-cheeked and bundled up in a quilted jacket, an Oxford Literary Festival bag slung across her shoulder. We hugged hard too. She was bubbling over with excitement, and that night in Seattle we drank little bottles of Coors and caught up on months of news.

We'd hired a white Ford, sturdy and unglamorous save for a set of Wyoming plates. After breakfast the next day we drove to Edmonds and caught the ferry across Puget Sound to Kingston. The Olympic Highway, the 101, ran right round the head of the peninsula. There were snow-capped mountains up ahead, looming a little threateningly. I looked at the map, tracing names. Hurricane Ridge, Mount Deception. Across the Juan de Fuca Strait we could see the blue shadows of islands, and beyond them the smudgy pencil line of Canada.

We reached Port Angeles mid-afternoon, weaving in past auto-repairs and building supply yards. The Red Lion was just off Main Street. From my bed I could see clean out to Victoria, across milky blue water that looked like churned ice. Raymond Carver used to fish out there, in his nutty, unsafe boats. He could only tie three kinds of knots, and used them willy-nilly, not caring whether they were appropriate or not. Once he ran out of gas and was too scared to call the coastguard and tell them what he'd done. Instead he dragged west on the tide, slamming into a big red buoy and almost scuppering himself.

Luckily, some fishermen spotted the boat and towed him back to harbour. He'd got off lightly. The only harm done was a telling streak of colour below the fenders: yet another memento of a near-miss existence. He was always greedy for fish, gleeful to have them and glad, later, to give them away. This is Good Raymond, of course: the successful writer of the late 1970s and early 1980s, who'd managed to pull himself out of a self-made hell; a real pigsty of a life.

Unlike his friend John Cheever, Carver never tried to conceal the poverty of his origins. He was born on 25 May 1938 in Klatskanie, Oregon, the first of two brothers. His father was a mill worker who liked to fish and drink, though he lacked the knack for holding his liquor. Raymond Senior – C.R. – met his future wife on a sidewalk in Leola, Arkansas, as he was walking out of a tavern. ‘He was drunk,' Carver recorded his mother as saying in an essay called ‘My Father's Life'. ‘I don't know why I let him talk to me. His eyes were glittery. I wish I'd had a crystal ball.' In the same essay he told tales on his parents' misdeeds, relating a night in which C.R. came home smashed and Ella locked him out of the house before whacking him between the eyes with a colander, which Ray figured later must have weighed the equivalent of a rolling pin. Other nights she'd water his whiskey, or pour it down the sink.

The Carvers settled in Yakima, Washington, a town famous for its apples and hops. Ray was a chubby, husky boy who didn't shine at school, though he loved passionately to read. Despite the drinking, they muddled along comfortably enough until 1955, when C.R. lost his job. He went alone to California and found another position in a mill in Chester. Somehow he got sick out there. He sent a letter home saying something about an infected saw cut, though an anonymous
postcard in the same mail warned Ella that her husband was on death's door, adding ominously that he was drinking raw whiskey.

When they arrived in Chester, C.R. seemed gaunt and bewildered, and looked to have had the stuffing knocked clean out of him. Not long after that he had a breakdown and went back to Yakima, where he was treated with ECT on the fifth floor of Valley Memorial Hospital. By this time Ray had got his smart, stunning sixteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. He married Maryann on 7 June 1957, a few days after she graduated high school. In ‘My Father's Life', he wrote: ‘My dad was still locked up when my wife went into this same hospital, just one floor down, to have our first baby. After she had delivered, I went upstairs to give my dad the news.'