The Trip to Echo Spring (7 page)

The problem, as anyone who has read Cheever's journals will know, is that the same gulf between appearance and interior that makes his stories so beguiling was also at work in his own life, though here it produced less pleasurable effects. Despite an increasingly command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever couldn't shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle classes. Partly, this was a matter of money. Even when he was packing his daughter into the cab that took her each morning to private school, he was painfully aware that he remained too poor to tip the doorman or pay his bills on time. ‘The rent is not paid,' he noted despairingly in his journal of 1948, ‘we have very little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs.'

An oft-repeated anecdote from the Sutton Place years has Cheever taking the elevator each morning: a dapper little figure in suit and tie, indistinguishable from the other hard-working, well-scrubbed men who crowd in on every floor. But while they stream out of the lobby,
rushing off to workplaces across the city, he descends to the basement, strips to his underwear, and settles at his typewriter, emerging, suited once more, in time for pre-lunch drinks. The sense of himself as both forger and forgery could be thrilling, but in his journal Cheever added dolefully: ‘It is a tonic to my self-respect to leave the basement room.'

Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness. All the same, Cheever's sense of double-dealing seems to have run unusually deep. After a New Year spent upstate with some wealthy friends, he wrote in baffled fury a thought that had occurred to him while folding, of all things, a monogrammed towel:

It was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

This burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever under wraps, was not just a matter of class anxiety. Cheever lived in the painful knowledge that his erotic desires included men, that these desires were antagonistic and even fatal to the social security he also craved, and that as such ‘every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol'. During this period, his sense of failure and self-disgust could reach such agonising heights that he sometimes raised in his journals the possibility of suicide.

Who wouldn't drink in a situation like that, to ease the pressure of maintaining such intricately folded double lives? He'd been hitting it
hard since his late teens: initially, like Tennessee Williams, out of a desire to quell his acute social anxiety. In the bohemian Village of the 1930s and 40s, alcohol was still the omnipresent lubricant of social exchange, and even in the depths of poverty, he'd managed to find the funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen manhattans or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends' apartments, at Treetops (his wealthy wife's family estate in New Hampshire), in the Breevort Hotel, the back room at the Plaza or in the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he'd pop in after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while he attended to his needs.

Though not all these scenes were exactly civilised, alcohol was an essential ingredient of Cheever's ideal of a cultured life, one of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent shadows of inferiority and shame. In a journal entry written the summer before he married Mary, he recorded the following fantasy:

I found myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I've never learnt to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles' five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones' Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty . . . moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.

In this pleasant daydream, drinking is not about anything so vulgar as gratifying an appetite, but rather part of an elaborate social code, in which the right thing done at the right time conveys a near-magical sense of belonging. The monopole is ordered and iced, not drunk; the martini only tasted; while the Vouvray is merely transferred from one container to another, more appropriate to the demands of the season and the hour.

The same note sounds again from another, later diary entry, written in September 1941, when Cheever was on a ten-day furlough from the army. ‘Mary was waiting,' he writes happily, ‘all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad-greens, etc., filled the ice-box.' What's interesting about this memory, which recalls Ratty's gleeful iteration of his picnic in
Wind in the Willows,
is the emphasis on cleanliness as well as largesse.
Shined
,
clean
,
shining
,
clean
: an antidote to the grubby privations of camp life, perhaps. But in its obsessive repetitions, it also resembles an incantation, a spell for safety and good health (clean, after all, is a hospital word, particularly clean sheets, while the preserving ice-box also has a hospital, even a morgueish, chill about it). As such, it's hard not to read those ranked bottles as a kind of medicine, a prophylactic against the sense of dirtiness and disorder that would continue to dog Cheever from house to house, from year to year.

I was jolted out of this line of thought by a man in the bar saying distinctly
Ossining.
How strange. Ossining is a small town in Westchester County, forty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. It's still best known, years after his death, as Cheever's adopted
hometown (after he died the flags of the public buildings were lowered for ten days). Coincidentally, it's also where Tennessee Williams's mentally ill sister Rose spent most of her adult life, in an institution he both chose and paid for. It's one of those places that exist in the limbo of the reader's mind, inexorably associated with the melancholy, suburban stories Cheever used to write for the
New Yorker
.

I looked up. The Ossining man was sitting with the woman whose blouse I'd coveted. He was balding and wore one of those jaunty navy blazers with gleaming buttons that are supposed to lend one a nautical air. They were evidently cornering into a spectacular row.

‘So,' she said. ‘What is your marriage? Are you happily married? What is your home situation?'

‘Happily? Happily would be the right word. I guess I'm happily married. But I'm attracted to you. I can't control that.'

‘I'm just wondering what you've been doing since this morning.'

‘As a matter of fact I went home around noon. I told work I had a very important client to entertain. Don't be hurt or confused if I say I have a happy marriage. Really, if I was truly happy I wouldn't be here with you.'

Jeez. I wondered for a minute if they could be actors, rehearsing for some rotten soap, though perhaps I'd just seen
Tootsie
one too many times. The man got up and moved around the table, sliding in beside her on the banquette. ‘I think most men would think they'd have sex with a Russian woman with their wallet in their hand,' he said. ‘Russian women are crazy about money.' She looked at him blankly and he added: ‘Oh come on, you've heard that before.' I began to gather my things, and as I did I heard him say: ‘It was the most
important moment of my life. I remember every second of it. And now you've ruined it for me.'

If this was a Tennessee Williams play she'd lose the plot and start screaming, or else she'd crush him like Alexandra del Lago in
Sweet Bird of Youth
, who can't be made into a victim by anyone, even though her looks are fading and she is terrified of death. And if, on the other hand, it was a John Cheever story, he'd have sex with her and then go home to his wife and children in Ossining, where no doubt someone would be playing a piano. He'd mix a martini and go out on to the porch and look over the orchard to the lake, where the family skate in the winter months. Gazing dreamily into the blue light of evening, he'd see a dog, a dog named Jupiter, who'd come prancing through the tomato vines, ‘holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.'

I'd stolen, of course, the closing scene of ‘The Country Husband', with its swerve up and away, out of the trenches, the animal earth, as if gravity were just a joke and the yaw and pitch of flight was somehow in our repertoire. Recently, I'd begun to become suspicious of this weightless element in Cheever's work, to see it as another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking. Now, however, the line seemed very lovely, an antidote to the harshness that is all too present in the world. I folded a few dollars on the table and left the King Cole then, spinning through the revolving door and escaping, a little tipsy myself, into the cold, illuminated air.

3

FISHING IN THE DARK

WHEN I TOLD AN AMERICAN
friend I was travelling by train from New York to New Orleans she looked at me incredulously. ‘It's not like
Some Like It Hot
any more,' she said, but I didn't listen. I love trains. I love gazing out of the window as the cities slide by, and I couldn't think of anything more pleasurable than taking a sleeper, crossing in darkness through the Blue Ridge Mountains and waking with the dawn in Atlanta or Tuscaloosa.

In the interests of thriftiness I'd decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I'd do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat'. Before I left the Elysée for Penn Station I looked again at the route map. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: twelve states. Still, I guessed it would be less arduous than Tennessee Williams's first trip to New Orleans. In December 1938 he travelled by bus from Chicago, stopping off to see his family in St. Louis and arriving in the south just in time to ring in the New Year. It was the Depression and he had no job and
hardly any money, but all the same he felt at home immediately, writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was
made
for if any place in this funny old world.'

At the station there were people charging in every possible direction, and yet as soon as I worked out which check-in desk I needed, it all proceeded with beautiful efficiency. A uniformed porter took my bags down to the train and advised me against the seats above the wheels. It seemed like a return to a more civilised age and I felt for a moment, if not like Sugar Cane, then at least equal to Jack Lemmon's Daphne, sashaying along the platform in his ill-fitting heels.

The first stop was Philadelphia. I took a window seat, stowed my bags and arranged all my little bits and bobs in easy reach: that strange homemaking impulse that overcomes travellers on overnight trips. iPod, notebook, water, a bag of sticky grapes I'd bought after hearing yet another horror story about Amtrak food. I spread my plaid blanket over my knees and as I did a great wave of claustrophobia overtook me. I was at the time at the tail end of a period of chronic insomnia. I could barely sleep in my own bed, with earplugs and an eye mask. My flat had been broken into ages back, and ever since my reticular activation system had locked on red alert.

Only those who are persistently deprived of sleep can understand the panic that wells up when the conditions it requires are likely to go unmet. Sleeplessness, as Keats put it, breeds many woes. That maggoty word
breeds
is exactly right, for who lying awake at three or four or five in the morning hasn't felt their thoughts take on an insectile life, or experienced a minute crawling of the skin? Sleep is magically efficacious at smoothing out the tangles of the day, and a shortage makes one agitated to the point of lunacy.

As anyone who's ever drunk too much will also know, alcohol has a complicated relationship to sleep. Its initial effect is sedative: the slumpy somnolence most of us are familiar with. But alcohol also disrupts sleep patterns and reduces sleep quality, limiting and postponing the amount of time spent in the restorative waters of REM, where the body both physically and psychologically replenishes itself. This explains why sleep after a wild night is so often shallow and broken into pieces.

Chronic drinking causes more permanent disturbances in what's known prettily as the
sleep circuitry
: damage that can persist long after sobriety has been attained. According to a paper by Kirk Brower entitled ‘Alcohol's Effects on Sleep in Alcoholics', sleep problems are more common among alcoholics than the population at large. What's more, ‘sleep problems may predispose some people to developing alcohol problems', and are in addition often implicated in relapse.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway suffered from insomnia, and their writing on the subject is full of submerged clues about their drinking. The two men first met in May 1925 in the Dingo American Bar on the Rue Delambre in Paris, when Fitzgerald was twenty-eight and Hemingway was twenty-five. At the time, Fitzgerald was one of America's best known and best paid short story writers. He was the author of three novels,
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned
and
The Great Gatsby,
which had been published a few weeks before. A pretty man, with neat little teeth and unmistakably Irish features, he'd been careering around Europe with his wife Zelda and their small daughter Scottie. ‘Zelda painting, me drinking,' he recorded in his
Ledger
for the month of April, adding in June: ‘1000 parties and no work.'

In a way, the bingeing shouldn't have mattered. He'd just finished
Gatsby,
after all; that perfectly weighted novel. Its great strength is its indelibility: the way it enters into you, leaving a trail of images like things seen from a moving car. Jordan's hand, lightly powdered over her tan. Gatsby flinging out armfuls of shirts for Daisy to look at: a mounting pile of apple green and coral and pale orange, monogrammed in blue. People drifting in and out of parties, or riding away on horseback, leaving behind some lingering suggestion of a snub. A little dog sneezing in a smoky room and a woman bleeding fluently on to a tapestried couch. The owl-eyed man in the library, and Gatsby's list of self-improvements, and Daisy being too hot and saying in her lovely throaty voice that she hopes her daughter will be a beautiful little fool. The green light winking, and Gatsby calling Nick
old sport,
and Nick thinking of catching the train back to St. Paul and seeing the shadows of holly wreaths cast on to the snow.

A different man could have survived a blowout after building something as lovely and as durable as that. But Fitzgerald was too unanchored to be able to tolerate his chosen pace of life. For years, he and Zelda had been reeling hectically around the globe, ricocheting from New York to St. Paul, to Great Neck, to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, trailing wreckage in their wake. Just before he'd arrived in Paris there'd been a particularly troublesome spell. Zelda had an affair with a French aviator and was becoming very strange, while Fitzgerald was drinking heavily and getting into fights, at one point ending up in a Roman jail, a scene he'd later use to mark Dick Diver's definitive loss of control in
Tender is the Night,
the novel he'd just begun.

As for Hemingway, he was knee-deep in what he'd later remember as the happiest period of his life. He was married to Hadley Richardson,
his first wife, and had a small son he nicknamed Mr. Bumby. There's a photograph of him taken around that time, in a thick sweater, shirt and tie, looking a little chubby. He has a new moustache, but it doesn't quite disguise the boyish softness of his face. Three years back, in 1922, Hadley had accidentally lost a suitcase containing all his manuscripts, and so the book of stories he'd just published,
In Our Time,
represented entirely new material, or at the least new versions of lost originals.

The two men liked one another immediately. You can tell from even the most casual glance through their letters, which are stuffed with good-natured insults and statements as frankly loving as: ‘I can't tell you how much your friendship has meant to me' and ‘My god I'd like to see you'. As well as being good company, Fitzgerald was also of professional assistance to Hemingway that year. Before they'd even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young man. In a letter to Perkins written a few weeks after their first meeting in the Dingo, Hemingway noted that he was seeing a lot of Scott, adding enthusiastically: ‘We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon.'

The next summer Fitzgerald helped out again, this time by casting a critical eye over Hemingway's new novel,
The Sun Also Rises.
In a characteristically insightful and badly spelled letter, he suggested that the first twenty-nine pages (full of ‘sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings-at-nothing . . . elephantine facetiousness') be cut, though in the end Hemingway could only bring himself to dispense with fifteen. ‘You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe,' he adds, to soften the blow, before confessing a few lines on: ‘I go crazy when people aren't always at their best.'

At the time this letter was written, Hemingway had got himself into a fix. He'd fallen in love with a wealthy, boyishly attractive American, Pauline Pfeiffer. Over the course of the summer (in which he, Hadley and Pauline holidayed together in Fitzgerald's old villa in Juan-les-Pins), it became increasingly clear that his marriage was finished. ‘Our life is all gone to hell,' he wrote to Scott on 7 September. He spent a suicidal autumn alone in Paris, was divorced from Hadley on 27 January 1927 and by spring had resolved to marry Pauline.

During the course of the break-up he suffered punishing insomnia. In the same 7 September letter, he used the word
hell
a second time to describe his condition ever since meeting Pauline, adding:

. . . with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could study the terrain I get sort of used to it and fond of it and probably would take pleasure in showing people around it. As we make our hell we certainly should like it.

Insomnia as a light to view a hellish terrain. The idea evidently appealed to him, because it reoccurs as the foundation of a story he wrote soon after. A long time back, before he'd met even Hadley, Hemingway had served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy in the First World War. While bringing chocolate to the soldiers on the front, he'd been blown up by mortar fire and had spent a long time in hospital with a badly damaged leg. In November 1926, he wrote a story inspired by this experience, though it ranged out much further than that.

‘Now I Lay Me' begins with Nick Adams (not Hemingway exactly, but rather a kind of stand-in self or avatar, who shares various items of his childhood and wartime record) lying on the floor of a room at night,
trying not to sleep. As he lies there, he listens to silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. ‘I myself did not want to sleep,' he explains, ‘because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back.'

To ward off this terrifying eventuality, he carries out a nightly ritual. Lying in the dark, listening to the small noises of feeding from above, he fishes very carefully in his mind the rivers he knew as a boy: the trout rivers of Michigan, with their deep pools and swift, shallow stretches. Sometimes he finds grasshoppers in the open meadows, and uses them for bait, and at other times he collects wood ticks or beetles or white grubs with brown heads, and once a salamander, though that's not an experiment he repeats. Sometimes, too, the rivers are imaginary, and these can be very exciting, and easily carry him through to dawn. These fishing adventures are so detailed it's often hard to remember that they aren't real; that they're fictional even inside the fiction: a story a man is telling himself in secret, a manufactured substitute for the sort of wayward, nocturnal journeys he might otherwise be making.

On this particular night – the night of the silkworms in the mulberry leaves – there's only one other person in the room, and he too is incapable of sleep. Both are soldiers, in Italy in the First World War. Nick is American, and the other man has lived in Chicago, though he's Italian by birth. Lying there in the dark they get to talking, and John asks Nick why he never sleeps (though actually he can manage just fine when there's a light on, or after the sun has risen). ‘I got in pretty bad shape along early last spring, and at night it bothers me,' he says casually and that's all the explanation he offers, except for the
mention of being blown up at night at the very beginning of the story. Instead, the weight of his injury is carried by those dream rivers, its severity only really gaugeable by the enormous efforts he makes to circumvent it. He's certainly not going to tell the reader directly how bad it feels to lie there, thinking you might die at any minute.

Fitzgerald's own take on the hells of sleeplessness came seven years later, with an essay called ‘Sleeping and Waking'. It ran in
Esquire
in December 1934, when he was careering into the breakdown he'd confess to eighteen months later in ‘The Crack-up', a much more famous trio of essays for the same magazine. At the time of writing, Fitzgerald was living in Baltimore with his daughter. His wife was in a mental institution, he was drinking heavily, and the days of being carefree in Paris and the Riviera had vanished as conclusively as they did for poor Dick Diver in
Tender is the Night
– though you could argue that they'd only been carefree in the sense that a man on a tightrope is carefree, soft-shoeing along without the slightest sign of strain or effort.

Writing in praise of Fitzgerald years later, John Cheever observed that his genius lies in the provision of details. Clothes, dialogue, drinks, hotels, incidental music: all are precisely rendered, plunging the reader into the lost world of the Riviera or West Egg or Hollywood or wherever it is we are. The same is true in this essay, though it's by no means the most glamorous of his stage sets. Aside from one brief visit to a New York hotel room, the drama is confined to the bedroom of the author's own house in Baltimore, with small forays out into the study and the porch.

In this room he suffers what might be described as a rupture in the fabric of sleep, a widening interval of wakefulness between the first easy plunge into unconsciousness and the deep rest that comes
after the sky has begun to lighten. This is the moment, he declares in grand and untranslated Latin, that's referred to in the Psalms as ‘Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris', which means: ‘His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night, of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark.'