Seemingly driven by perversity, Weed insults old Mrs. Wrightson, who as social arbiter of the community can keep his daughter from invitations to the assemblies. In an argument about this he slaps his wife, Julia, in the face. When she prepares to leave him, he comes to his senses, sees the psychiatrist, takes up woodworking to forget his passion for the baby-sitter, and—in the end—is joyfully restored to health and happiness.
He reaches his epiphany amid a jumble of seemingly disparate images of Shady Hill at twilight. Dinner is over and the dishes are in the machine. “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.” A neighbor taking piano lessons begins to worry the Moonlight Sonata. A housemaid writes a letter to Arthur Godfrey. Francis Weed is building a coffee table in the cellar. Upstairs his son Toby takes off his cowboy outfit, climbs into a space suit, and flies from bed to floor, “landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.” Nearby, Mrs. Masterson attempts to send little Gertrude Flannery home, for everyone knows that Gertrude does not go home when she’s supposed to. In the Babcocks’ hedged-in terrace the naked Mr. Babcock pursues his unclothed wife. Mr. Nixon shouts at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. A miserable cat wanders through the garden, wearing a doll’s dress. The last to appear is Jupiter, the Labrador, in a passage Nabokov cited as among his favorites. Jupiter “prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper.” Finally the narrator concludes, in a passage Cheever himself liked to recite. “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”
Kings, elephants, and mountains in Westchester? Not likely, but then all the images Cheever has called up work against the grain of the community. The little girl who doesn’t know enough to go home, the dog with the slipper in its mouth, the naked Babcocks as handsome as any nymph and satyr—all defy the conventional patterns of Shady Hill, and Cheever’s admiration goes out to them. He wanted very much to become part of a community that would give him and his family a sense of security. But the real moments of joy came during flights of independence, brief journeys of defiance and escape that ended, usually, with a thump.
It followed that Cheever’s political indignation could be aroused—as in the case of the vendetta against Elizabeth Ames—by infringements on individual freedom. During the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, he conceived a deep enmity for the junior senator from Wisconsin and his crusade against Communism and/or for personal aggrandizement. He also spoke out on behalf of Josie Herbst, who was temporarily denied a passport because of her political associations. “Nothing that she ever did or said would have led me, or now leads me, to believe that she was a member of the Communist Party,” his affidavit declared, and in due course the passport was granted. Meanwhile he wrote Herbst bewailing “the crazy thread of associative guilt” that had been used to tie her down. In Scarborough, he reported, he’d recently run across a native Fascist. This man, a fishing companion, was strongly opposed to a public library in the community. “I want my children to grow up and be healthy and patriotic citizens,” he said, “and they don’t need books for this.”
It would be wrong to suggest that Cheever—whether in 1954 or at any other time of his life—became politically militant. He had liberal opinions and he rose to the defense of his friends, but he did not march or proselytize or talk in public on controversial issues. He did not know enough to do so. What he did know about was writing, and in the fall of 1954 he began a two-year stint as instructor in creative writing at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school. This job, teaching one class a semester, supplemented the family income and gave him an opportunity to articulate his ideas about the craft.
On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, he went down to 117th Street to meet his class of bright young women. According to English department colleague David Robertson, Cheever “donned the mantle of an academic with seemingly eager interest as well as with grace.” He felt a certain pride in teaching on the university level, since he himself had not gone to college at all. Cheever learned the departmental ropes and “was entirely congenial” as a colleague, Robertson recalls, though as an instructor teaching only one course it was not incumbent on him to do so. Privately he was appalled by the politics of the English department, in which creative writing courses were regarded as unimportant, if not frivolous.
In the classroom, Cheever was a success. He spoke, after all, as an established writer. And he spoke without prejudice, rarely belittling the work of his students. Most of them thought he was wonderful. “He was a demon for style,” remembers Judith Sherwin, who took Cheever’s “English II, 12. Story Writing” course in 1955–56. In workshop sessions, he wowed his students by taking dull sentences and making them shine with a touch of incongruity here, a gorgeous clause there. He also insisted on certain standards. Students should write about what they knew, he declared, and since most of them were young and (they thought) short on experience, they resisted this advice. Sherwin herself—now a writer and professor at the State University of New York in Albany—felt at the time that this stricture limited her too much, but has come to realize how right her instructor was. For by example as well as precept he showed how it could be done—how it was possible to “mythologize the commonplace” available at most any age. He was, Sherwin believed, the first of the magical realists.
Cheever also functioned to dampen his students’ enthusiasm for the wild artistic life. Even in those beat-generation days he invariably came to workshops and individual conferences well groomed, and wearing coat and tie. Moreover, he backed up his conventional appearance and style with knowledgeable advice. They did not have to become bohemian to succeed, he told his young women students. Few of them, he suspected, had a real vocation for drinking. And, he cautioned, it did not pay to sleep with editors in hopes of getting stories or novels published. His students listened with respect if not in entire agreement; their teacher was a professional who was publishing one wonderful story after another in The New Yorker.
In 1955, however, his artistic progress was slowed by medical difficulties. As the new year arrived, Cheever was in Phelps Memorial Hospital recovering from pneumonia. Aline Benjamin recalls visiting on New Year’s Day and finding John at work on the typewriter. “Nobody,” he said, “will give me any champagne.” Often he made his drinking a subject for humor, as in the letters he wrote to Phil and Mimi Boyer over the signature of Cassie, the family Labrador, which had been bred by the Boyers. (For a time during Susan’s youth, the Cheevers did not keep dogs, for they were thought to aggravate her asthma. Later it was decided that she was allergic only to male dogs, and thereafter a succession of handsome, clumsy, and affectionate female Labradors lived with the family.) In her letter, Cassie said that on the trip up to Treetops there had been an argument over where they should stop for lunch, with the old man holding out for a Chinese restaurant where he could get a martini. This was all in good fun, but liquor and sex already posed real problems for Cheever. Two or three times in the early 1950s, he consulted psychiatrist Bernard Glueck, “complaining of difficulty with the handling of alcohol and homosexual concerns.”
At Thanksgiving, Cheever spent another holiday in the hospital, this time to have his “hindquarters rebushed.” A pleasant side effect of these periods of physical discomfort was that Mary always “took wonderful care” of him during recuperation. And despite his illnesses he found much to be thankful for: the light in the sky, the miracle of human love. Depression had often been his companion, he wrote Eleanor Clark at midsummer from Nantucket. Until recently, he’d been “an odd mixture of man and cockroach.” Now the cockroach seemed to have gone. In gratitude he joined All Saints Episcopal Church.
It was during that summer at Nantucket, too, that Harper & Brothers bought up the contract for his novel from Random House. As Cheever romanticized the tale, publisher Simon Michael Bessie sailed into Wauwinet on his yacht, st
epped ashore with a flourish, and made the deal on the spot.
As Bessie remembers it, he and Cheever progressed from social acquaintance to an author-publisher relationship in two less dramatic steps. Though they had met previously at various gatherings, it was during a long lunch at Gerald Malsby’s house in 1953 that they talked seriously for the first time. The subject was Saul Bellow, a writer Cheever greatly admired. Bellow was the only important American novelist, he maintained, who wrote neither out of sympathy with nor in opposition to the Puritan tradition. Up to that time, Bessie had thought of Cheever as an extremely gifted but perhaps overfacile chronicler of his middle-class world. Their conversation about Bellow struck a deeper, more illuminating note. Mike asked him to write an essay on the subject for Harper’s magazine. Cheever did not: literary essays were not his sort of thing.
Still, that luncheon encounter cleared the way for a favorable response a few years later when Cheever wrote Bessie a note that went more or less as follows:
Dear Mike:
These old bones are for sale. I have a contract with Random House for a novel which I may never write but which I will certainly never write for them. The price of these bones is $2400, which is the advance I’ve taken against this novel.
“Where do I send the $2400?” Bessie replied.
The contract with Harper generously allowed Cheever up to five years to deliver his novel. And Bessie also agreed never, never to ask Cheever how the novel was progressing. He did not have long to wait, for Cheever was sailing along on his third and marvelously successful attempt to convert the saga of a New England family into book-length fiction. He’d given the book a new name: The Wapshot Chronicle. The career that looked so dismal in 1951 was shining bright, and there were still sunnier days ahead.
ITALY
1956–1957
Two prizes awarded Cheever’s short stories presaged the success that lay ahead. In May 1955 “The Five-Forty-Eight” won the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award for the best short story of 1954. In January 1956 “The Country Husband” won the O. Henry Award for the best story of 1955. Cheever took pleasure in making light of these prizes. He had to go to Washington to accept the Benjamin Franklin one, for which he received a scroll depicting a naked man “scratching on a tablet.” Mary Liley Cheever, dying in a two-family house in Quincy, read the story about the Franklin Award in the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. “I saw it in the newspaper that you got a prize,” she told her son over the telephone. “Oh yes,” John said. “I didn’t mention it to you because I thought it wouldn’t interest you.” “Oh, you are so right,” she said. “It doesn’t interest me at all.” Now “that was Massachusetts,” Cheever liked to say in telling this story.
His mother suffered through the decade after her husband’s death with arthritis, a stroke, and a broken leg. None of these ailments received medical attention. Mrs. Cheever preferred the consolations of Christian Science, and even maintained that a reader in the church had prayed over a tumor and arrested it. At the end she was virtually immobile and alone in her duplex, except for the oppressive company of the claw-footed furniture that survived the loss of the house at 123 Winthrop. John saw his mother shortly before she died on Washington’s Birthday of 1956. She spoke calmly about her approaching death. “You must not be upset when I die,” she told him. “I am quite happy to go. I’ve done everything I was meant to do and quite a lot that I wasn’t meant to do.”
Later he was to say that she ordered a case of Scotch and drank it down to ease her passing, but that story probably had its origins in his own troubles with alcohol. At the time of his mother’s death in February 1956, he told no such tale. Like her husband before her, she died at eighty-two. Gus Lobrano, who edited Cheever’s early stories for The New Yorker and taught him how to fish, died later that same week.
Benumbed by the double loss, he set off for Yaddo to recover by working on The Wapshot Chronicle. For twenty years, the novel had been building up inside of him. Now it came pouring out. To make it do double duty, he sold sections of it to The New Yorker. “I don’t like to cut it into small pieces,” he commented, but his financial situation left him no choice, and the magazine was accommodating. Four chunks of the novel ran there in advance of publication.
As his novel grew, chapter by wonderful chapter, so did Cheever’s reputation. In April he got word of a thousand-dollar award in literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Malcolm Cowley, then president, signed the citation to John Cheever,
who with constantly increasing precision of style, sharpness of eye, and wry sympathy of heart, has commemorated the poetry of that most unpoetical life, the middle class life of the American metropolis and its suburbs. He knows the comedy and the pathos of his subject and he is a master of his form.
At the party for grantees and new members in May, Cheever enjoyed himself more than he thought he should have, and afterward he delivered a homily to Susan. Honors didn’t matter, he told her, work was all that mattered. But it was not easy to get back to work. Soon yet another distinction descended from Saratoga, where he was elected to the board of Yaddo.
Despite these interruptions, by June 21 the novel was done and in the mail. At least it looked like a novel, John wrote Eleanor Clark: it cost more postage than a short story. The other piece of good news came from Hollywood, where Dore Schary of M-G-M bought film rights to “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” for forty thousand dollars. With that money in the bank, the Cheevers made firm plans to go to Italy in the autumn, a trip they had been contemplating for years. In the meantime they spent six weeks at the house of Arthur and Stella Spear in Friendship, Maine. There Cheever anxiously awaited a reaction to his typescript from Harper & Brothers and engaged in that fictionalizing exploration of other people’s houses, other people’s lives that was, for him, part of the charm of rented summer places.
These places usually summoned up at least the beginning of a story. Summer cottages revealed their past in the books left behind, or the absence of them, and in the paintings or other displays on the wall. At Wauwinet on Nantucket, pencil markings recorded the growth of children who had lived there for the past sixty years, and Cheever could not resist inventing tales about them. At Nantucket’s Surfside, in the Yates-Shepard cottage, Cheever conjured up a divorce. She was a watercolorist and he a slim young man from New York. Why did they quarrel? When did he leave?
Perhaps because he knew the Spears too well, Friendship did not arouse such story-making instincts. The place refused to “unfold” for him. A village sixteen miles south of Rockland, the town featured the capricious weather of the Maine coast. Looking out the windows on a foggy day was like “looking at a stone.” Yet when the sun shone, it seemed like “the top of the world.” She would recognize Friendship from her Maine days with Robert Lowell, he wrote Jean Stafford: “Bostonians … sunsets … and at dusk the whole point awash in tea.” On July 1, the tea gave way to beer during a clambake on an island in the bay. Everyone drank too much waiting for the lobsters and clams to cook. To sober up, Cheever dived into the sea, often.
The Friendship sojourn was over and the Cheevers back in Scarborough before Harper’s responded to his manuscript. While he waited, John composed both congratulatory letters (“Dazzling,” “Brilliant”) and discouraging ones (“Write it off to experience”) in his mind. Finally Mike Bessie called, said how much everyone liked the book, and invited Cheever down to lunch at the Vanderbilt Hotel. Still apprehensive, Cheever announced before the meal that he had two things to say. “First, if you don’t really like the book I’ll be glad to give you back your twenty-four hundred dollars.” At this point Bessie interrupted to reassure him. They thought The Wapshot Chronicle was wonderful. Fellow editor Evan Thomas thought it the best thing that had happened to Harper’s fiction list for years. “We are proud,” Mike said, “to have the chance to publish it.”
“Well,” Cheever said, “the second thing I want to say is that you may think there are too many smells in the book, and
I just want you to know I’m not going to take any of them out. I am a very olfactory fellow.” Bessie had in fact noticed the preponderance of smells in the novel—they are used, often, to summon up place and period—but under the circumstances said nothing at all about that. Instead he spent most of the lunch telling Cheever how much he admired him for what he’d done, and what a good book he’d written. So little editing was required that Bessie felt he hadn’t done his job.
With The Wapshot Chronicle in production, the Cheevers began to prepare in earnest for their trip to Italy. They planned to spend a year overseas. The Scarborough house was rented to young novelist Stephen Becker and his family. Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren, already living in Rome, were enlisted to help look for a suitable apartment. John booked passage on the Conte Biancamano, leaving October 17 and arriving in Naples on November 1. It was hard to get any work done with the trip in prospect. All his ideas “turned to smoke at the thought of leaving.”
Cheever recorded the details of the voyage to Italy in “Atlantic Crossing,” the only one of his journals so far published. Keeping a journal was an important part of Cheever’s writing regimen. The habit came down to him, he said, from the sea captains and sailors among his ancestors, men who habitually set down the weather and the events of the day. He used his journals not only to report what happened, but also to warm up for his fiction, to report anecdotes, to chastise others, to daydream about men and women he was attracted to or was having affairs with, and to entertain private thoughts.
“Atlantic Crossing” is much less inward-looking than most of Cheever’s thirty-plus journals. Instead it reads like an extended diary, invigorated by the author’s sensitivity to places and the people who inhabit them. The family went first class, partly because Mary, thirty-eight, was more than three months pregnant. At sea they ran into a week of bad weather. Nearly everyone got sick, including the orchestra and the assistant bartender, but Cheever did not. The ship itself seemed like “a cross between the Fall River Line and the old Ritz.” Cheever swam in the ship’s pool, walked the promenade deck, took Italian lessons, read to eight-year-old Ben (who had smuggled his white mouse, Barbara Fritchie, on board), and singled out drinking companions. At night there were hat parties and flamenco dancing and horse races. Susie, thirteen, roamed the ship as if it were what she was meant for, dancing with the officers and sipping ginger ale in the lounge with other girls her age. The talk of the ship was the Belgian beauty with the three-octave laugh. Cheever watched in fascination as she charmed every male on board with her nearly infinite variety. “She is coarse, she is witty, she is a countess, she is a little girl selling matches in the snow.” He spoke also with the Southern woman in whose voice could be heard, “not unpleasantly, the notes of a hound dog.” He observed the scrawny Dartmouth professor and his boyish secretary with the scarf tossed gaily over his shoulder. “Do they? Don’t they?” he wondered.