New Ways to Kill Your Mother (38 page)

‘My God, the suburbs!’ Cheever wrote in 1960. ‘They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in
The New York Times
only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.’ By this time he had been living in the suburbs for almost a decade, having moved in 1951 to Scarborough (with his wife, his daughter, Susan, born in 1943, and son Ben, born in 1948) and then in 1961 to a large house in Ossining, where he was to live for the rest of his life. His third child, Federico, was born in 1957 in Rome, during a family sojourn there paid for by MGM’s purchase of the rights to one of his stories for $25,000.

Cheever’s relationship with his children was very close and mostly difficult, partly because he had nothing much to do all day
except lounge around looking at them in a state of half-inebriation and total dissatisfaction. Towards the end of his life, he told colleagues that once, after a row with his wife, he woke to find a message written in lipstick by his daughter on the bathroom mirror: ‘Dere daddy, don’t leave us.’ When it was pointed out that such a scene occurs in his story ‘The Chimera’, with the same misspelling, Cheever replied: ‘Everything I write is autobiographical.’ But this was not so. Like a lot of writers, everything he wrote had a basis in autobiography and another in wishful or dreamy thinking. His daughter later denied that the scene took place: ‘I know how to spell,’ Susan Cheever said, ‘and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So “don’t leave us”? That was never the fear.’

‘Cheever,’ Bailey writes, ‘loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl”.’ As she was growing up, her father was a nightmare. ‘I defied my father’s fantasies,’ she wrote in her memoir,
Home before Dark
. ‘As an adolescent I was dumpy, plagued by acne, slumped over, and alternately shy and aggressive, and my lank straight brown hair was always in my eyes.’ When she invited boyfriends home, Cheever was not helpful. ‘He liked to invite my boyfriends off with him to go scything in the meadow or work on a felled tree with the chainsaw or clear some brush out behind the pine trees. I don’t know what happened out there, but they always came back in a rage.’ With his older son, he was almost worse. Ben, Bailey writes, was

now old enough to be a considerable disappointment in his own right: as his father was at pains to remind him, he too needed to lose weight and do better in school and (especially) take an interest in sports like other boys … Cheever, a great reader of Freud, was not consoled by the news that homosexual tendencies are somewhat innate in all people; rather he became even more vigilant in cultivating a proper ethos for his older son. ‘Speak like a man!’ he’d say, driven up the wall by the boy’s high-pitched voice, not to mention his giggling (‘You laugh like a woman!’).

Cheever picked on one of his son’s friends whom he thought was effeminate. The boy, he wrote, ‘often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer … He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.’

Cheever’s view of other writers was not sweet either. He wrote to a friend about John Updike: ‘I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.’ (Updike, when he read this remark in Cheever’s published letters in 1994, returned the compliment, when he described his feelings about Cheever’s drinking: ‘I felt badly because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.’) In 1965 Cheever (who, unlike some of his fellow writers, was not boycotting the White House) managed to heckle Updike as he read a story at a reception there. ‘The arrogance of Updike goes back to the fact that he does not consider me a peer,’ he wrote in his journals, bitterly noting that Updike considered Salinger a peer.

Out of all this hate and resentment and foolishness, two figures escaped. One was Cheever’s younger son, Federico, and the other was Saul Bellow. Cheever seems to have liked both of them; or both of them had worked out a way to evade the daily spite he directed at all others, including his editor at the
New
Yorker
, William Maxwell, who, he noted, bored him stiff. Federico got on with his father by not taking him seriously, by becoming his kid brother rather than his son, and then slowly becoming his father’s protector. ‘More and more,’ Bailey writes, ‘Federico had become the father and John the wayward boy: the latter had to be told not to swim naked in other people’s pools, not to use the chainsaw when drunk – on and on – while the former patiently absorbed the insults Cheever inflicted on whosoever presumed to look after him.’

When Cheever met Bellow in the early 1950s he felt an instant rapport with him. ‘I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte,’ he wrote. ‘I loved him,’ Bellow said in return, and added that Cheever had not tried Yankee condescension on him. ‘It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.’

When she read that Cheever said of Bellow, ‘we share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain’, Mary Cheever remarked: ‘They were both women haters.’ Certainly, most of the time, Cheever hated his wife. As the position of women in America began to change, and Mary Cheever developed independent views and ambitions, her husband’s temper was not improved. ‘Educating an unintellectual woman,’ he remarked, ‘is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. She cannot add a column of figures or make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns.’ His hatred for his wife disfigured some of his stories, including ‘An Educated American Woman’ (1963) and ‘The Ocean’ (1964). (He conceded that his depiction of ‘predatory women’ was a ‘serious weakness’ in his work.) ‘An Educated American Woman’ is perhaps the best account we have of how frightened American men were by the possibility that their wives would be anything other than little homemakers.

Just as the position of women was changing in America, so, too, the prejudice against homosexuals was fading. While Cheever was threatened by the former, it was obvious that the latter would have a profound effect on him once he left his own house in Ossining and took a look at the world. In 1973, when he began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had T. C. Boyle, Ron Hansen and Allan Gurganus as students. Not only were these talented young writers, but one of them – Gurganus – was extremely handsome (as the photograph included in Bailey’s biography makes abundantly clear) and, as Bailey puts it, ‘quite insouciantly gay’. As Cheever admired Gurganus’s work (and introduced him to Maxwell, who published one of his stories), he presumed that Gurganus would return the compliment by sleeping with him, despite the fact that he was almost fifteen years older than Gurganus’s father. Some of his letters to Gurganus were playful, including the one where he asked (in return for the Maxwell introduction) for some favours. ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’ Gurganus let him know as sweetly as he could that while he liked him, he did not want to sleep with him. ‘How dare he refuse me in favour of some dimwitted major in decorative arts,’ Cheever wrote. He asked Gurganus to consider whether such figures ‘appreciate the excellence of your character and the fineness of your mind’.

What Cheever was really looking for, as Gurganus put it, was ‘somebody who was literary, intelligent, attractive and manly, but gay on a technicality’. Early in 1977, at the University of Utah, he met Max Zimmer, a PhD candidate in his early thirties, who had been brought up as a Mormon. As Cheever felt ‘a profound stirring of love’ and came on to Max, Max felt ‘confusion and revulsion’. That spring Cheever noted:

How cruel, unnatural and black is my love for Z. I seem to mean to prey on Z’s youth, to drive Z into a tragic isolation, to deny Z any life at all. Love is to instruct, to show our beloved what we know of the sources of light, and this may be the declaration of a crafty and lecherous old man. I can only hope not.

In fact, he hoped not quite a lot of the time. And his hoping not was generally improved by sending Zimmer’s work too to the
New Yorker
.

Since Cheever took the view that sexual stimulation could improve his eyesight, part of Max’s function, once their affair began, was to offer the same comfort as a good pair of spectacles might have. (When driving at night, Cheever used to ask his wife to fondle his penis ‘to a bone’.) ‘Whenever Max submitted a manuscript,’ Bailey writes, ‘Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a handjob.’ Then (as Max noted in his journal) Cheever would ‘take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on his face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion’.

Max, who was confused, as they say, rather than actually gay, was uneasy and guilty in the Cheever household.

If he thought it was OK to parade me in front of Mary and his children, then I guess it was OK. The fact that I didn’t feel OK doing it was my problem … Obviously it’s what people in the East do, the way he takes it in stride. Sitting down at the dinner table with his family, an hour after I’ve given him a handjob and he still has stains in his corduroys from it, I guess this is OK here. It’s tearing my guts out, but Ben’s being nice to me, and Susie – who should take a fucking plate and bust it over my head – and poor Mary, you know.

In her memoir, Susan Cheever wrote about the view the family took of Max’s presence.

He was often at the house in Ossining, and although this was not a comfortable situation for him, he treated my mother with a relaxed courtesy and respect. In fact, he treated her a lot better than my father did. I was always glad to see him. He was pleasant and funny, and when they were together my father seemed more accessible than he usually was.

In 1975, at the age of sixty-three, after a drunken term spent teaching at Boston University, Cheever stopped drinking. A year later, he finished his novel
Falconer
. Susan Cheever describes that year:

My father’s certainty as a writer was never more apparent than during the year he was writing
Falconer
 … Each chapter and scene seemed to stream from his imagination already written. These were the things he had been longing to say … 
Falconer
is a novel about a man imprisoned for the murder of his brother. He is a heroin addict, and his marriage is a travesty of marriage vows. The centre of the book is a tender homosexual love affair.

When the book was published, Cheever was on the cover of
Newsweek
with the caption: ‘A Great American Novel’. The book was number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list for three weeks. In 1979 Cheever’s collected
Stories
won a Pulitzer Prize and wide critical acclaim.

Falconer
arose from the clash between the two most significant buildings in the town of Ossining: Cheever’s suburban home, which was for him and his family often like a prison, and Sing Sing. In the early 1970s, when he had exhausted himself by drinking and had also exhausted himself writing slack stories on the subject of the deep despair and the minor travails inherent in American East Coast suburban life, Cheever was invited to teach at Sing Sing, where he befriended one of the prisoners. He saw a great deal of this man when he was released. ‘Almost every set
piece in
Falconer
,’ Bailey writes, ‘almost every detail … appears somewhere in Cheever’s journal entries about Sing Sing, based on information he’d extracted from inmates.’ The novel, which is short, has a relentlessness in tone, a gravity and seriousness, which is unlike anything else Cheever wrote. It is as though the book were not merely a strained metaphor for all the anguish Cheever felt and caused in his life, but an exploration and recognition of that anguish, presented in a style that was factual but also heightened and controlled and then filled with suffering. The style is risky in the way it allows bald statement to brush against an overall vision that is like something from the Psalms. The sense of violence, hatred, pain and deep alienation is offered raw; beside this, love, or something like love, comes as dark redemption or another form of power. In the middle somewhere are the grim ordinariness of prison life and some brilliant sex scenes. If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending,
Falconer
is the best Russian novel in the English language.

Cheever’s journals for the months when he worked on his masterpiece are fascinating. He understood that even the smallest experience, such as a wait at an airport, can become something much larger in the imagination. ‘On the question of crypto-autobiography,’ he wrote,

and the fact that the greatness of fiction is not this, I am writing not from my experience as a teacher in prison but from my experience as a man. I have seen confinement in prison, but I have experienced confinement as a corporal in a line rifle company, as a stockade guard, as a traveller confined for 36 hours in the Leningrad airport during a blizzard, and for as long again in the Cairo airport during a strike. I have known emotional, sexual and financial confinements, and I have actually been confined to a dryout tank on 93rd Street for clinical alcoholics.