These passages, lively and unhesitant in the usual Cheever style, cast a new light upon the time we shared, in the fall of 1964, in the Soviet Union, a time I recalled so affectionately in the words I spoke at his burial service: “The Russians were drawn to his courage and ebullience and became more themselves in his presence. John was a great spirit, and these connoisseurs of the spirit knew it, and loved him.” The impression that I made upon him, it saddens me to realize, was less favorable. I arrived when he was midway in his own month of cultural exchange, just after Nikita Khrushchev had been, in the grand tradition of Kremlin skulduggery, mysteriously removed from office. I came with my wife, where Cheever was alone—insofar as one could be alone amid the ubiquitous Soviet escorts and translators and their jealously watchful American counterparts. Though I was twenty years younger than Cheever, a bit more of my work had been translated into Russian, and my relative youth—I was thirty-two, about the same age as Yevtushenko and Vosnesensky, the glamour boys of Russian poetry and of the momentary Khrushchevian thaw—was perhaps endearing to our hosts; in the Communist world my eager middle-American naïveté may have been more intelligible than Cheever’s wry East Coast diffidence. I led a rather sheltered existence back home but as a cultural emissary, in a culture full of strangeness and menace and flattery, I became, on stage, quite talkative. At one of our joint appearances, I blush to remember, observing our audience’s total ignorance of Cheever’s remarkable work, I took it upon myself to stand up and describe it, fulsomely if not accurately, while my topic sat at my side in a dignified silence that retrospectively feels dour. Perhaps it felt dour at the time: the thought that I might have seemed officious flitted, batlike, through my mind as the limousine hauled us on to the next exposure.
John Cheever was a golden name to me—a happy inhabitant of The New Yorker penthouse all those years I was staring up from the sidewalk. In fact, it was my covetous dissatisfaction with one of his most assured and sardonic tales of suburban life, “O Youth and Beauty!,” that goaded me to write a contrastingly benign story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” which The New Yorker, to my undying gratification, accepted. In my youthful innocence I had mistakenly misread Cheever, one of the most celebratory of writers, as a misanthropic satirist. Never mind—my misapprehension gave me the needed push, the crystallizing spark; my debt to him was real. My appreciation of his prose, in the next ten years, as I ripened into a suburban householder myself, had deepened and widened. It is very hard for a young writer to imagine that an older, with a famous name and his books deathless on the shelf, might be unhappy or have feelings that can be hurt. Incredulously I heard Cheever confide, on a night when—our cultural duties for the day behind us—my wife and I and he sat up talking in the hotel, that it had been three years since he had had a story accepted at The New Yorker. He found it, he said, a considerable relief. It seemed very obvious to me at the time that The New Yorker knew best, was best, and that, for all the editors’ sometimes meddlesome perfectionism and, in that era, anachronistic nice-nellyism, its pages were far above all other possible display cases. Cheever’s confession made me sad and, yes, exultant: one less competitor for that delicious glossy space between the cover and the back-page whisky ad. I was so ardent a contributor that even amid the rigors of the Soviet trip, in one neo-czarist hotel room after another, I managed to write and send off, in pencilled copy, a few poems, which Cheever in a letter to Tanya Litvinov that June, when I evidently weighed on his mind, described as “some assinine [sic] poems on Russian cities in the last New Yorker.”
I have read wonderingly, as the rapid posthumous invasion of his privacy has proceeded, of his discontents with The New Yorker even in the decades of his prime there, of his financial straits and ruinous drinking, of his sexual straying and ambivalence, of his inconsolable insecurity. Looking back, I can almost see how he might have envied me not only my twenty years’ juniority and my Harvard education and my translated Centaur but the companionship, in Russia, of my wife—named, like his own, Mary and, during that excursion, a kind of Russian beauty, with a friendly dimple and a sturdy capacity for vodka. Another of his letters to Exley cooks up a fantastic triangle, in gaudy Cheeverian colors:
Our [his and my] troubles began at the Embassy in Moscow when he came on exclaiming: “What are you looking so great about? I thought you’d be dead.” He then began distributing paper-back copies of the Centaur while I distributed hard-cover copies of The Brigadier [and the Golf Widow, his latest collection of short stories]. On the train up to Leningrad he tried to throw my books out of the window but his lovely wife Mary intervened. She not only saved the books; she read one. She had to hide it under her bedpillow and claim to be sick. She said he would kill her if he knew. At the University of Leningrad he tried to upstage me by reciting some of his nonsense verse but I set fire to the contents of an ashtray and upset the water carafe. But when I pointed out to President and Mrs. Johnson that the bulkiness of his appearance was not underwear—it was autographed copies of The Centaur—he seemed deeply wounded.
The allusion to the Johnsons harks back to the same White House event where he almost put a cherry bomb in my bug juice—a gala for National Honor Students, including an entertainment in which I read. Cheever is cited as an authority on my performance, in a letter by S. J. Perelman* to Ogden Nash: “The very next morning I had to fly to Washington to a reception for Presidential scholars at which J. Cheever was a great help. Also present at this was that eminence gris, J. O’Hara, and that somewhat younger eminence & literatus, J. Updike. The latter read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I couldn’t personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page. But Cheever brought me tidings that all three extracts dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike’s. When I asked Cheever whether Lady Bird was present, he informed me that she was seated smack in the middle of the first row. What are we coming to?”
In truth, only one of the passages, from the end of the fourth chapter of The Centaur, touched upon (so to speak) masturbation, and so deftly I had assumed only the most sensitive and corrupt of the honor students would get it. The effect, of finding myself discussed with such gleeful malice in the letters of men whom I idolized, and whose works I had pondered in my teens as gifts from above and signposts to heaven, is chastening, perhaps edifyingly so. Aspiring, we assume that those already in possession of eminence will feel no squeeze as we rise, and will form an impalpable band of welcoming angels. In fact, I know now, the literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers. I met Perelman on a few occasions—most memorably at Lillian Hellman’s on the Vineyard, where his pink face, pince-nez, impeccable dress, and dignified bearing, as of a well-established West 47th Street diamond merchant, made an entirely favorable impression—but I really associate him with the comfort his Acres and Pains brought me as an adolescent transplanted to some Pennsylvania acres even more weedy than his own, with the admiration we young quipsters at the Harvard Lampoon felt for his New Yorker contributions, and with the actual hard laughter his amazingly ornate and cunningly adjusted sentences faithfully sprang from my voice box. He was the last humorist of his droll generation to keep practicing, and to think that I was, however modestly, an irritant to his exquisite sensibility is almost a source of pride. To those who yearn to join the angels, even the sound of angelic mockery is music. And dead men shouldn’t be blamed for having their private letters published.
In reality, Cheever was always courteous to me and increasingly friendly and kind. He took to writing me impulsive, complimentary notes, such as one saying of a book review of mine, “You speak of literature as if it played some part in civilization and I feel briefly that perhaps I’m not ironing shirts in the back of a Chinese laundry.” The year before he died, looking unwell, he had himself driven down to New York so he could appear on the Dick
Cavett Show with me and tell the world that my new novel was “important”—a word he kept using, with an effect of litany. That same last year of his, he and Mary gave me and my second wife lunch at Ossining; though he had no appetite, he sat at the table, courtly and witty, and then took us on a brief excursion to his favorite local sight, the Croton Dam. My wife took a photograph of the two of us there, and John is visibly in pain, yellowish and compressed and frowning. Yet such was his vitality, and the dazzling veil of verbal fun he spun around himself, that only the photograph made me realize how bravely ill he was that day.
For eight months, ten years after our Russian episode, he and I lived at opposite ends of Boston’s Back Bay, both estranged from our Marys, both in a brick-lined limbo. He had come to teach at Boston University in bad shape, and got no better. Boston and its settings from his youth weighed on him heavily, and alcohol had reduced his mind to a mumble. I seem to remember seeing the first sentences of Falconer on a piece of paper in his typewriter, but the page and the platen never moved, nor did food appear in his refrigerator or books on his bookshelves. The apartment the university had given him on Bay State Road looked no more lived-in than a bird perch. My attempts to entertain him generally misfired. The old Garbo film at the Museum of Fine Arts was sold out when we arrived, and our main adventure of the night was my getting us lost in Roxbury and his jumping from the car to buy a pack of cigarettes at a dark and heavily grated corner emporium. When I came to take him to Symphony Hall one Tuesday night, he was standing naked on the third-story landing outside his door; his costume indicated some resistance to attending symphony but I couldn’t imagine what else, and I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes. We arrived late and lasted until intermission, when he felt compelled to leave and go buy a bottle of gin around the corner, from a surly salesman who failed to realize he was dealing not with an old rummy but with one of America’s most distinguished authors. John pulled his Brahmin accent on him, showed him his ready cash, and got the gin. He had the distracted air of a man convinced that the real fun was elsewhere. Some of the bizarre things he saw in the students’ windows on Bay State Road (which he indignantly called “a slum”) worked their way into the prison milieu of Falconer. B.U. to him was prison.
My scattered memories of those eight months—which ended when, having rather miraculously failed to kill himself with alcohol, he took himself to New York City and dried out for good, finished Falconer, and embarked upon seven years of sobriety and celebrity—seem to center on his acts of consumerism. Our first meeting occurred by accident, in the dry sunshine of September 1974, outside of Brooks Brothers, where he had come to buy shoes. He invited me to follow him in. He was somewhat satirical about the tassels on the footwear the salesman offered him, but he bought two pairs anyway. I was struck by that, his carefreely buying two pairs at once, and by the way, in the Kon-Tiki bar of the Park Plaza, where we repaired afterward to renew old acquaintance, he insisted to the waiter that the drinks he was brought be doubles. His insistence was anxious, as if a drink that was merely single might in its weakness poison him. Yet when, after three or so of these, John stood up to go, he exclaimed, in a drawl of surprise, “God—I’m drunk!!”
He did seem a bit wobbly. We walked a few blocks together. I asked him if he could make it back to his place, the shimmering length of Back Bay away. He assured me he could and, holding the blue Brooks Brothers shopping bag full of tasselled shoes, his small figure dwindled down the green and monumental perspectives of Commonwealth Avenue. Rather callously, I figured he would be all right. To me he was less a mortal man than an enviable prose style.
The Letters of John Cheever is to be valued for its outpouring of that style, for the tender, puzzled notes by his son Ben, and for the jesting gallantry of his last death-defying letters. In one of them, to me, he awards me the magnanimity he had doubted earlier: apropos of a published review of his last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, he wrote, “Your magnaminity is overwhelming.” Fifteen years had gone by and he still couldn’t spell the word, but it meant something real and important to him. Evidences of an impulsive, plaintive, insecure, and haughty nature have quickly accumulated, in his daughter’s memoir Home Before Dark, in Scott Donaldson’s biography, and in the volume of letters, with some frank, abysmally depressed journals to come. For all that, those who knew him can testify, he was a gem of a man, instantly poetic and instinctively magnanimous—one of those rare persons who heighten your sense of human possibilities.
* From Don’t Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman, edited by Prudence Crowther (Viking, 1987).
SPEECHES
How Does the State Imagine?1
OUR ASSIGNED TITLE challenges the literary man’s traditional duty to be specific. Like almost everybody else in the world I was born into a tribe, with its rites and obligations and mystic signs. I was early introduced to the flag called the Stars and Stripes, and to the eagle with his claws full of arrows, and the symbols for dollars and cents, and the map showing our national westward expansion. The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and provisions of the state intersected was the postal system. Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house the printed journals—the newspapers and magazines—that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future. In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond. Each day’s mail brought potential treasure. This is still true for me. I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return. It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do. I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit.
Now, what do these hollow blue monuments on street corners from here to Hawaii tell of how the state imagines? It desires, we must conclude, its citizens to be in touch with one another; the tribe seeks interconnection and consolidation. The state imagines solidarity, and resists secession and nonconformity, which is secession on the personal scale. Its instinct is conservative, I would say, more than, as is often charged, expansionist; only when the territorial enlargement is made to seem necessary to conserving what already exists is the effort of tribal aggression enthusiastically undertaken.
However, a state will almost never, without a fight, submit to its own diminishment; this is true of its government as well. Compared with a human individual, the state is a relatively rudimentary organism. The individual options of altruism and self-sacrifice and weary withdrawal and anorexia are too intricate and perverse for it. It can imagine only a continual health, the vigor of a gently inflationary status quo; this is because its imagination is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wishes to lose his or her job. A democracy wisely provides an electoral process whereby most of the top officials must periodically run the risk of replacement; but the numerous workers beneath them are no longer subjected to such a risk. It is an awesome sight, in Washington, D.C., around five o’clock, to see the armies of government workers swarm like locusts into the mellowing sunlight. Just as bone counters every injury with the production of more calcium, more bone, so government tends, under every stimulus, to extend its connections with its citizens and the services it proposes to render them. Automobile seatbelts become mandatory by law and by law warnings from the surgeon-general are printed on cigarette packages. All this, of course, for the cause of tribal well-being.
The imagination of the modern artist, on the contrary, is committed not to conservation, which is carried on by the libraries and museums devoted to his art, but to exploration and danger, to expansion. It was not always so; the artist for millennia has been in league with the state, an
d has chiselled its propaganda and its gods on the appropriate temples and mausoleums. But an alternative patron to autocratic government, an affluent and varied popular audience, has arisen, and after it the notion of a perpetual avant-garde—the notion of an art wherein change, like change in fashion or the climate, is amusing and desirable in itself. The state, like a child, wishes that each day be just like the last; art, like a youth, hopes that each day will bring something new.
It seems to me that the writer’s imagination and the imagination of the state have opposite tendencies and should keep a respectful distance from one another. Myself, I ask mainly that my tribal officials keep the mails operating—no small task, and one where many tribes fail—and continue to safeguard the freedom of expression that my particular state’s founders rashly promised its citizens. This is plenty, and this is enough. I do not know why, in 1965, the United States government felt obliged to create endowments to encourage and fund the arts and the humanities. Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products, an actual audience for their performance. This is above all true for writing, which, requiring only pen and paper and a solitary author’s time, can be cheaply produced and has been, since the invention of printing, a popular art, an art that seeks to draw its support from below and not from above.