The most demonstrative of all was the flamboyant Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Like a dynamo, the poet enraptured adoring audiences who came to what were tamely advertised as poetry readings but actually combined—in Mary Updike’s phrase—“the more moving elements of theater, opera, concert, and church.” A matinee idol to these crowds, Yevtushenko was rarely offstage at any time. He carried himself like the commanding figure he was. In a Communist society, he was treated like nobility. He and Cheever, very different in his “muttery Waspish manner,” were nonetheless taken with each other. “I think that John was amused by the buccaneer in Yevtushenko,” John Updike speculates, “and Zhenya (as we called him) was engaged by the debonair raffish side of John” (or Chon, as Zhenya called him). With his quick ear, Cheever soon developed an imitation of Yevtushenko based on his theatricality and his ego that could “crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.” Yevtushenko asked him how many letters he got from readers. “Maybe ten a week, twelve a week, something like that,” Cheever said. “I get two thousand a day,” Yevtushenko said. Still, Cheever felt a genuine affection for the poet that was not always shared by his fellow writers in Russia. “Yevtushenko is nothing but a flirt,” they told Cheever, “in your case, a very successful flirt.”
The two most vivid memories Cheever brought back from Russia were of his final afternoon in Moscow and of his visit to Tolstoy’s home. Yevtushenko took Cheever to a tenement on the outskirts of Moscow where a young artist and his family lived. The artist showed Cheever a dozen “brilliant, progressive, and heretical” paintings. As they left, Yevtushenko exclaimed, “So! He cannot show his paintings. He cannot sell his paintings. My present to you is the invincibility of his paintings.” Rightly or wrongly, Cheever came to think that the very restrictiveness of Soviet life was necessary to the Russian people and that only under such oppressive conditions could they and their art thrive. According to this theory, which owed something to his own experience, Russians were happy only when confined and suppressed. Give them freedom and they would be miserable.
Cheever’s most unforgettable moment in Russia came at the end of a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate. The day did not begin auspiciously. It was a long dreary trip, he had a hangover, and at the estate Russian peasants were picnicking on the great man’s grave. Yet when he was ushered into Tolstoy’s study, Cheever felt the hair rise on the back of his neck in mystical communion. He fell asleep on the long drive back to Moscow, and awoke just at dusk—his head in the lap of his long-haired female interpreter. Looking out the windows streaked with rain, he could see the streetlights of the city winking on. It seemed the most romantic thing that had ever happened to him, and not because of sexual excitement. If anything, the tableau was that of a little boy, asleep on the backseat, sheltered against the weather by his mother as they drove home at last light.
INWARD
1965–1967
The trip to Russia was the first of three Cheever made to that country, and he was to travel to Romania and Bulgaria also during the years ahead. Meanwhile the occasional trips to Italy continued, interspersed with journeys to the Caribbean, to Ireland, to Spain, to Egypt, to the Far East. Within the United States as well, he began to travel widely in response to the demands of his developing reputation. During 1965, for instance, he went to Washington twice and to Chicago twice. Simultaneously with this wayfaring and allied with it, he was waging an inner battle to understand and come to terms with himself. In his journal and in his fiction, he repeatedly directed his attention inward. And during the second half-decade of the 1960s, he twice consulted psychiatrists at considerable length about his problems: his compulsive drinking, his persistent phobias, his deteriorating marriage, his confused sexuality.
On the return trip from Russia, Cheever made a brief stop in Berlin for the State Department and there met Paul Moor, an American writer and critic. Moor, an admirer of Cheever’s work, phoned him at the Hilton and volunteered to show him around during his stay. They saw a good deal of each other during the next few days, enough at least so that it became clear that Moor lived alone with a French bulldog and had no lady friends. On Cheever’s last night in Berlin, he invited Moor up to his room at the Hilton for a nightcap, where he said, unexpectedly, “I’ve had some very pleasant homosexual experiences.” Later Moor came to think that with this remark Cheever was signaling him to take the initiative, but at the time it did not occur to him. John had talked glowingly about Hope Lange throughout the visit, and that placed him, Moor thought, firmly on the heterosexual side of the fence. This must have been what Cheever wanted Moor to think, and what he wanted to think himself as he sat in the departure lounge in Amsterdam. He heard “a thrilling sound”—the sound of high heels on stone. And when he wrote Moor from Ossining, early in February, he told of ice skating and drinking the day before and of the subsequent morning-after blues that would not subside until he imagined “a picturesque cottage” and a beautiful young woman who lived there with him.
From Cedar Lane, Cheever launched into long-range correspondence with his new Russian friends. As a way of introducing them to American life, he sent Tanya Litvinov and Kornei Chukovsky copies of The New Yorker. It took Kornei a while to get used to the advertisements in this capitalist magazine. After that he enjoyed “looking at all the girls I’ll never kiss, the cars I’ll never drive, the sweaters I’ll never wear, the shoes which will never pinch my toes, the places I’ll never visit and the cemetery in which I’ll never lie.” Tanya passed her New Yorker on to her mother, Ivy, who in due course submitted to the magazine—and had accepted for publication—several stories and sketches of her own.
The regularity with which Cheever received mail from the USSR depended upon the state of relations between the two countries. Never was this more noticeable than at Christmastime. When U.S.-Russian relations brightened, dozens of cards arrived in Ossining. When they darkened, there were no cards at all. Understandably, Cheever worried that his letters to Russia might cause trouble for those he was writing to. He knew, too, that the U.S. State Department was not entirely pleased with his affection for Russia, its writers, and its people, but he did not suspect what proved to be the truth: that the CIA occasionally intercepted letters he posted to the Soviet Union.
Nor did he have reason for such suspicions, since he was publicly recognized in Washington as one of the nation’s leading writers. Late in February he was invited to read to “the literati, cognoscenti and intelligentsia” of Washington under the sponsorship of the Library of Congress. James Dickey, poetry consultant to the library, arranged the program, in which Cheever shared the platform with novelist Reynolds Price. Dickey thought Cheever “very well mannered and gentlemanly,” and not at all the sort of person you could get close to on short acquaintance. “You could feel some suppression in him,” Dickey thought, “some kind of withdrawn and secretive thing.” From Washington, Cheever went to read at Pembroke, where he performed without incident and thus quieted the fears of his daughter, Susan, an undergraduate there, that he might drink too much and disgrace himself.
Next stop was Chicago, where he spent a week working with novelist Richard Stern’s creative-writing students and giving a public reading at the University of Chicago. Cheever was “excellent,” Stern recalls, and extraordinarily generous into the bargain. Mary came along on this trip, and one evening the Cheevers took the Sterns to the Pump Room for dinner, thereby spending much of what John had earned for his week at the university. From the first, Stern detected the tension between John and Mary. A feeling of unhappiness radiated from Cheever, while his wife countered him with power and sharpness. “I felt defensive for him,” Stern remembers. He was also struck by the way Cheever’s reticent demeanor contrasted with the openness of his talk. This was especially true of his accent, shoved up into his nose and the upper part of the throat, making a unique patrician sound that clashed with the frankness and sharpness of what was said. Stern thought him a curious mixture of external dignity and inte
rnal emotional chaos. With Cheever, he said, “you had that sense that you were living in a duplex.” As always when in Chicago, during this trip Cheever saw Saul Bellow, another writer who—like Stern—respected his work and felt keenly aware of his vulnerability.
Mary preceded her husband in returning to Ossining. Riding the train alone back to New York, the assertive Cheever took over. He had been taught as a youth that it was perfectly proper to talk to strangers on trains or planes, and so, as the Twentieth Century Limited sped toward New York, he struck up an acquaintance with “a fork-lift manufacturer” and two housewives from Evanston. As Sherry Farquharson—one of the Evanston women—recalls, a rather dapper older man approached their table and asked, politely, “May I join you?” He looked faintly familiar, and then she realized she’d seen his picture in Time. So join them he did for cocktails and dinner, followed by lethal Rusty Nails in the club car as the night receded behind them on the silver rails. The next day, she walked along the ramp at Grand Central with the worst hangover of her life.
Shortly thereafter, son Ben, seventeen, produced his own woman-on-the-train incident on his way home from prep school at Loomis. Instructed like his father before him to engage traveling companions in conversation, he began to talk to a woman—a divorcee, as it turned out, in her early thirties. She was friendly, and seemed interested in what he had to say. With no thought of sex in his mind at all, he invited her to come home with him for dinner and to spend the night. He promised to show her around Ossining the following day. John and Mary, meeting the train, were horrified that their son had picked up or been picked up by an older woman. Inclined to believe the worst, they were too well mannered to say anything overtly, though at dinner, Ben noticed, his ordinarily charming father was anything but charming to his new lady friend. And the next morning, when Ben awoke to drive her around town, he found that he was too late. His father had gotten up early and put her on the train himself. The incident, dressed out in full comic regalia, found its way into Bullet Park, his novel of 1969.
Cheever had begun work on Bullet Park soon after publication of The Wapshot Scandal. Stories came to him less easily than in the past, and he devoted much of his time to this novel-in-progress. So he must have been singularly encouraged when he was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ William Dean Howells Medal for The Wapshot Scandal. The Howells Medal, awarded for the best work of fiction during a five-year period, had previously been won by Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and James Gould Cozzens, among others. Cheever’s Scandal emerged as the winner in close competition with Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools and Saul Bellow’s Herzog. In reaction, Cheever wrote Bill Maxwell that he thought the award somehow unsuitable. It seemed foolish to try to segregate American fiction into five-year periods. And accepting any honor ran against the grain of the New England reticence he’d grown up with.
But of course he was more pleased than he would admit and happily accepted the award in the ceremony on May 19. In his presentation speech, Ralph Ellison stressed Cheever’s duality of vision. Ours has been called a comic age, Ellison observed, for in comedy we recognize our common humanity, and surely “it is easier to protect ourselves from despair with laughter, desperate though it might be, than to surrender to the chaos that we’ve made of our promise.” Cheever’s achievement, he went on, was to “have made us aware not only of what our laughter is about, but of that tragic sense of reality, that graciousness before life’s complexity which is its antidote.”
In accepting, Cheever was characteristically laconic and straightforward. When the novel was finally completed, he began, his first instinct was to commit suicide. Next he thought of destroying the manuscript, but how then, Mary had asked him, could she explain to the children what he had been doing for the previous four years? “Thus,” he concluded, “my concern for appearances accounted for the publication of the novel; my concern for disappearances accounted for much of the book itself, and that these disparate matters should have brought me here this afternoon gives me the pleasure most novelists take in drawing together unrelated experience.” He took the honor bestowed on him “most seriously,” he said, and was “deeply grateful.” Then he took his solid-gold medal, “as big as a saucer,” and sat down.
In June, Cheever paid his second visit of the year to Washington, this time to attend a White House dinner in the company of John Glenn, Stan Musial, and such other writers as Updike, O’Hara, and Marianne Moore. The guests were served cocktails but only “bug juice” with the dinner. Back in Ossining there were no such restrictions on alcoholic consumption. One night Cheever got drunk and, while biting into a piece of cold meat, apparently swallowed a dental bridge. For a time, he feared that the contraption might nibble away at him internally, but no complications ensued. He must have passed the bridge, hooks and all.
In September he wrote “The Geometry of Love,” his first story in over a year, and sent it to The New Yorker. In the story an unhappy husband attempts to counteract the tyrannies of his wife by reducing them to understandable geometrical theorems. The experiment seems to be succeeding, but then he is taken sick. His wife comes to see him, tells him how well he looks, remarks that she wishes she “could get into bed for a week or two and be waited on,” and goes from the hospital to a restaurant and a movie. It is the cleaning woman who tells her, when she gets home, that her husband has passed away. On the literal level, “The Geometry of Love” does not present a convincing picture of reality. The basic idea—that Euclidean geometry can ameliorate a bad marriage—is preposterous, and whether intentionally or not, the episodes are strung together with a conspicuous lack of coherence. On a Saturday visit to Cedar Lane, Bill Maxwell suggested, gently, that the story had failed. The trouble, he thought, was liquor. The stories were still beautifully written, but they had no point, or so Maxwell felt.
Cheever’s fiction was still marketable elsewhere, however. On Monday The Saturday Evening Post “took exactly ten minutes” to buy “The Geometry of Love,” and paid three thousand dollars. Cheever recounted this anecdote in several letters, with the strong suggestion that the Post purchase invalidated Maxwell’s judgment. But he did not easily forget the incident, and wondered in his journals if Maxwell might not be right after all.
He ended 1965, however, in a burst of brilliance at the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago, the annual gathering of university teachers of language and literature. For the occasion the American Studies Association sponsored a program on the relationship of the writer and his culture and produced three novelists to discuss this topic. The three were Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever. Mailer was very much in the news through his antiwar pronouncements (we should turn LBJ’s picture upside down, he declared at Berkeley) and through the well-publicized domestic battle in which he had stabbed his wife with a knife. In An American Dream, his novel that had been serialized in Esquire, he seemed to argue that violence was a valid form of experience and an appropriate way of responding, personally and politically, to a corrupt world. “In those days,” as Mailer said in 1985, “I took myself very seriously, and was indeed embattled with the establishment.” So he was cast as the star, and Cheever and Ellison as supporting players for the thousand professors who jammed into the Red Lacquer Room of the Palmer House to See Live Writers Perform.
In advance, Cheever regarded the event as a one-on-one confrontation. He joked about going five three-minute rounds with Mailer. “I’ll be wearing white trunks” for the bout, he said. As it happened, he spoke first, and instead of addressing the topic directly he presented “The Parable of the Diligent Novelist.” For him almost anything could set a story in motion, even a request from a scholarly organization to discuss the relationship between the American writer and his culture. So it was a story he machine-gunned to the professoriate in his nervous, elegant, witty, dazzling style, a story designed to parody Mailer’s most recent novel.
The novelist in Cheever’s tale, like Stephen Roja
ck of An American Dream, goes through life seeking sensation far and wide. He goes to a seminary, for example. Then he quits and holes up in a slum. He rapes and knifes and buggers. He becomes a cop assigned to Central Park’s nether world of criminality and sexual perversion. He takes up international spying and in that role meets his death when struck down by a taxicab in Krakow. The point of the parable, clearly, was that the novelist’s death/bankruptcy/failure resulted from his “wretched excess” in chasing after every conceivable experience, legal or illegal. Even writers needed to learn the value of moderation. Cheever told the story so cleverly and so engagingly—and it was such a relief, in a convention devoted to close examination of literary minutiae, to actually hear a story told—that he left his audience “ablaze with pleasure.” The academics loved it, though not many realized that he was satirizing Mailer, giving him a “friendly kick in the ass,” as program organizer Robert F. Lucid put it.
Mailer understood well enough, was mightily annoyed, and generated some “fierce eye contact” as Cheever returned from the rostrum. When it was his turn to speak, he gripped the microphone like a bulldog and read a corrosive, dramatic, hit-and-run essay titled “The Dynamic in American Letters,” describing the division of our literature into two rivers, one of manners, one of the voice of the people, and both running dry. Mailer like Cheever brought down the house. Immediately afterward there was more eye contact in which Mailer detected in Cheever an unspoken acknowledgment that he, Cheever, had underestimated his opponent. (Ellison, speaking as usual without notes, was outshone by the two of them, at least on this occasion.) Later Mailer led his fellow writers, along with Lucid, to the Playboy Club, and there the animosity between Cheever and Mailer dissipated with the drinks and their mutual interest in the Playboy phenomenon. The novelists did better with the professors than with the Playgirls, who wandered in, sized them up, decided there wasn’t a movie producer in the bunch, and wandered out again.