Scott Donaldson Read online

  John Cheever

  A Biography

  Scott Donaldson

  ALSO BY SCOTT DONALDSON

  The Suburban Myth

  Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott

  By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway

  American Literature: Nineteenth and Early

  Twentieth Centuries (with Ann Massa)

  Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Editor, Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  Editor, Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

  “The Great Gatsby”

  Editor, Conversations with John Cheever

  This book is for Vivian

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PREHISTORY

  CHILDHOOD/1912–1926

  ADOLESCENCE/1926–1930

  BROTHER/1930–1934

  STARTING/1934–1937

  MARY/1937–1942

  ARMY/1942–1943

  UPTOWN/1943–1950

  SCARBOROUGH/1951–1955

  CAREER/1951–1955

  ITALY/1956–1957

  HOUSE/1957–1961

  OSSINING/1961–1963

  RUSSIA/1964

  INWARD/1965–1967

  DOUBLING/1967–1969

  BOTTOMING/1969–1973

  IOWA-BOSTON-SMITHERS/1973–1975

  REBIRTH/1975–1977

  SUCCESS/197 7–1980

  CANCER/1980–1982

  ENDINGS

  Notes on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  We’d made the date by postcard, but there must have been some mix-up and when I got off the ferry to Nantucket with the rest of the day-trippers, John Cheever was not there to meet me. Having come so far, I went out to the end of the island and knocked on the door of his room at the Wauwinet Inn. Cheever was all graciousness: invited me in, took me downstairs for a drink (his was iced tea), and talked about himself and his work for three hours as we watched the sailboats sport in the breeze. Almost immediately—did he aim to shock?—he told me about the “hundred and fifty affairs” he’d had. Later, as he drove me back to the ferry, he spoke with feeling of his recently deceased brother. “Some people have parents or children,” he said. “I had a brother.” There seemed no appropriate response. “For a long time I couldn’t take him,” he added, and then, quietly, “I still can’t.”

  It took several years of hard digging and harder thinking to begin to understand what those remarks signified. All biographers know theirs is an impossible task, for we really cannot understand one another. As Mark Twain commented, every person’s real life “is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.” With a writer like Twain or Cheever, the long paper trail suggests the direction of some of that private cogitation. Patterns emerge, generalizations develop. But no one goes inside another’s mind. And that first and only meeting in Wauwinet, with its intermingling of confusion and revelation, disappointment and pleasure, warned me to expect the unexpected from John Cheever.

  Eventually, I came to see his complicated and difficult life as a triumph. Hurt in childhood, he grew up a man divided against himself. A battle raged inside him between light and dark, celebration and sorrow, love and hate. The tension drove him close to self-destruction, and sometimes he lashed out at those around him. Yet with his victory over alcoholism, the mature Cheever at last rejected the dark and chose the light. Always a writer’s writer, toward the end he started getting the kind of public recognition his work had long deserved. Cheever’s 180 stories, spanning from 1930 to 1980, tell us more about people in the American middle class during that half century than any other writer’s work has done or can do. Among his novels, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) movingly captures the contrast between the often dispiriting present and the past, not perfect but recollected in tenderness, that we like to think we came from. Falconer (1977), situated in a prison, lands us smack in the middle of everything that is wrong with our civilization, yet ends in a celebration of the glory of love. And everything bears the stamp of Cheever’s vivid imagination and rhetorical magic. He wrote, John Updike observed, “as with a quill from the wing of an angel.”

  SCOTT DONALDSON

  PREHISTORY

  The most remarkable thing about John Cheever was his capacity for invention. You could not be with him for fifteen minutes before he would look across the street or the restaurant, spy an interesting face, and the story would begin. William Maxwell, the writer who edited most of Cheever’s stories for The New Yorker, once called him a “story-making machine” in the same sense that a rosebush is a machine for making roses. Cheever himself compared his talent to the possession of a pleasant baritone voice. He could not sing, much. But oh, could he tell stories.

  The gift was there from the beginning and lasted all his life. At seven, he began to entertain his grammar school classmates with preposterous tales. At seventy, in the last year he lived, he finished his last book of fiction. “I can tell a story,” he observed. “I can do … little else.”

  It was, of course, more than enough. As he learned to shape and hone his talent, he became one of the century’s masters of the art of fiction. His yarn spinning also made him an enchanting companion. “The truth was not in him,” his friend Arthur Spear said of Cheever, with a reminiscent smile. Spear would not have changed him for the world.

  As a practical matter, though, Cheever’s capacity for invention—his compulsion to invent—sometimes led to difficulties. The man, like the writer, was afflicted by this touch of genius, and in his private life he could rarely be relied upon for the unadorned truth. This was particularly true regarding his family origins, which he tended to redecorate and improve upon when he could be brought to discuss them at all. For an anecdotal man he was surprisingly reticent about his background. Often it seemed that he was trying to muddy his past. “Something back then” must have been troubling him, friends thought. In a few of his early stories never collected in book form, he addressed the subject openly and frankly. Otherwise, most of his fiction romanticized his roots.

  According to family legend, John Cheever was descended from Ezekiel Cheever, the schoolmaster at Boston Latin who was so revered that Cotton Mather preached his funeral sermon and called him Master Socrates. Ezekiel crossed the Atlantic in 1637 (the legend had him aboard the Arbella in 1630, along with John Winthrop and the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony). He taught first in New Haven, then at Ipswich and Charlestown before the call to Boston in 1671. A commanding figure, Ezekiel drilled the sons of ministers and magistrates in the Latin grammar he himself composed, maintained strict discipline, and punished any show of pretension. “The Welfare of the Province was much upon his spirit,” Samuel Sewall noted when Ezekiel died at ninety-four. “He abominated periwigs.”

  Ezekiel Cheever was a great man, John Cheever loved that remark about periwigs, and so he claimed him for his ancestor. His father had done the same, supposedly searching through “seven or eight generations” in the genealogical records in Newburyport to trace his origins back to the redoubtable schoolmaster. He had seen the papers himself, John said, but thrown them all away. In fact, he was not directly descended from Ezekiel. The real founder of the family in America was Daniel Cheever, who emigrated from England in 1640. Daniel became prison-keeper in Cambridge, as did his son Israel, also in the direct line of descent. Daniel was a cousin of Ezekiel’s. Ezekiel was a cousin of John Cheever’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

  If Cheever knew who his progenitors were, he did not acknowledge it. Once he’d adopted Ezekiel he was loath to let him go, and developed a genuine pride of family based on him. As novelist Ralph Ellison observed in this connection, “Some people ar
e your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” So, like his father and the fictional Leander Wapshot, John Cheever declared that there was nothing in his veins “but the blood of shipmasters and schoolteachers.” He told his children about their ancestor Ezekiel, and often mentioned him in interviews. He used the name in his fiction in two important instances. The founder of his Wapshot clan, modeled on Ezekiel Cheever down to his hatred for wigs, is called Ezekiel. The protagonist of his novel Falconer is Ezekiel Farragut. In real life he named a much-loved black Labrador puppy Ezekiel, or Zeke for short. When his first grandchild was born, Cheever tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade his son Ben to call the boy Ezekiel.

  Cheever came to believe in his relationship to Ezekiel so wholeheartedly that he was disturbed to discover a sour apple in that branch of the family. Ezekiel Cheever, Jr., a schoolmaster like his father, testified against the accused witches at the Salem trials of 1692. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the witch trials, this Ezekiel Cheever appears as an official of the court that tried and condemned the witches to death. In due course John Cheever talked to Miller and was reassured that the playwright had simply happened upon the name in reading documents of the time and that his role was not historically accurate. In 1978, however, poet and professor Lewis Turco showed Cheever the records certifying that Ezekiel Cheever, Jr., had in fact given testimony against the accused women. Cheever was shocked. “The family has suppressed this information,” he declared, and joked that he might destroy the incriminating evidence. In effect, he achieved the same result by choosing to ignore it. Ezekiel Jr.’s failings were not admitted into the legend.

  John Cheever’s real ancestry was not without its distinctions. His progenitor Daniel’s grandson William Cheever married Miriam Cleveland, an ancestor of Grover Cleveland. And William’s son John—a great-great-great-granduncle of the writer—marched against the British troops from Newburyport on April 19, 1775, the day of the shot heard round the world. As for sea captains among his forefathers, two Cheevers, not direct ancestors, owned ships built in John Currier, Jr.’s Newburyport shipyard in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, Benjamin Hale Cheever, John’s great-grandfather, sailed the seas for the China trade, and became the first actual progenitor recognized by the family. The Cheevers named their first son for him. Blue-and-white Canton china that he brought back from his travels was displayed in their Ossining house, along with a red Chinese fan, framed. Born in Newburyport in 1770, Benjamin Hale Cheever became a successful and respected member of the community. In 1820 he was elected a trustee of the Newburyport Sabbath School and Tract Society; he had earned the title Master by the time of his death two years later.

  Benjamin Hale Cheever’s youngest child was John Cheever’s grandfather Aaron, the first in a series of late-begotten children who stretched four generations over more than two hundred years. Benjamin Hale was born in 1770, Aaron Waters in 1815, Cheever’s father, Frederick Lincoln, in 1863, and John William himself in 1912, to die in 1982. Aaron, Frederick, and John were all youngest children. Aaron was forty-eight when he fathered Frederick, Frederick forty-nine when he fathered John.

  John’s father loved to spin yarns about eccentric members of the family. His uncle Ebenezer, for instance, had been an abolitionist before the Civil War in Newburyport, a copperhead town whose livelihood came from shipping. Depending on the story, Ebenezer was either stoned in the streets for his opinions, or tarred and feathered with William Lloyd Garrison, or both. During the war itself, another story went, he might have made a fortune as a purveyor of hardtack to the Union troops, but lost the contract to a fledgling firm that became the National Biscuit Company. Ebenezer played his flute and didn’t mind. His wife, Juliana, who played the pianoforte, occasionally assumed the personality of an Indian squaw. In this incarnation she would “braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe … and receive messages from the dead.”

  These and other family sagas Frederick Lincoln Cheever gladly told, but he said not one word about his own father, Aaron. Once when John and his father were feeling particularly mellow, having drunk “at least a pint of whiskey” each, he screwed up his courage and asked, “Dad, would you tell me something about your father?” The answer was “No.”

  Under the circumstances, rumors flourished. It was understood that his grandfather had left his wife, Sarah, and their two children, Hamlet (Aaron admired Shakespeare) and Frederick, to fend for themselves. His grandmother subsequently ran a Boston boarding-house, John suspected, though he wasn’t told. He did get the distinct impression between the lines of what went unsaid that his grandfather had been a seafaring man in his youth, that he drank, and that he had committed suicide.

  In an early story, “Homage to Shakespeare” (1937), Cheever attempted to summon up his grandfather’s ghost. According to the story, he had in effect been undone by Shakespeare. At sixteen he shipped out to Calcutta and took with him the buckram-bound copy of Shakespeare’s plays that, along with a tintype of himself looking fiercely angry, were the only mementos to survive when he died. The book was heavily annotated, with sonorous speeches underlined where Lear and Coriolanus and Macbeth “damned men for their treachery” and their lack of faith. Admittedly his grandfather was a failure in the eyes of Newburyport, where he retired to reflect, with the encouragement of the Bard, on his own unappreciated greatness. He considered that he had the spirit of a king, and did not deign to work. With Shakespeare, he took dark views. “Gleaming through the vanity of every incident he read the phallus and the skull.” Eventually, nagged by his wife, he took up with the bottle and the local barmaids, and she left him for a better life. At the end, the narrator imagines him—“my grandfather,” given no other name—still prideful but now beaten, too drunk to find a woman, bumping into lampposts, locked out of his lodgings, “muttering as he stumbled some line from Timon of Athens about how men bolt their doors against the setting sun.”

  So it may have been, or some of it. The available facts are that Aaron Waters Cheever was born in Newburyport on September 18, 1815, the son of Benjamin Hale and Rebekah Thompson Cheever. At thirty-one, on December 5, 1847, he married Sarah A. Nash in Medford. Both bride and groom then lived in Woburn, and he was employed as a cordwainer—a worker in cordovan leather, a shoemaker. Later he became a patternmaker, someone who sketches the design of shoes. In time the family lived both in Newburyport and in Lynn, where Aaron probably participated in the great shoemakers’ strike that began on Washington’s birthday, 1860. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, John’s father, was born in Lynn on January 16, 1863. Frederick’s only sibling, Hamlet, was almost ten years his senior. Soon after Frederick’s birth the Cheevers moved to Boston. Evidently Aaron left his wife and children early in the 1870s. He died in Boston on August 2, 1882. The death certificate lists his final residence as III Chambers Street in the old West End, a ragged quarter inhabited largely by Eastern European immigrants. (Chambers Street no longer exists, having given way to urban renewal.) The immediate cause of death was “alcohol & opium—del. [irium] tremens.” That too was not something John was told.

  Left fatherless, Frederick Cheever grew up poor, but the stories he told did not dwell on his poverty. Instead he talked of sleeping in an attic full of ivory tusks and of riding the first horsecar from Newburyport to Amesbury, a trip he celebrated in the laconic style of his journal.

  Sturgeon in river then. About three feet long. All covered with knobs. Leap straight up in air and fall back in water.… Hold the reins and see the sturgeon leap. Boyish happiness.

  He came to Boston with his parents on the Harold Currier, the last sailing vessel to leave the Newburyport yards. It cost the family very little, since the ship was being towed in for outfitting; otherwise, they probably couldn’t have afforded the trip.

  Frederick went to work in a shoe factory full-time the day after he graduated from the Phillips School with honors. In the evenings, wearing mittens against
the cold, he studied The Magician’s Own Handbook, in order, his son concluded, “to make himself socially desirable.” One of the tricks was “How to Cook an Omelet in Your Hat.” The secret was to make the omelet in advance, hide it in the top of the hat, then propose to perform one’s magic when, say, the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after brandy and cigars. “I can cook an omelet in my hat,” one was to say brightly, and when challenged produce four eggs, three of them blown through tiny needle holes, drop the one whole egg on a table as if by accident, then take the three blown eggs and “cook” them over a candle in one’s hat, eventually—Alakazam—displaying the precooked omelet for the wonderment of one’s companions.

  In appearance John Cheever’s father “was one of those Massachusetts Yankees who look forever like a boy although toward the end he looked like a boy who had seen the Gorgon.” He spoke in a North Shore accent and kept his as variable. “The ship had a mahst made of had wood,” he would say. He followed a series of rituals, convinced like the fictional Leander Wapshot “that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and continuousness of things.” Every morning “he took a cold bath, howling like a walrus.” In the evenings he invariably wore a white shirt and a dark coat. “His concern for sartorial preciseness was exhaustive,” as his son put it. He went skating on Christmas Day. He went swimming as many days as he could; at seventy his false teeth were swept away by the Atlantic. He fancied himself a seafarer, and handled his catboat—though “it sailed like real estate,” he’d complain—as gracefully as a dancer. But actually he made his living, and then stopped making his living, in the same shoe business that had given his own father employment.

  Frederick Lincoln Cheever either did or did not own a shoe factory. In his late years, John Cheever certainly said he had, and said so with the verisimilitude of the storyteller. As a boy, John reported, he was permitted once a year to toot the noon whistle at the factory in Lynn. “Everybody then took their sandwiches out of their paper bags. And that,” he observed, “was my participation in the shoe industry.” Yet city directories in Lynn show no record of Whitteridge and Cheever or Woodbridge and Cheever, as his firm was presumably called. Moreover, Frederick Lincoln Cheever is listed in Quincy city directories as a salesman from 1908 until 1922, then as a shoe manufacturer for several years thereafter. And the records of Thayer Academy, attended by both John and his brother, Fred, during the 1920s, give their father’s occupation as “shoe salesman.”