The Trip to Echo Spring (6 page)

As for falling in love, that took a little longer. It wasn't until Tennessee was staying in St. Louis, under his mother's roof, that he realised how much he missed Frank, who he'd nicknamed the Little Horse on account of his long face. He sent a wire, asking him to wait at the apartment, but when he arrived home it seemed deserted. ‘I felt quite desolate,' the older Tennessee remembered. He went into the enchanted bedroom and there on the big bed was little Frankie, fast asleep: his companion and guardian for the next fourteen years.

It was getting late. I walked back to the hotel through Sutton Place, took a bath, put on a dress and heels and went out again into the twilight. It was the cocktail hour, that lovely moment which in cinema is called magic time, the hour of the wolf. On its way to darkness the sky had turned an astonishing, deepening blue, flooding with colour as abruptly as if someone had opened a sluice. In that instant the city resembled a huge aquarium, the skyscrapers rising in the wavering light like underwater plants, the cabs flashing through the streets like shoals of fish, darting north at changeover as the lights tripped green all the way to Central Park.

I walked by way of 55th Street to the King Cole bar at the St. Regis, where among ten thousand other illustrious events the opening night party for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was held. If you want old-style glamour in New York you come here, or else go to the Plaza, or to Bemelman's at the Carlyle, where the walls are painted with debonair rabbits getting up to mischief in a fantastical version of the park.

The room was low-lit and subtly burnished. I ordered a King's Passion and sat on a banquette by the door, catty-corners from a Russian woman in a slippery white blouse. I'd entered Cheever territory, no doubt about it. John Cheever: the small, immaculately dishevelled Chekhov of the Suburbs, who despite his long association with the wealthy upstate town of Ossining lived in Manhattan from the age of twenty-two until the morning after his thirty-ninth birthday.

His last residence was just around the corner, on East 59th Street, and the St. Regis was among his favourite haunts. He liked anything that smacked of old money. In 1968, long after he'd left the city, his publishers put him up at the hotel for a two-day press junket, during which time he impressed one reporter by ordering two
bottles
of
Scotch and gin. (‘Guess what the bill is?' he said gleefully when they arrived. ‘Twenty-nine dollars! Wait until Alfred Knopf sees that!') 1968: five years before he went careering around Iowa City with Raymond Carver, and seven years before he found himself at Smithers, sharing a room with a failed delicatessen owner and learning how to live without either the sorrows or the consolations of gin.

Cheever fascinated me because he was, in common with many alcoholics, a helpless mix of fraudulence and honesty. Though he feigned patrician origins, his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts was both financially and emotionally insecure, and while he eventually attained all the trappings of the landed Wasp he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and self-disgust. He was an almost exact contemporary of Tennessee's, and though they weren't friends, their worlds in the New York of the 1930s and 40s often overlapped. In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her husband wasn't entirely heterosexual while they were at the first Broadway production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

According to Blake Bailey's beautiful biography,
Cheever,
there was a leitmotif associated with Blanche's dead homosexual husband and this tune lodged in Mary's head and led to some kind of underwater realisation that her husband's sexuality was not as she'd assumed. She never mentioned it to him. ‘Oh Lord, no,' she told Bailey. ‘Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.' As for her husband, he noted in his diary, ‘as decadent, I think, as anything I've ever seen on the stage'. He loved the play, adding rapturously:

There is much else; the wonderful sense of captivity in a squalid
the chords struck seem to lie close to insanity. Anxiety, that is – confinement and so forth. Also, he avoids not only the common clichés but the uncommon cliché, over which I trip, and also works in a form that has few inhibitions and has written its own laws.

The entry concludes with a prescription to himself ‘to be less inhibited, to be warmer . . . to write, to love': the same arenas in which he'd struggle for the next three decades of his life.

John Cheever was conceived after a sales banquet in Boston and born in Quincy, Massachusetts on 27 May 1912. Like Tennessee Williams, he was the second child of a profoundly ill-suited couple, and though he adored his brother Fred he was aware that he wasn't his father's favourite child. Indeed, on learning of his wife's pregnancy, Frederick Senior's first recorded act was to invite the local abortionist to dinner. He already had one much-loved son; why did he need another? Cheever never felt like he secured much of Frederick's affection, and some of this mood of neglect and longing wells up in his short story ‘The National Pastime', in which a small boy tries to persuade his father to teach him to play baseball, that needful hand-me-down of American masculinity. Frederick was a shoe salesman, and when this business failed in the Depression he withdrew into eccentricity and depression. He drank heavily, and it seems that his father was also an alcoholic, who died of delirium tremens.

Luckily, Cheever's mother, Mary Liley, was an immensely capable woman, though she was profoundly unaffectionate and suffered from a neurotic and overbearing temperament. She was claustrophobic, and as an adult Cheever remembered with intense irritation her behaviour
at the theatre. Often she'd have to grab her bag and gloves and push her way out, overwhelmed by the confinement of the stalls. Financially, though, it was she who kept the family afloat during the black years of the mid-twenties. Before her husband's downfall she'd channelled her chilly and remarkable energies into various good works. Now she established and ran a gift shop in Quincy, the existence of which filled her snobbish son with shame.

As for Cheever, he was a skimpy, lonely boy, a little effeminate and dismally untalented at sports. His real gift was for telling stories, marvels of fabrication and ebullience. Apart from a brief spell at Quincy High, he was educated largely at private schools, where he failed to shine academically despite an evident flair for English. His academic career ended for good when he left his last school, Thayer Academy, voluntarily at the age of seventeen. Showing a flash of his mother's enterprising spirit, he wrote a story about what he cannily reframed as his expulsion and sent it off to the
New Republic.

The editor who bought it, Malcolm Cowley, was an old friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He took a shine to Cheever, and as well as inaugurating his literary career was responsible for providing him with what was probably his first experience of New York-style intoxication. He threw an afternoon party and invited his protégé, who fifty years later would queasily recall:

I was offered two kinds of drinks. One was greenish. The other was brown. They were both, I believe, made in a bathtub. I was told that one was a Manhattan and the other Pernod. My only intent was to appear terribly sophisticated and I ordered a Manhattan. Malcolm very kindly introduced me to his guests.
I went on drinking Manhattans lest anyone think I came from a small town like Quincy, Massachusetts. Presently, after four or five Manhattans, I realized that I was going to vomit. I rushed to Mrs. Cowley, thanked her for the party, and reached the apartment-house hallway, where I vomited all over the wallpaper. Malcolm never mentioned the damages.

Perhaps realising he was in need of some city polish, Cheever moved to Manhattan in the summer of 1934, renting a fourth-floor walk-up on 633 Hudson Street for the princely sum of three dollars a week. His neighbours were longshoremen and sea cooks, and his room so epitomised the poverty of the period that it was photographed by Walker Evans (with whom Cheever had a brief liaison) as part of a series documenting the Great Depression. The image crops up periodically in reportage of the period: a claustrophobic low-ceilinged cell, furnished with a single bed that smelled powerfully of lice-preventive, the walls lumpily plastered, a pair of too-short curtains dragged shut against the night.

That first winter was intolerably cold. Cheever lived off milk, stale bread and raisins, spending his days with the drifters and down-and-outs in Washington Square, bundled up against the chill and talking obsessively about food. He worked at odd writing jobs, publishing occasional stories and précising novels for MGM, but none of these endeavours added up to anything like a steady income. Rescue came, once again, in the form of Malcolm Cowley. He suggested over dinner that his young friend might stop banging away at his hopeless novel and instead attempt much shorter stories, adding that if four were turned out over the next four days, he'd take a stab at placing them.
The challenge paid off. A few weeks later Cheever received his first cheque from the
New Yorker
for ‘Buffalo', initiating one of the most constant associations of his life.

Despite his growing reputation as a writer, for a long while Cheever's life in the city remained fundamentally unmoored. Then, on a rainy afternoon in November 1939 he went to visit his literary agent and encountered a pretty, well-bred, dark-haired girl in the elevator. ‘That's more or less what I would like,' he thought, and married Mary Winternitz just before the start of the Second World War. Over the next decade they moved from Greenwich Village to Chelsea and then on to the bourgeois splendours of Sutton Place, renting a ninth-floor apartment with a sunken lounge and views out across the East River.

It was during the Sutton Place period that Cheever began to write some of his greatest short stories, among them ‘The Enormous Radio', ‘The Day the Pig Fell into the Well', ‘The Common Day' and ‘Goodbye, My Brother'. These stories possess two kinds of magic. The first is a superficial conjuring of light and weather, of uptown cocktail parties and islands off the coast of Massachusetts. ‘The darkness would come as thickly into the soft air as silt.' ‘The sea that morning was a solid colour, like verd stone.' ‘There were a hundred clouds in the west – clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed.' There then follows a deeper, more disquieting thrill, which arises from the way these radiant surfaces are undermined. In his best work there exists an almost perpetual ambiguity, a movement between irony and sheer enchantment that only Scott Fitzgerald has ever seriously rivalled. Listen, for example, to this:

That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and brassy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of a custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done very well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island. What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbours, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?

‘Remember the day the pig fell into the well?' she asked.

Although he's often described as a realistic writer, Cheever is stranger and more subversive than his increasingly Waspy scenery suggests. Sometimes an unexplained ‘I' will assume control of the narrative, or else an eerie, collusive ‘we'. Stories blast forward in time, or contain false endings, false beginnings, midway swerves and points at which
the thread of narrative is abruptly severed. He seems to take his greatest pleasure in abandoning responsibility for his characters, only to lean in, split-seconds from collision, and whirl them back into motion again.

In ‘The Pot of Gold', a story from 1950, there's a line of description I thought of often while I was in Manhattan. Two women meet regularly to talk in Central Park. ‘They sat together with their children through the sooty twilights, when the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace, and the air smells of coal, and the wet boulders shine like slag, and the Park itself seems like a strip of woods at the edge of a coal town.' I found it pleasurable to say out loud.
When the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace.
There's no writer I can think of so effortlessly capable of reconditioning the world.