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.
The problem, as anyone who has read Cheever’s journals will know, is that the same gulf between appearance and interior that makes his stories so beguiling was also at work in his own life, though here it produced less pleasurable effects. Despite an increasingly command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever couldn’t shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle classes. Partly, this was a matter of money. Even when he was packing his daughter into the cab that took her each morning to private school, he was painfully aware that he remained too poor to tip the doorman or pay his bills on time. ‘The rent is not paid,’ he noted despairingly in his journal of 1948, ‘we have very little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs.’
An oft-repeated anecdote from the Sutton Place years has Cheever taking the elevator each morning: a dapper little figure in suit and tie, indistinguishable from the other hard-working, well-scrubbed men who crowd in on every floor. But while they stream out of the lobby, rushing off to workplaces across the city, he descends to the basement, strips to his underwear, and settles at his typewriter, emerging, suited once more, in time for pre-lunch drinks. The sense of himself as both forger and forgery could be thrilling, but in his journal Cheever added dolefully: ‘It is a tonic to my self-respect to leave the basement room.’
Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness. All the same, Cheever’s sense of double-dealing seems to have run unusually deep. After a New Year spent upstate with some wealthy friends, he wrote in baffled fury a thought that had occurred to him while folding, of all things, a monogrammed towel:
It was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
This burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever under wraps, was not just a matter of class anxiety. Cheever lived in the painful knowledge that his erotic desires included men, that these desires were antagonistic and even fatal to the social security he also craved, and that as such ‘every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol’. During this period, his sense of failure and self-disgust could reach such agonising heights that he sometimes raised in his journals the possibility of suicide.
Who wouldn’t drink in a situation like that, to ease the pressure of maintaining such intricately folded double lives? He’d been hitting it hard since his late teens: initially, like Tennessee Williams, out of a desire to quell his acute social anxiety. In the bohemian Village of the 1930s and 40s, alcohol was still the omnipresent lubricant of social exchange, and even in the depths of poverty, he’d managed to find the funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen manhattans or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends’ apartments, at Treetops (his wealthy wife’s family estate in New Hampshire), in the Breevort Hotel, the back room at the Plaza or in the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he’d pop in after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while he attended to his needs.
Though not all these scenes were exactly civilised, alcohol was an essential ingredient of Cheever’s ideal of a cultured life, one of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent shadows of inferiority and shame. In a journal entry written the summer before he married Mary, he recorded the following fantasy:
I found myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I’ve never learnt to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles’ five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones’ Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty . . . moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.
In this pleasant daydream, drinking is not about anything so vulgar as gratifying an appetite, but rather part of an elaborate social code, in which the right thing done at the right time conveys a near-magical sense of belonging. The monopole is ordered and iced, not drunk; the martini only tasted; while the Vouvray is merely transferred from one container to another, more appropriate to the demands of the season and the hour.
The same note sounds again from another, later diary entry, written in September 1941, when Cheever was on a ten-day furlough from the army. ‘Mary was waiting,’ he writes happily, ‘all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad-greens, etc., filled the ice-box.’ What’s interesting about this memory, which recalls Ratty’s gleeful iteration of his picnic in Wind in the Willows, is the emphasis on cleanliness as well as largesse. Shined, clean, shining, clean: an antidote to the grubby privations of camp life, perhaps. But in its obsessive repetitions, it also resembles an incantation, a spell for safety and good health (clean, after all, is a hospital word, particularly clean sheets, while the preserving ice-box also has a hospital, even a morgueish, chill about it). As such, it’s hard not to read those ranked bottles as a kind of medicine, a prophylactic against the sense of dirtiness and disorder that would continue to dog Cheever from house to house, from year to year.
I was jolted out of this line of thought by a man in the bar saying distinctly Ossining. How strange. Ossining is a small town in Westchester County, forty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. It’s still best known, years after his death, as Cheever’s adopted hometown (after he died the flags of the public buildings were lowered for ten days). Coincidentally, it’s also where Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister Rose spent most of her adult life, in an institution he both chose and paid for. It’s one of those places that exist in the limbo of the reader’s mind, inexorably associated with the melancholy, suburban stories Cheever used to write for the New Yorker.
I looked up. The Ossining man was sitting with the woman whose blouse I’d coveted. He was balding and wore one of those jaunty navy blazers with gleaming buttons that are supposed to lend one a nautical air. They were evidently cornering into a spectacular row.
‘So,’ she said. ‘What is your marriage? Are you happily married? What is your home situation?’
‘Happily? Happily would be the right word. I guess I’m happily married. But I’m attracted to you. I can’t control that.’
‘I’m just wondering what you’ve been doing since this morning.’
‘As a matter of fact I went home around noon. I told work I had a very important client to entertain. Don’t be hurt or confused if I say I have a happy marriage. Really, if I was truly happy I wouldn’t be here with you.’
Jeez. I wondered for a minute if they
