Fathers and Daughters

John Cheever didn’t write book reviews or travel sketches, essays about apple orchards, historic houses, or even his beloved gin. He skipped the kind of piecework with which other writers eke out an income, and maybe it would have been better for him if he hadn’t; certainly he wouldn’t have found himself sweating so much about house payments or tuition bills. Instead almost everything he produced for publication was a work of fiction: five novels, the sixty-odd short stories included in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Stories of John Cheever (1978), and the even greater number that didn’t make the cut. Some writers of his generation took a regular turn in Hollywood, others taught, but Cheever didn’t do those things either, not until the 1970s, when in late middle age several forms of desperation sent him into the classroom at Iowa and Boston University and, most importantly, at the state prison in his Westchester town of Ossining. Iowa gave him both drinking buddies and young men to lust after; Sing Sing, once he had dried out, the extraordinary if episodic late novel Falconer (1977), an unexpected best seller that made him financially secure at last.

But what he did do, and for almost the entirety of his adult life, was keep a journal, thousands of badly typed pages that he stashed in a series of loose-leaf notebooks. He invited his older son, Benjamin, to read them just before his death at seventy in 1982, and his daughter, Susan, drew on them in the memoir, Home Before Dark, that she published two years later; excerpts from the journal appeared in The New Yorker in 1990 and a longer selection in book form the following year. He wanted them published, and knew that their precise and lovely prose would forever alter our sense of his work. It’s an old tale by now, the journal’s revelation of a life that seemed, he believed, to hang by the most fragile and fraudulent of threads: a fearful closeted bisexual life, ruled by the anxious longings of his ever “itchy member.” Suppose his wife, Mary, guessed, or the suburban neighbors with whom he appeared to pass?

Meanwhile each year’s binder lay on his desk, for anyone who chose to pry; apparently no one did. He described his heterosexual affairs as well, and he offered a clear understanding of his alcoholism, his growing inability to resist the temptation of a drink before lunch, and at times before breakfast. Two scoops of gin, that’s how he described it, as if it were ice cream. And yet some of the best passages depict ordinary domesticity: an afternoon walk with a child or the beauty of early dawn, with a maple tree emerging from shadow.

That journal had another purpose, though. It was an essential part of his work, a place in which to think aloud, to try out ideas or plot points. So he sketches out an ending for Falconer or asks himself if he should make the title figure of “The Swimmer” (1964) resemble Narcissus. These passages remind me of nothing so much as the notebooks of Henry James in their rapid canvassing of the possibilities offered by a given fictional premise, some chosen and others rejected. He also has some of James’s frankness about money—money as both a subject and a governing condition of one’s life, though the older writer was perhaps the more practical. The most telling moment in the journal, at any rate, is about dollars rather than sex or booze, a moment from December 1963 that his daughter first described in Home Before Dark and returns to in When All the Men Wore Hats:

Like many men of fifty, I am obliged to ask for a raise and, like many men of fifty, I am confronted with a blameless, monolithic, and capricious organization, hobbled, it seems, by its own prosperity…. I am accused of improvidence, and make several long speeches about how I am harassed by indebtedness. The Saturday Evening Post has offered me twenty-four thousand, The New Yorker has offered me twenty-five hundred, and I will take the latter, I’m not sure why.

That was the day he handed the manuscript of “The Swimmer” over to his New Yorker editor, William Maxwell. It’s now his most famous story and perhaps his best, a tale of American loneliness that can stand comparison with Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”; the magazine ran it the next year but not before a lot of dim-witted editorial discussion about its departures from any strict and plausible realism. Cheever asked for more money and the magazine said no, even though he had won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), and the hundred-odd stories he had already published there, beginning in 1935, had long been a defining feature of its fiction.

Susan Cheever writes in Home Before Dark that that refusal became a story in its own right, and one her father liked to embroider over the dinner table by “throwing in a snowstorm and the suggestion that he couldn’t afford to buy presents for his children.” Still, its central anecdote is true enough. He went down into the Midtown Manhattan streets, slotted a dime into a pay phone, and dialed the agent Candida Donadio. She told him to wait a moment and almost immediately called back with that offer from the Post: $24,000 for four stories a year. Cheever returned to the New Yorker offices and got a modest raise on his annual first-look contract, which gave the magazine the right of refusal on his work. He later claimed that it also offered him the key to the men’s room and an unlimited supply of snacks, but it didn’t even try to match the Post’s offer. Nevertheless he stayed, though “not sure why”; in his daughter’s words, he was always a “patsy” about money.

When All the Men Wore Hats takes its title from a line in his brief preface to The Stories of John Cheever. Many of the book’s characters, he writes, seem to come from a lost midcentury world, “when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store,” and almost nobody went bareheaded. The claim is nostalgic, serene, and entirely at odds with both the stories themselves and the book Susan Cheever has written about them. Her father’s men do wear hats, but they also know that their world is already lost, that they haven’t found either the financial success or the happy domesticity they hoped for.

The narrator of “The Season of Divorce” (1950) says that both he and his wife “come from that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times. Lost money is so much a part of our lives,” as indeed it was of Cheever’s. His father had once owned a share of a prosperous Massachusetts shoe factory, but he sold out and then lost the proceeds in the stock market. The family never got over that failure. In “The Enormous Radio” (1947), his first great story, Jim and Irene Westcott seem to have hit “that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins,” with two kids and a twelfth-floor apartment near Sutton Place. But what they find, as they sit listening to the big new radio that somehow lets them tune in on all their neighbors, is that the average hides a good bit of misery. Or rather that the average lot is misery, their own included. The man in 16-C beats his wife, “that girl who plays the ‘Missouri Waltz’ is a whore, a common whore,” and the elevator operator has TB. Hearing all this they start to quarrel, and then their own secrets come out. Irene is a shallow spendthrift, Jim is going broke, and he’s never forgiven her for having an abortion.

Susan Cheever was born in 1943 and passed her own childhood near Sutton Place. Each morning her father would put on his one suit and take the elevator downstairs, as if heading to an office job like everyone else. But the office was a basement storeroom, where he would strip to his boxers and sit down at the typewriter. That was his secret, or one of them; another was just how closely his fiction stuck to the details of his own family life, in both its facts and its emotional tenor. A number of his stories from the 1940s and 1950s feature a little girl whose appearance and temperament are a match for his daughter’s, and in “The Hartleys” (1949) he has the child killed by a malfunctioning ski lift. He later said the story was meant to capture his fears on her behalf; she doesn’t think it’s that simple.

She began her career as a journalist, eventually working at Newsweek, and published her first novel, Looking for Work, in 1979. A handful of others followed, but she made her reputation with Home Before Dark, and proved adept as well at the kind of occasional writing her father never chose to master. Another memoir, Treetops (1991), explored her mother’s complicated blended family, which put the Cheevers close to people of great privilege but didn’t provide them with any capital of their own, or at least no capital beyond culture.

Susan Cheever has written about her own demons as well, and one of her books is a biography of Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose program helped save both her and her father. There are also sharp biographies of Louisa May Alcott and E.E. Cummings, the latter a family friend. When All the Men Wore Hats inevitably returns to some of the issues and moments of her earlier memoirs. But it keeps a tighter focus on her father’s work, and while her admiration for it seems boundless, she also scratches at the scars it has left on her. The book offers a detailed commentary on about two dozen of his stories, showing where they draw on and where they depart from the actual life behind them. She reprints six of the best in an appendix, including “The Swimmer,” and describes the success of Falconer, written when her father was newly sober, as well as the moment of inspiration that made Knopf’s Robert Gottlieb push him into releasing his second best seller, the big red-jacketed Stories of John Cheever, an idea he at first resisted.

Her treatment of “Goodbye, My Brother” shows how both she and her father operate. It was first published in 1951, and Cheever used it to open that 1978 collection. It’s significantly longer than many of his works, nineteen pages in the Stories as opposed to the nine of “The Enormous Radio,” and takes place at the summer house, on what is apparently Martha’s Vineyard, of the Pommeroy family: four grown children and their widowed, hard-drinking mother. The house stands on an eroding bluff and will soon either tumble down or need a ruinously expensive shoring-up. At least that’s what the priggish Lawrence Pommeroy says, the youngest of the four and the one most at odds with his siblings. Nobody likes Lawrence, not the story’s readers and certainly not his nameless narrating brother, who begins the tale by saying that his family “has always been very close in spirit.” Though not, it seems, in any other way. The climactic moment comes when Lawrence tells the narrator that he’s a fool, their mother a drunk, and their sister a slut. He’s right about all of it, and the narrator’s response is to pick up some driftwood and brain him from behind.

The Cheevers had no such house, though they did spend part of each summer at a New Hampshire lake where Mary’s family had a sprawling rustic camp. The backgammon game Cheever uses as a guide to his characters was lifted from that part of his life, while the rivalry between the siblings was shaped by the mix of love and loathing he felt for his older brother, Fred. But Susan Cheever writes that her father would have denied that there was any necessary connection between those details and the inner truth of his stories. Life was one thing, art another, and their superficial resemblance was no more than that.

There’s a good bit of misdirection in all such claims, though it’s something a writer may need to believe in order to work at all. For the critic, however, looking at what was real becomes a way to see what’s been invented, to see the art itself. In “Goodbye, My Brother” that’s a matter of the narrator’s unreliability. Because Lawrence is right. His brother is a fool, someone who takes pride in the most threadbare of family traditions. Every time I read this story I am more on Lawrence’s side, as Susan Cheever says she is herself, and indeed he’s the one who says good-bye, leaving the island with his head bloody and bandaged. Or I’m on Lawrence’s side until I’m not, until the story’s last sentences, when as the narrator walks on the beach he sees his sister and his wife swimming, water nymphs who then step “naked, unshy, and full of grace” from the dark and “iridiscent” sea. A fool—and because of that offered a vision that Lawrence could never have.

Alcohol and money, too much of one and not enough of the other. Those are the surface coordinates of Cheever’s world, but though his hat-wearing martini drinkers all seem to have good jobs he says singularly little about what they actually do. In “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (1956) Johnny Hake lives in that “banlieue” and works in the New York office of a “parablendeum manufacturer,” but Cheever made that word up and the nature of Johnny’s work remains entirely abstract. Then he loses his job and has to find another before his checks begin to bounce. One night he puts on dark clothes and a pair of soft-soled shoes and walks into a neighbor’s unlocked house; the man’s wallet is easy to find, a “big billfold” stuffed with dollars. It’s enough to save him, and a new career seems to open as he scouts through town and thinks about whom to hit next. But Johnny finds his own actions appalling, and they make him see the duplicity that underlies his entire world. Another man tries to enlist him in a plan to fleece “three kids,” the newspapers seem suddenly full of stories about swindles and crimes, and when his children give him a handyman’s ladder for his birthday he’s convinced that they know about his secret life.

Is this a story about the closet? Yes and no. It’s a story about what the closet allowed Cheever to see. He moved his family out of New York City in 1951, and from then on the suburbs became his subject: the towns made possible by what’s now Metro-North, each with its village core and the social hierarchies whose rigidity belied their newness. The closet lit his society’s masks from within, a world where everyone has something to hide. That’s what Johnny Hake discovers in Shady Hill, but he’ll get away with it. For the tale ends as a comedy. His old boss rehires him, he returns his neighbor’s money by breaking into his house once more, and then he walks off whistling in the dark.

Part of Cheever’s own struggles came from the fact that he wrote short stories. A novelist of his generation could make money, but he was never comfortable with the novel’s necessarily greater scale and was in his mid-forties before he published The Wapshot Chronicle. And really that’s a story writer’s idea of a novel, full of loose ends and detachable nodes of narrative, a brilliant but ramshackle exercise in a form for which he was unsuited. Nevertheless he felt that he wouldn’t be taken seriously until he finished it, and in any case he couldn’t afford to return the advance. Of course, some short stories did make money—those in The Saturday Evening Post above all. The New Yorker was different, and Susan Cheever draws on both Ben Yagoda’s history of the magazine and Blake Bailey’s biography to show that her father was consistently underpaid.¹ The New Yorker’s dizzying system of compensation employed a series of sliding scales: word rates that varied not only with length but also from writer to writer, occasional bonuses, and then that first-look contract, which offered a small bit of security even as it limited one’s chances elsewhere. Every one of the magazine’s regular contributors had a different deal, and Cheever’s was notably bad. So the question isn’t only why it was, but why he chose to stay, to sign that contract with each new year.

For Susan Cheever both questions go back to his relationship with The New Yorker’s Maxwell. She suspects that the editor suspected, that his own “complicated sexuality,” best seen in the romantic friendship of Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf (1945), allowed him to intuit her father’s secret. Did Cheever fear exposure? Blackmail? “I don’t want to use the word,” Susan Cheever writes, though her disclaimer still leaves it in one’s mind. But Maxwell did make him feel that he was understood, protected, safe. The New Yorker was a home where the “better times” had never ended, and though there was a bare four years between them Cheever thought of his editor as a mentor.

At the same time Maxwell chafed at the knowledge that that was indeed how most people saw him: as an editor, not a writer. He had published four successful novels in the fourteen years that ended with Time Will Darken It in 1948, but then the magazine began to eat his time. His best fiction was published after he retired, including So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), a short novel as great as Falconer, and I can’t escape the sense that in looking at Cheever he felt a touch of envy. That wasn’t how he viewed his other authors, Eudora Welty and Frank O’Connor among them, but Cheever was the competition, another chronicler of upper-middle-class American life.

That relationship lay behind the difficulties the magazine had with “The Swimmer.” It now seems a definitive example of that thing known as “the New Yorker short story,” and so essential a work of our literature that two recent online essays in this magazine made it central to their arguments.² But sixty years ago there was a Maxwell-led discussion about whether it was indeed “a” New Yorker short story, or if perhaps it violated some canon the magazine held dear. I spent a week this summer reading through its fiction for 1964, the year in which “The Swimmer” appeared. It was a curious and disappointing experience. Most issues had two stories, with the shorter one first, immediately following Talk of the Town, and then the longer one. The latter was the position Cheever’s tale held in the July 18 issue, immediately following John Updike’s inconsequential “The Morning,” not buried at the back of the book, as Susan Cheever says.

Almost all the year’s stories by American writers were formally safe and conventional, Donald Barthelme’s excepted, though Barthelme should perhaps be understood as an extreme version of the magazine’s humorists, a linguistic acrobat like S.J. Perelman. They were politically safe as well. Stories from abroad might deal with politics, and the English could offer an explicit treatment of class, but history was what happened elsewhere. There were several pieces drawn from the Vienna-born Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses (1964), her autobiographical novel about life as a refugee from fascism, and a surprising number of other stories were really bits of memoir. Most of it was forgettable, and yet one thing seemed clear: in a piece of realistic writing the reader should never be in doubt about what had happened. You might wonder how a character feels about what’s happened, and the magazine was famous for what Yagoda calls its “non-ending ending[s].” But there should be no question at the level of plot.

“The Swimmer” broke that rule. The story begins on a midsummer Sunday when all Westchester County seems hungover, and at the edge of a friend’s pool Neddy Merrill, his hand “around a glass of gin,” decides to swim back to his house some miles away. He hops from one shimmering patch of chlorinated blue to another, answering questions about his beautiful wife and four tennis-playing daughters and accepting the occasional drink as he follows the “quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.” First he visits “the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears,” and then a dozen more. Yet as he moves from pool to pool the day begins to change, leaves fall, the air turns cold, and he starts to shiver with age. At first people are glad to see him, but that soon changes as well. One woman says she’s sorry to hear about some “misfortunes” of which he has no memory, his “poor children” among them. Another tells him to leave. At last he walks up his own driveway, exhausted, only to find that the house is dark and in need of repair, and when in the final sentence he looks through the window he sees “that the place was empty.”

Neddy’s own experience is continuous, but time has passed for everyone else in his world, summer has gone to fall, whole years have spun by and left his life a ruin. And yet how can one go from midsummer to late autumn in the course of a single afternoon? In “The Enormous Radio” the Westcotts know from the start that what’s happening is strange, but in the later story that strangeness steals over its pages so quietly that we have left the possible world behind before we know it. Or have we? For “The Swimmer” never quite becomes an allegory. Cheever brings us through time as he brings us through space, that “quasi-subterranean” and irreversible stream, but the falling leaves are real leaves, and the pools, however numinous, still need to be skimmed. That was what troubled Maxwell, that deliberate blurring of categories. Susan Cheever writes that he told her father the magazine “could not publish a story that took liberties with the realities of the natural world.” Years later he admitted to her that he’d been wrong. The story “tried things that we felt just weren’t possible. It turned out that anything was possible.”

We never learn what kind of misfortunes Neddy has had. Is it the drinking? Something more? The story’s genius lies in the absence of any explanation for either his troubles or the passing of time, but by the end it’s clear that he’s an outcast, and the tale stands as another example of what the closet allowed the writer to see. Cheever’s alcoholism was probably hereditary, but the social mores of his buttoned-up, post-Prohibition, postwar world all conspired to make it worse. A grown-up was someone who knew how to hold their liquor. Or at least pretend to hold it. In “The Sorrows of Gin” (1953), one of what Susan Cheever calls the “little girl” stories, Amy Lawton watches her father put a drink on the mantelpiece and then forget where he’s left it. He looks on the living room’s side tables, searches the terrace of their suburban home, comes back to the living room, and heads out once more to the terrace. Then he gives up, pours himself another, and goes to fetch the babysitter. Susan Cheever remembers elsewhere that her father sometimes did that himself, and that turns her account into something uncanny, with everything doubled: two daughters, two fathers, and with the real ones each reporting on the actions of both their fictional counterparts. She was ten when he published that story.

When All the Men Wore Hats is a book about alcoholism, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. For it is also a book about responsibility, about what you owe to art and what to the people around you. About the difference between those things and then the choice between them, knowing that something will be lost no matter what. Cheever denied that what happened in his work had anything to do with what happened at the family’s dinner table. “Fiction is not crypto-autobiography,” he said, and tried to persuade her that only a philistine would think so. Meanwhile his daughter felt betrayed by the way he turned her childhood self into words, and doubly betrayed by his refusal to admit it. She tells her brother Benjamin that “on the page he was a great father” and hears him reply that “off the page he had no interest in us whatsoever,” as if they were only material. Great enough to know that he misplaced his drinks; bad enough to do it in the first place. Like all arguments that matter, this one will never go away, and she knows it. Art and life have everything to do with each other, but they are never quite the same, and the gap between them is in every case different.

Susan Cheever remembers that one of her father’s fictional fathers had watched as his little girl was dragged to her death by a Vermont rope tow, and she reads that story as a mark of the ambivalence and aggression with which he saw her. And perhaps there’s some aggression of her own in choosing “Reunion” (1962) as her favorite of all his works, the one with which she ends this book. It covers just 1,200 words, in which the first-person narrator, a teenaged child of divorce, meets his father for lunch in New York. They rendezvous at the information booth in Grand Central Station and don’t have much time; the boy has a train to catch. His father already smells of whiskey, and when they enter a nearby restaurant he claps his hands for service, argues with the waiter, and is asked to leave. At a second place he orders them each a martini, and then another; this time the boy is refused service and they head out to the street again. And so it goes: four restaurants in four pages, no food, and by the end the father cannot even order a newspaper without getting into a fight. The boy has to go. “Now, just wait a second, sonny,” the man says, but it’s too late. The narrator goes down the stairs to his train, and “that was the last time I saw my father.”