LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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