Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [121]
It wasn't just other men who worried Cheever, but anything Mary did that seemed to indicate a waning interest in wifely duties. Her participation in the League of Women Voters, for example, excited an almost hysterical chagrin, which as usual Cheever cloaked with a lot of good-natured ridicule in his letters: she was a “comical character,” he wrote, who got up early every morning and nailed signs to trees alerting “the ladies” to their latest meeting, while he, Cheever, hid “in a neighbor's attic.” In fact, he feared nothing less than total abandonment, suspecting that her interest in the League of Women Voters and Rod Swope was all too justified. Impotence had become an issue in their marriage, and this was a very vicious cycle for Cheever. Any failure to perform resulted in proliferating anxieties, which drove him deeper into drink and further impotence; rather than blame drink and certain other factors, though, Cheever would find ways of blaming his wife—she was cold, self-involved, and so on—which in turn heightened her own exasperation and caused her to reject him in actual fact.
Beneath it all, of course, was an escalating terror of homosexuality, and living among the dauntingly normal citizens of Scarborough didn't help. Alleged “sex perversion” was a bigger stigma than ever—the fifties were a time of rampant homophobia, of government witch hunts and random police raids—and there was a lot of heavy, nervous joking at suburban cocktail parties. “Jumping at every mention of homos,” Cheever wrote in his journal, which in the early months of 1954 was filled with self-loathing on the subject. “He speaks scornfully of effeminate men lest he be misunderstood and as he scorns his own effeminacy,” Cheever wrote of an acquaintance. “And in making this harsh judgment I might say that I sometimes seem to live behind a veil of ignorance myself.” That was perhaps an understatement, though in Cheever's case it wasn't so much ignorance as visceral revulsion. Every encounter with suspected homosexuals (“with their funny clothes and their peculiar smells and airs and scraps of French”) struck him as “an obscenity and a threat,” such that his own impulses were unbearable and had to be numbed with alcohol or blamed on his wife. But then homosexuality was only part of the problem, as even Cheever could see. Reading the psychoanalyst Karen Horney one night, he realized that he was “implicated in the neurotic picture,” given his insatiable need for love and approval (often caused by “parental indifference,” said Horney), and never mind his pathological jealousy: he strained himself to write kindly, witty, intimate letters to almost total strangers; his public persona was unassailably charming (belied withal by the depressive paranoia of his journal); he followed comely people around on the street; he felt an “erotic, childish” hankering almost all the time, and regarded himself (rightly) as “a punching bag for the beauty and virility of the world.” But why speak only of the neurotic's “frustrations,” he wondered, when “a good deal of poetry and charm can be involved”?
Perhaps, but the fact remained that he was impotent, and often drunk before lunch. Finally, in April, he decided to see the Sing Sing psychiatrist, Bernard Glueck, a young man who'd struck him as having a “vigorous mind” when the two met at a party in 1952. Cheever told his wife that he was going because of impotence per se, but with Glueck he openly broached the matter of “homosexual concerns” along with his worsening (and not unrelated) problems with impotence and alcohol. At their first session Glueck was reassuring enough, but Cheever was wary at the prospect of any sort of long-term psychoanalysis. As he wrote in his journal, he found the “atmosphere of the confessional” distasteful,