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By Root 3988 0

the move to Ossining and the labors required to pay for it—a hectic time that he seemed to take in stride, albeit boozily as usual. In fact he was consumed with an almost suicidal self-loathing. His imagination was crowded with sordid daydreams of the “unwashed sailor” (Kentfield), which could only be subdued with huge doses of alcohol. Not surprisingly, he was more impotent than ever with his wife (“there is not a spark of life in the old root”) and worried that, for his sins, he'd now become decisively homosexual. When, a month later, Wald offered him two thousand a week to come back and write a screenplay, Cheever was tempted to accept—certainly he needed the money, but the thought of seeing Kentfield “[took] the lead out of [his] pencil” all over again. Wald persisted, proposing that Cheever was the only man to write “a big, important film that will explore, investigate and interrogate all the people residing in the suburbs,” but Cheever continued to beg off. He never wrote for the big screen again.

Nor, it seems, did he ever see Kentfield, who continued his long decline. After finishing his third book, All Men Are Mariners—which took five years to write and vanished with hardly a trace—Kentfield devoted himself all the more to emulating the feckless lives of his heroes, Malcolm Lowry and Hart Crane. Returning to Sausalito after a chaotic sojourn in Mexico, he promptly fell down some stairs (“or in fact up them,” he wrote a friend), breaking several ribs. “He is lost and I know something about this,” Cheever wrote in 1964, after reading Kentfield's final story in The New Yorker, about “alcoholism and whores in Mexico.” A few years later, as chairman of the grants committee, Cheever discreetly inquired of Maxwell whether he knew anything of Kentfield's whereabouts; he doubted he could get Kentfield a grant, but he thought the committee might make some charitable gesture if things were as bad as he suspected.

Things were bad, all right, though Kentfield persevered for nearly fifteen years after that meeting in Hollywood, and even managed to produce an autobiography of sorts, The Great Green. This did not lead to a surge of interest in his work, however. Nor could he stop drinking, though he'd made a last-ditch effort to get help from Synanon, a spin-off of Alcoholics Anonymous that had evolved into a cult of sorts. When they demanded he prove his commitment to sobriety by shaving his head, Kentfield threw in the towel. “Local Writer Falls from Cliff “ read the headline in the Point Reyes Light on September 11, 1975. “Kent-field's nude and battered body was found Thursday morning at the bottom of a 500-foot cliff at Palomarin,” the newspaper reported, along with some other curious details. Kentfield had left a hastily scribbled will of sorts, advising his beneficiaries that his most valuable possession, a ramshackle van, needed a new clutch and fuel pump. By way of explaining his suicide, he mentioned his disillusion with Synanon and suggested the reader consult chapter ninety-three of Moby-Dick, “The Castaway,” in which the sailor Pip has a near-death experience that leaves him indifferent to the world: “[T]herefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense …” Kentfield's son may have taken this to heart in some obscure way, for he fell to his death from almost the identical spot twenty-five years later.

A 1978 journal entry reveals that Cheever knew something of Kentfield's fate. At a time when Cheever was sober, celebrated, and “terribly lonely,” he seemed to think it was Kentfield's estranged wife who had driven him past the cliff en route to a rehab clinic. “I want to stop and have my last drink,” he imagined Kentfield telling the poor woman, before he got out of the car. As far as anyone knows, though, Kentfield died alone.

* Later, when holding court for journalists (the apple wood crackling in his fireplace, the heirlooms on display), Cheever often pointed out that his house in Ossining had been built in the eighteenth century “and so handsomely restored by Eric Gugler in the 1920's