Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [178]
Often he drank because he was worried, and not all his worries were ill-founded. He was fifty years old and had published almost 150 stories—many among the best of the postwar era—as well as a novel that had consumed half his life: could he go on like that forever? Meanwhile his financial obligations were crushing. He awoke (earlier and earlier) in the grip of the cafard, and lay in bed thinking about things (“eviscerated, insubstantial”) until it was time to have breakfast and get to work—but all too often the work went badly, which made him even more anxious and presently despairing, until a state of total pitiless sobriety was simply out of the question. Then he would sneak a drink or two and wait for lunch, when he could legitimately drink more, after which he'd try sweating it out with a long walk or a scything session. Young Federico was always “terrified” to see his drunken father tottering off with the big unwieldy scythe over his shoulder: “I was never sure if he was going to come back with all his limbs.”
It helped a little that Cheever managed to find humor in his own low spirits. He became more and more fond of the refrain that he was an “old man nearing the end of his journey,” and he noticed that, like his mother, he was apt to indulge in “copious sighs” as well as the bleak little proverbs that accompanied them (“There's not enough rain to water the garden,” he'd quote her, “but enough to keep you indoors”). And—like his father-in-law—he often assumed the role of martyr in order to put others subtly in the wrong: “Oh, don't worry about me, dear,” he'd sigh, having served his wife and family with generous portions so that nothing was left for him but a potato and a puddle of grease. “This is plenty for me.” His children took to calling him Eeyore, and once Susan presented him with an empty honey jar and a dead balloon.
Another way of shaking off the torpor of the cafará was to remind himself, emphatically, of certain abiding virtues that made life beautiful. As he wrote in his journal at the end of that disappointing spring, “I wake at three or four—soft moonshine from the west—and half-rising in bed exclaim: Valor, Love, Virtue, Compassion, Splendor, Kindness, Wisdom, Beauty, Vigor! The words seem to have the colors of the earth and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night.” For years he'd resort to that little incantation when all else failed to rouse him (his recital was wan at times), and meanwhile it provided the spark for “A Vision of the World,” about a man who rebels against “incoherent” reality by imposing the logic of his dream life. In sleep the narrator keeps encountering an oddly heartening, quasi-Slavic phrase—“Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego”—but when he urgently repeats this to his vapid wife, she dissolves in tears. At last, waking once more “in despair,” he suddenly, ecstatically grasps the (implicit) meaning of the dream motto—”Valor! Love! Virtue!” etc.—and so achieves a peace that passeth understanding.
One imagines that Cheever resorted to his incantation more than a few times when thinking of his brother, Fred, who had fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion. For a while, according to his daughter Jane, Fred had been not only sober but almost content—or rather he was “wonderful in the morning,” though afternoons weighed heavily and his mood darkened as the once-beloved cocktail hour came around. On weekends he'd drive into town with his youngest