• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4035 0

finish The Wapshot Scandal, only to realize the prospect remained as distant as ever. And then, a day or two after he arrived, his old hero Cummings died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage. That night Cheever talked of Cummings with two Yaddo friends, Curtis Harnack and his wife, Hortense Calisher. Harnack had also known the poet, and amid long ruminative pauses, the two swapped remembrances. “The body of Cummings might have been there in its coffin,” said Calisher, “and in a way it was. I was at a wake.” Cheever had seen Cummings a few years before at Susan's school in Dobbs Ferry, where the poet had agreed to give a reading. As Susan remembered, the two men had warmly embraced in the headmaster's office: “The force and openness of their affection for one another seemed to shake that airless, heavily draped room.” Afterward they drove the poet back to Patchin Place, stopping for hamburgers at White Castle, where Cummings railed wittily against his arthritis as well as the silly teachers at Susan's school. As Cheever liked to point out, the poet had “perfect style”: “I think of Cummings, who played out his role as a love poet into his late sixties. There was a man.”

A further source of unhappiness at Yaddo was, as Cheever saw it, the ever more visible presence of homosexuals, though of course they were hardly a novelty there. As a much younger man, Cheever had warily taken tea with composers David Diamond and Marc Blitzstein (“thinking, without censure, that their world was very unlike mine”), and now, twenty-five years later, here was Blitzstein still—and still vaguely “ungainly,” it seemed to Cheever: “I think that this is not the force of an invincible society but the invincible force of nature that demands that we take procreative attitudes and loathes the gymnastics of perversion.” Be that as it may, the force of society (as opposed to nature) was much on Cheever's mind too—it was society, after all, which had left Newton Arvin “stripped of everything.” Before and after that unfortunate man's fall, Cheever had militated at board meetings in favor of building a swimming pool at Yaddo, and now the thing was done at last. Every afternoon, then, Cheever sat beside the water watching the sun-bathing youths and reminding himself of his devotion to attitudes of procreation. “But my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this,” he glumly noted, “and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world.” Arranging his towel, Cheever felt again like “a practiced and consummate impostor” and concluded that he was “heading for ruin.”*

As a self-proclaimed (and often drunk) impostor, Cheever was increasingly poor company around his family. His daughter and he were especially apt to clash, as she got older and more assertive and perhaps eager to get a bit of her own back. These days, when he began to lecture her about her weight, instead of bursting into tears she was just as likely to call him a “troll” and slam the door in his face. Of course, Cheever had always encouraged (and certainly modeled) a sort of mocking banter among family members, such that the dinner table was characterized as a “shark tank” and a “bear pit.” At the best of times, no one appreciated a well-aimed barb as much as Cheever, even when he was the target, but these were not the best of times. “You have two strings to play,” said Susan, at pains to deflate her father's occasional pomposity. “One is the history of the family, the other is your childlike sense of wonder. Both of them are broken.” Cheever exploded, and even managed to force her into tears again. “I think, abysmally bitter, that Orpheus knew he would be torn limb from limb,” he wrote; “but he had not guessed that the Harpy would be his daughter.”

The previous year, she'd begun attending Pembroke (the women's college at Brown), and hated it; she wanted to transfer to Bennington, but Cheever refused—he'd also talked Pammy Spear into choosing Pembroke, and she liked it just fine. Soon, however, Susan gave him reason to regret his obduracy. That spring she brought home a boyfriend