Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [197]
The main aspect of this personage was his curious accent. Was he a Cambridge Brahmin? British? What? It was hard to pin down. Philip Roth pointed out that it wasn't really a New England accent at all—“more like an upper-class New Yorker, someone like Plimpton, perhaps.” This was close, though Cheever's accent was somewhat more mutable than Plimpton's. When appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, or putting an impudent barkeep in his place, Cheever became almost a parody of the pompous toff (“like Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island,” the writer James Kaplan observed, “or Chatsworth Osborne in Dobie Gillis”), but at other times—relaxed, cracking jokes—he sounded not unlike a boy from the South Shore with an English mother. “I knew John before he had an accent,” said Jerre Mangione, his old FWP colleague from the thirties, and Mary Cheever also seems to remember when her husband had a more conventional way of saying “idear” for “idea” and “Cheevah” for “Cheever.” No matter. Most agree that Cheever's accent became a well-assimilated part of his persona—”a suave, fictional dialect,” as the poet Dana Gioia put it, “[that] seemed to have the force of ancient authority, as if he were some New England Homer standing at the apex of a long oral tradition.”
Nor would it be accurate to say that the persona itself—in its finished form—was false. “He saw what he wanted and he became it,” said Allan Gurganus. “That's what Cary Grant said, who started with Archie Leach: ‘I made up the name Cary Grant and then I became him.’ “ One thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald—or rather Cheever did, noting the disparity between Fitzgerald the vulgar, drunken prankster and Fitzgerald the artist, Fitzgerald the well-meaning father who “preserved an angelic austerity of spirit,” as Cheever wrote in Atlantic Brief Lives: “Noble might be a better word, since as a boy in what had been the frontier town of St. Paul he had considered himself to be a lost prince. How sensible of him. His mother was the ruthless and eccentric daughter of a prosperous Irish grocer. His gentle father belonged to the fringe aristocracy of the commercial traveler, moving from Syracuse to Buffalo and back again. How else could he explain his gifted-ness?” Needless to say, Cheever might just as well have been writing about himself. Also like Fitzgerald (and any number of American writers), he was a wistful snob—simultaneously enchanted and repelled by a materialistic culture where artists, no matter how great, remain outcasts to some extent. Fitzgerald, finding his grandfather listed in the St. Paul Social Register as a “grocer,” penciled in the word “wholesale;” Cheever, feeling belittled in some way, would pull an accent and become the lost prince of Wollaston. And yet the part of him that remained Archie Leach, so to speak, was a humble man who felt tender toward the other Archie Leaches of the world.
“I can't connect my life,” Cheever remarked once in the late seventies. “That person in the Army wasn't me. And there was a whole life before that that I can't connect either.” There were other lives, too, until finally he became the world-famous writer and Westchester squire. “It is strange to relate that I never had such a clear impression of knowing someone so well as on the first evening I met John Cheever [in the fifties],” said Elizabeth Spencer. The two remained friends over the next twenty-five years, though Spencer never again felt remotely as close to Cheever. “But I continued to believe that that funny and charming person was the real one.”
IN HIS JOURNAL,