Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [2]
He even seemed to come to terms, at long last, with what he called “the most subterranean eminence in [his] person”—a fear that he was a sexual (as well as social) impostor. “Here is some sort of conflict,” he wrote in 1963, though it might have been any year; “a man who has homosexual instincts and genuinely detests homosexuals. They seem to him unserious, humorless and revolting.” Thus, even at the best of times, a shadow was cast over his happiness, though he often tried counting his blessings with a sort of wan bemusement: a loving family, a beautiful house, friendly dogs, talent, fame, on and on. Still the shadow remained, whatever the surface facts of his life (“I wake from a dream”—he wrote in his journal—”in which I am committing a gross and compulsive indecency”).
Falconer had been a catharsis of sorts—the story of a man who makes peace with himself, partly in the form of a homosexual love affair—and shortly after he finished the novel, Cheever also seemed to find peace. While visiting the University of Utah Writing Program in 1977, he met a young man who had none of the attributes of a “sexual irregular,” as Cheever would have it: “His air of seriousness and responsibility, the bridged glasses he wore for his nearsightedness, and his composed manner excited my deepest love …” The young man's name was Max, and, in some form or another, he remained in Cheever's life until the end. Cheever often wondered if he were being succored by the ghost of his beloved older brother, Fred, or some other long-lost friend; at any rate he seemed more inclined to accept his own nature, such as it was. “Life is an improvisation!” he liked to say, especially in later years.
Certainly life had turned out better than he ever could have hoped as a lonely, starving artist in the Depression, in flight from a family life that was “bankrupt in every way”: “I remember waking in some squalid furnished room,” he wrote, two years before his death, “probably with a terrible hangover and very likely with a stiff and unrequited prick.” At such times he used to comfort himself with dreams of future love and success—and now, fifty years later, it had all come true. “And so I woke … with a wife and the voices of birds, dogs and children but what I had not anticipated was the sound of a brook. And so it seems to be more bounteous than once I could have imagined.” But then a curious afterthought: “It could, of course, be more horrifying.”
CHAPTER ONE
{1637-1912}
MANY SKELETONS IN FAMILY CLOSET,” Leander Wapshot wrote in his diary. “Dark secrets, mostly carnal.” Even at the height of his success, Cheever never quite lost the fear that he'd “end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by [his] children, an old man approaching death without a companion.” This, he sensed, was the fate of his “accursed” family—or at least of its men, who for three generations (at least) had seemed “bound to a drunken and tragic destiny.” There was his paternal grandfather, Aaron, rumored to have committed suicide in a bleak furnished room on Charles Street in Boston, a disgrace too awful to mention. One night, as a young man, Cheever had sat by a fire drinking whiskey with his father, Frederick, while a nor'easter raged outside. “We were swapping dirty stories,” he recalled; “the feeling was intimate, and I felt that this was the time when I could bring up the subject. ‘Father, would you tell me something about your father?’ ‘No!’ And that was that.” By then Cheever's father was also poor and forsaken, living alone in an old family farmhouse on the South Shore, his only friend “a half-wit who lived up the road.” As for Cheever's brother, he too would become drunken and poor, spending his last days in a subsidized retirement village in Scituate. No