• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3787 0

John patiently replied: “I'm enclosing a small check because it's all I have. I can't produce two thousand dollars out of thin air and I don't know who can. … If Annie would write and tell me what she needs in the way of tuition I will see what I can do about this. I realize that this will be embarrassing for Annie but it seems to be the only way of doing it.” One year later, Fred was sufficiently back on his feet to take a trip to England, stopping for a night in Ossining before catching his plane. While John simpered and drank and wished his brother would go away (even the man's rejuvenation was vaguely unsettling), Fred went on about the splendors of Boulder and reminisced about the family. “After twenty-five years of acute alcoholism, paranoia and marital mayhem,” John wrote Exley, “[Fred] appears at sixty-two, handsome, intelligent, sober and well-dressed. We sat up late, the Good Brother and the Bad Brother. The Good Brother (me) drank nearly a quart of bourbon while the Bad Brother sipped a gingerale. At breakfast the Bad Brother was all charm and composure. The Good Brother was one fucking mess.”

BY THE MID-SIXTIES, Cheever's furtive trips to the pantry were an almost daily ritual. The morning's work was usually done by ten-thirty, whereupon he'd retire either to the terrace if the weather was fine (he could hear the telephone ring and see people come and go) or downstairs to his wing chair, where he'd sit chain-smoking and pretending to read while casing the situation: Iole, perhaps, was puttering around the kitchen and would have to be distracted, or else his wife and/or children were lingering over their coffee and newspaper. Meanwhile the gin bottles sang and sang. When the coast was clear, Cheever would hit the pantry like a shot and pour a few “scoops,” but if the others were still hanging around as late as half past eleven or so, he'd often excuse himself (irritably) and drive to the liquor store, then park in some leafy area on the way home and “take a big pull at the bottle, spilling a lot of gin over [his] chin.”

He knew he was destroying himself, but the prospect of stopping or even tapering off seemed preposterous. Sometimes he felt all right when he woke up (albeit hungover to some greater or lesser degree), but within an hour or two the cafará would “[move] in like tear-gas,” and if he didn't get a drink he'd suffer an almost maddening malaise. Better to drink and calm down and wonder, sometimes tearfully, what was to become of him. “I keep reading biographies of Fitzgerald and I always get to bawling at the end,” he wrote a friend. “I read on a terrace where no can see me and when he goes out to Los Angeles for the last time I start crying and I weep right through to the end.” Perhaps this was meant to be taken somewhat tongue in cheek, but in fact Cheever could hardly have identified more with Fitzgerald, whose “torments” (and fate?) seemed very like his own. “Shall I dwell on the crucifixion of the diligent novelist?” he wrote, thinking of Fitzgerald. “The writer cultivates, extends, raises, and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by lethal doses of heroin or alcohol.”

As it was, his condition was literally paralyzing. The “gethsemane” of train travel—and he did, after all, have to go to the city now and then—would begin on the platform, where he was attacked by a vertigo so severe that he'd clutch a column, anything, lest the pavement “fly up and hit [him] between the eyes.” Then, if he actually managed to get on board, his panic would mount until sometimes he had to get off in the vicinity of Tarrytown or Yonkers; otherwise he'd “get bombed” (more so) in the toilet or perhaps take one of his “massive” tranquilizers, which left him floating in a limbo wherein his “hands seem[ed] to drop off.