Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [30]
Any separation from Fred was an almost intolerable wrench, and so, in the summer of 1930, John was crushed when his brother departed for Germany. Interested in the idea of “breeding” even then, Fred was fascinated by the budding experiment to establish a state along racial lines, and finally he could no longer restrain himself from crossing the Atlantic to learn more about National Socialism. John (who would always lack his brother's zest for big ideas) lay weeping on the sofa in Fred's empty apartment in Boston: “I wept for a love that could only bring me misery and narrowness and denial; and how passionately I wept.”
John was perhaps well cared for in his brother's absence, as they'd become part of a rather louche circle of intellectuals who tended to espouse socialism of one kind or another and gravitated around the frank bohemia of Beacon Hill. As Cheever reported to Cowley (in e. e. cummings-esque lower-case), “prescot [sic] townsend will very nearly give me his house in provincetown for a month.” Prescott Townsend was then a thirty-six-year-old dandy who frequented “tearooms” such as the Green Shutters on Cedar Lane Way (a narrow street where Fritz and Joey would presently take an apartment), which featured enormous martinis quaffed discreetly from porcelain cups amid a din of radical palaver. Townsend's greatest fame would come later, as founder of the Boston Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay-rights advocacy group. Known as “Foxy Grandpa,” he had exotic digs in Provincetown that were a kind of caravansary for like-minded youths who were either attractive or interesting (and Cheever, at the time, was both).*
Another Boston mentor was the poet John Wheelwright, a Brahmin socialist who lived on Beacon Street with his sister in (as Lincoln Kirstein put it) “a suite of red-and-black Pompeiian chambers.” Cowley and Wheelwright had been fellow Harvard aesthetes, and Cowley might have been startled by the extent to which his new discovery “Jon” was getting around—as the latter informed him, he and “Jack” were friends: “[H]e is very nice, very guarded,” Cheever wrote of the poet. “[D]espite his attempts to be a period piece or a distinguished snob he is probably one of the most sincere, affectionate, charming people in Boston.” Wheelwright's sexual inclinations were as mutedly unorthodox as the rest of the man. He wrote bitterly of “those who split the monism of love into the dismal triad of heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality,” and once made a shy attempt to kiss the poet Howard Nemerov. What passed between him and Cheever will remain a mystery, though Wheelwright's endearing quaintness was (according to Cheever's journal) part of the confection that became Honora Wapshot.
With a certain wistful hilarity, Cheever often spoke of a memorable encounter with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, the poet's notorious grandson and proprietor of the family mansion on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Known for cultivating protégés, the fifty-year-old Dana gave Cheever a modest allowance and once invited him to Craigie Castle (as the mansion was known) for a lavish dinner. Later they went to the theater, after which Dana suggested they return to Brattle Street for a taste of his grandfather's brandy. “While I was waiting for him to produce the brandy,” Cheever recalled,
he got out of his clothes. I remember turning around and being surprised by the sight of a plump, white, naked man. I think I was more amused than anything else although I can see now the bitterness of having one's erotic drives seem clownish. I thanked him for the evening and politely said goodnight to the naked spectre. He railed at me. “You claim to be an independent spirit,” he said, “and yet you don't dare have a little harmless fun. You're just tied to your mother's apron strings.” I left the room with him in pursuit. The front door was locked but I found the key in a marble daisy on the left.
Naked or not, Dana was a rather comic figure (he reminded Cummings of the comedian