Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [304]
Bullied at every turn for his “false light-heartedness” and “grandiosity,” Cheever retreated into a vast, fraudulent humility. “Oh, but of course you're right,” he'd mutter (in so many words) when challenged. Nobody was fooled or amused. Carol Kitman, a staff psychologist, remarked that Cheever reminded her of Uriah Heep: “He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus,” she wrote in her progress notes. “He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time. … Press him to deal with his own humanity.” Told he was just like John Berryman, Cheever (“humbly”) replied, “But he was a brilliant poet and an estimable scholar, and I'm neither.” Yes, said the counselor, but he was also a phony and a drunk, and now he's dead; is that what you want? Cheever affected to take this sort of thing in stride, though in fact it was a ghastly humiliation. “Non posso, cara,” he'd weepily tell his daughter during his daily call from a communal pay phone. “Non posso stare qui.” He sounded so defeated that Susan worried he wouldn't last another day, and began parking her car outside the Newsweek building so she could leave work immediately and rush him to the gentler Silver Hill in Connecticut, where she'd made a reservation just in case. “Fifteen patients have fled since I joined the fun,” Cheever reported to Spear on April 21. “It's quite sad in this part of Siberia.”
But Cheever stayed put, and gradually began to make progress. A more tolerant attitude toward his fellow patients seemed to help. At first he'd been appalled by the “human garbage” he had to share quarters with: they stole from one another; they refused to clean their pubic hair out of the bathtub. Unable to dissemble his distaste, Cheever himself became roundly disliked; when it was his turn to wait on tables, he was so anxious over potential hazing that he spilled a dish of peas into a woman's lap. Confronted in group sessions for being aloof and snobbish, Cheever finally broke down and assured the others that he was taking things “very seriously” indeed. By the time Mary, Susan, and Ben came for a Sunday visit, Cheever appeared to be almost at peace with his environment. “Alcoholism seems to be an infirmity of the lower classes,” Mary observed, peering around the dining room, but Cheever's own gaze was humorous and fond. “I always liked running with a crowd of whom my mother disapproved,” he later remarked, “and Smithers did that.” Around the middle of his stay, “a lame black who knits and crochets” moved into his room and proved every bit as disaffected as Cheever had been two weeks ago: “He says that if he were strong enough to carry his suitcase down the stairs he would leave. I've offered to take his suitcase down but he doesn't answer.”
Toward the end, it was the prospect of leaving that sometimes worried Cheever. “I call Mary from time to time and she is full of complaints,” he wrote Maxwell. “The bank can't add, the dogs (4) are muddy, the lawns are dry, Susie has followed a worthless man to Chicago, and by innuendo her husband is in a dryout mansion on east 93rd.” In his journal he wrote a more somber account of the conversation (Mary had been “very bad-tempered,” mainly because his lost bank statements—abandoned in Boston—had led to a two-thousand-dollar overdraft): “This sort of thing provokes my drinking,” he concluded. “It makes me afraid to return.” The staff at Smithers were also somewhat afraid on his behalf. When Mary failed to appear for a scheduled conference, one of the counselors gave her a call; with glacial politeness