Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [327]
Having begun on a symbolic footing, the novel proceeds from there: Farragut is identified in terms of his sin and punishment (“fratricide, zip to ten”), and the place he inhabits, cellblock F, is “a forgotten place. Like Piranesi”—or, as the prison guard Tiny puts it, “F stands for fucks, freaks, fools, fruits, first-times, fat-asses like me, phantoms, funnies, fanatics, feebies, fences and farts. There's more, but I forget it. The guy who made it up is dead.” It also stands for Farragut, Falconer, fratricide, forgotten, and so forth, and is a place of perfect forlornity—a purgatory where one may pause to consider one's predicament with little in the way of consoling distraction. Indeed, at the beginning of Farragut's captivity, the only relief from loneliness is the company of cats (“They were warm, they were hairy, they were living and they gave fleeting glimpses of demonstrativeness”), which are presently massacred. Lest one abandon all hope, however, we have it on the authority of Chicken Number Two—the mascot of cellblock F, prophet, Greek chorus, embodiment of human destitution—that Farragut's imprisonment is “a terrible mistake,” that something good awaits him once he gets “clean” of addiction and its various impurities.
Until then, Farragut's alienation is complete. “Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction.” His addiction helps ease a painfully keen awareness of his own homeless-ness in the world, an “otherness” that becomes so explicit at Falconer that his sense of time and space are “imperiled” (notably, on arrival, his watch is stolen by a fellow prisoner); ultimately, he feels so disoriented that he has to ask Tiny for occasional reminders of his whereabouts: “Tiny understood. ‘Falconer Prison,’ he would say. ‘You killed your brother.’ ‘Thanks, Tiny.’” As for the pressures that have driven Farragut to such an outcast state (“Why is you an addict?”), certain familiar Cheeverian bêtes noires are suggested. There is, for one, the comically hateful wife who visits Farragut in prison only to mock and revile him—part of an old dynamic between the two, as we learn from flashbacks. Once, Farragut remembers, she'd taken off to Rome with an old friend (a woman of “very unsavory sexual reputation”), and when he tried to celebrate her return by cleaning house and lighting fires and buying flowers, she responded by curtly asking for a Campari: “Campari will remind me of my lost happiness.” Farragut's own homecomings have been even less successful. Returning from a rehabilitation center in Colorado, he'd explained to her that his drug-damaged heart could not tolerate excitement, whereupon she pointedly slammed a door (“The effect to his heart was immediate”), and then slammed it again. Such murderous malice, on the part of putative loved ones, even preceded Farragut's birth. “One of his mother's favorite stories” concerned the time his father had invited an abortionist to dinner “in order to kill Farragut,” and his brother Eben had also made attempts on his life—inviting him to go for a swim in Chilton Gut (a “well-known deathtrap” of sharks and riptides, as a stranger informs Farragut at the last instant while Eben runs off down the beach), and later pushing him out of a brownstone window and almost impaling him on a fence of iron spears. “[Father] wanted you to be killed,” Eben taunts his brother at last. “I bet you didn't know that. He loved me, but he