Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [43]
NEW YORK MEANT MRS. LEWTON, though Cheever continued to spend much of his free time, fruitlessly, looking for steadier work. He wasn't getting a lot of writing done. What remained of his time and energy had to be conserved for summarizing potboilers; then, too, there was the simple unpleasantness of writing on Hudson Street, where he shared a sagging mattress (“stinking of lice-preventive”) with a heavy typewriter. Most of the time he just didn't feel up to it. “I am certain of my own voice and I have a mindful of stories,” he wrote, “and coming back here I smoke butt after butt and read the newspaper and lie on my back looking at the ceiling.”
An ever more frequent companion was Walker Evans, though Cheever disapproved of the photographer in many respects. Almost ten years older, Evans had allowed his personality to congeal into a weary façade of pseudo-gentility—as Cheever put it, “a hopeless impersonation of the upper-middle class,” including a mumbly accent of sorts. In other words, the friends had a little too much in common, though Cheever coveted at least one notable dissimilarity: Evans was wholly devoted to his art, such that the rest of him was almost an excrescence. And Cheever had to concede that, in Evans's case, the sacrifice of charisma had been worth making: “[Evans's photographs] are, for all of their contempt, snobbery, preciocity [sic], an impressive record,” he wrote. “There are beautiful shots of razed houses, vacant lots, a tin ceiling smashed and twisted, peeling bill-boards. His pictures of Saratoga are much better than the ones [Lincoln] Kirstein printed.”
Meanwhile the two discovered other things in common. “I feel confident that we are going to be involved in a war,“ Evans would say, “and that I will be killed.“ Thus resigned to his fate—as Cheever also professed to be—Evans didn't see that it made any difference whom one slept with, and no doubt detected some such attitude in his young friend. “When I was twenty-one,” Cheever recalled, “Walker Evans invited me to spend the night at his apartment. I said yes. I dropped my clothes (Brooks). He hung his (also Brooks) neatly in a closet. When I asked him how to do it he seemed rather put off. He had an enormous cock that showed only the most fleeting signs of life. I was ravening. I came all over the sheets, the Le Corbusier chair, the Matisse Lithograph and hit him under the chin. I gave up at around three, dressed and spent the rest of the night on a park bench near the river.”
For Cheever it would always be one thing to have sex with a man, another to spend the night with him. The latter was a taboo he would rarely if ever violate until a ripe old age—although, under whatever circumstances, he'd once caught a glimpse of Walker Evans sitting naked at the breakfast table and seemed haunted by the memory: “[W]hy should [Evans]”—he mused forty-three years later—”drinking his coffee seem to have between his legs not a source of burgeoning but the circumspect and humble equipment for knitting a pair of socks?” Henceforth Cheever suspected that certain kinds of sex had the unsavory effect of “tax[ing] one's posture.”
But even in those days there were people who thought Cheever's posture (so to speak) was also a bit off. “We all knew John was sort of gay,” said Betty Hewling, a copy editor at The New Republic in the thirties. And though Malcolm Cowley would later deny having seen “any sign” of his protégé's bisexuality, Cheever's journal decidedly suggests otherwise: “[Cowley] was father, brother, friend and