• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3875 0

might have jingled my participles,” he wrote in 1962. “There was this in the air, I think, but neither of us wanted it enough to forgo the rest of the world. He's always been jumpy on the subject but never opaque.” Cheever remembered being “reproached” by Cowley for even considering a homosexual lifestyle: “Such a course [said Cowley] could only end with drunkenness and ghastly suicide”—as it had, indeed, for Cowley's friend Hart Crane. A very young Cheever had met Crane, and (thanks to Cowley) had a lively idea of what had led to Crane's suicide, since Cowley's first wife, Peggy, had been romantically involved with the poet, and on the same ship, when he threw himself overboard.* Crane thus became a totemic figure to Cheever: an artist who'd succumbed to the “Orphic cycle” of self-destruction, which in Crane's case was a direct result of his role as a “tragic homosexual.” That Cheever would endure (it seems) his first twenty years of married life without succumbing to temptation was at least somewhat due to Crane's example. “If I followed my instincts,” Cheever wrote, “I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

Reuel Denney had never “known or suspected” his friend's “dual sexuality” except in retrospect, once it became widely known after Cheever's death. Denney was then struck by something odd, after all, in Cheever's “attitude toward women,” which had seemed “to combine a strong sense of need for women's attention on his part with a hostile resentment against the fact that the need existed.” Cheever confirmed this resentment in so many words, referring to his “duty [my italics] to respond to females,” as though it was something of a burden. On the one hand, he wanted a socially acceptable “sanctuary for [his] cock,” but above all he wanted a family: “I wanted to marry almost every girl I slept with, I wanted to marry and have sons and a home and I flatly deny that this was a guise of sexual cowardice, that I didn't have the courage to pit my homosexual instincts against the censure of the world. I didn't find the world that contemptible.”

An early vehicle for social acceptability was Dodie Merwin, a pretty and spirited nineteen-year-old whom Hazel Werner had met in Provincetown and recommended to Cheever. By the time he called her, she'd moved to a little apartment on Barrow that shared a courtyard with the famous Chumley's Bar, not far from the squalor of Hudson Street (or, later, the squalor of Bethune). She and Cheever got on easily together. They took long walks around the Village, stopping at Sutter's Bakery, near Merwin's apartment, or any number of bars along the way. Both were adventurous, especially after a few drinks. On snowy nights, when the streets were empty, they'd ski beneath the old elevated train on Sixth Avenue, sometimes as far as Bryant Park.

Like most, Merwin was charmed by Cheever—and yet, for all his breezy wit, she detected something a little studied, detached, in his manner. “He always had this kind of chuckle,” she remembered. “He'd say something with a sort of self-deprecating look and burst into a chuckle. The remarks were always acute—they amused himself. And if successful, he'd repeat them with that grin. He'd toss his head a little and look wise.” Always, too, there was a tacit insistence on surface matters. If one was sad, and wished to confide, Cheever would make a sympathetic face and say the right things, more or less. He was kindly. But, as Merwin noticed, “He didn't communicate by eye. He looked at you straightforwardly enough, but his eyes were opaque. You got the impression he was thinking about his writing.” Or (often the same thing) he was thinking of something he didn't want to discuss—his brother, Fred, say, or Walker Evans: “He didn't seem comfortable” with either subject, Merwin recalled. Nor would he ever be. “He would never talk to me about his brother,” said his son Federico. “He would never talk to me about his years in New York, with the exception of