Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [45]
Cheever's amiable self-absorption was especially evident in his sexual approach—which, as Merwin put it (with a sort of wondering understatement), was “perfunctory and quick”: “It didn't seem to be initiated by the other person,” she said. “It was self-initiating and -sustaining.” A few years later, when Cheever lived near Dupont Circle in Washington, Merwin would pass through a creaking gate when she visited his brownstone; the creak would alert Cheever to her arrival. “No sooner did you get into his apartment than he's got you on the couch,” she said. “And that's it. Now you can go out for the evening. And he was happy. I can remember looking at him kind of quizzically and thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’” Many others, men and women alike, would wonder the same thing.
What also remained consistent over the years was Cheever's drinking. Even as a young man he had an enormous thirst, always on display in social situations, when sobriety seemed out of the question. Watching him polish off a dozen Manhattans at a single sitting—all the while chuckling and telling stories at an almost frenzied clip—Merwin got the impression that reality was a little too much for Cheever to bear. “He simply never faced himself, or when he did he didn't like what he saw,” she said. “And nothing relieved him.” William Maxwell made a similar observation after his friend's death: “He wanted to understand the world but he didn't want to understand himself.”
* So to speak. Three years later, Peabody formally adopted Miss Waite, as was customary for May-December romances in those days.
* Cheever refers here to that “first winter” after his New Republic story in October 1930, when he definitely rejected the regimentation of mainstream society—including college—and began wearing an amethyst ring, etc.
† Cheever's outlook was also compounded, perhaps, of the droll Republicanism of his new hero, Cummings, who'd visited Soviet Russia in the late twenties and found it a dreary place, and now insisted that President Hoover be recalled to office.
* As in the case of Philip Stevenson's The Gospel According to St. Luke's—a “quite uninteresting” prep-school novel that Cheever reviewed a few months after “Expelled” appeared—or Silas Crockett, by Mary Ellen Chase, a novel about New England's decline that struck a particular chord with Cheever, who boiled it down as follows: “Silas Crockett, the first in line, is a sea captain of the prosperous China trade. … Reuben of the third generation is forced to pilot a ferry boat and sell the splendid furniture and portraits of his fathers in order to make a living; and Silas of the fourth goes to work in a herring factory. … [T]he glorious seaboard of the China trade means to most of us … empty harbors and fugitive mill towns and the smell of the tourist camps and a cretin at the gas station. And all this, to Yankees of the new generation, is a story less for reverence and delicacy [that is, as Mrs. Chase chooses to tell it] … than for immense indignation and wonder.”
* Cheever's version of Crane's death was singularly unflattering to Peggy Baird Cowley. As Cheever told it, Crane was hysterically despondent after being beaten by a sailor to whom he'd made advances. “I have to talk!” he cried to the former Mrs. Cowley, on finding her at last in the ship's beauty parlor. “I'm having my hair done,” she replied, and so Crane hurled himself into the sea. Presumably this was some simulacrum of the version to which Malcolm Cowley was privy, though Cheever might have added the beauty parlor and much of Peggy's callousness. Certainly Malcolm himself didn't lack compassion toward his first wife: “Poor Peggy,” he wrote Cheever. “She died about 1970 in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker farm in Rivoli. … The services, at which I was the only old friend present, were conducted by a hippy