Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [84]
In those days—as Pete Collins's second wife Elizabeth pointed out—”Everybody drank like a fish, but Pete thought Cheever was an alcoholic as early as the late forties.” What with the long afternoons to kill, Cheever often began his evenings with a considerable head start, and the social results would sometimes (as he put it) have “all the characteristics of an automobile accident.” There was Cheever the antic, happy drunk, who one night in 1946 danced the “atomic waltz” with Howard Fast's wife, Betty, on his shoulders, until she put out a cigarette in his ear and he flung her to the floor. There was Cheever the mean drunk, whose dry wit would suddenly turn vicious at some vague point (“What right have I to calumniate these gentle people?” he reproached himself). And finally—more and more often—there was Cheever the bored and even boring drunk, pickled by the long day's drinking and wishing only for bed: “The conversation [last night] hit a very low level,” Cheever reflected in his journal (the only type of writing he could manage in the grip of his nastier hangovers). “I discussed with Dave some shirts I had bought at a sale and he told me about his disappointments with a tropical worsted suit.”
One of his more stimulating companions was the writer Irwin Shaw, whose larger-than-life personality excited both love and envy in Cheever. The two had in common the Signal Corps and The New Yorker, though already Shaw was becoming the kind of “money player” who wouldn't have to suffer Harold Ross's legendary stinginess much longer. Even then Cheever secretly considered himself the better artist, and it galled him that Shaw got most of the glamour. Their rivalry was manifest in touch-football games they played in Central Park on Sundays. Though heckled as a runt, Cheever was all business when Shaw was on the opposing team, and once managed to slip past him for a touchdown—a slender triumph, since otherwise Cheever was constantly reminded that he could scarcely afford the sweetness of Shaw's company: “[T]he cost of this comfortable life is fantastic,” he wrote Herbst, after a skiing weekend with the Shaws in Vermont (“drinking martinis and playing parchesi”). The same applied to his friendship with the Ettlingers, who were then in the process of buying the artist Waldo Pierce's house in Rockland County, where they would consort more and more with show-business neighbors such as Burgess Meredith and Paulette Goddard, Helen Hayes and Charles Mac-Arthur. On returning (by bus) from a New Year's visit, Cheever noted his envy and wondered if he and his family would ever have a house of their own—while at the same time surprising himself with such petty materialism:
Last night, folding the bath towel so the monogram would be in the right place (and after reading a piece on Rimbaud by Zabel), I wondered what I was doing here. This concern for outward order—the flowers, the shining cigarette box … I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
* Cheever incorporated the episode in a draft of The Holly Tree, though arguably his version lacks the comic brio of his father's. Aaron (the name of the Frederick/Leander character at that point) ends up feeling grossly humiliated by the whole ordeal: “They told me to take off my clothes. … Then they said I was too old.”
* Or did