Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [94]
* The earliest story that Cheever—or rather editor Robert Gottlieb—saw fit to include in the definitive collection, The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
*”Ross is dead,” Cheever noted in his journal on December 6, 1951, then proceeded to other matters: “Dinner party despatched [sic] on Sat. Hotchkisses, Boyers, Maxwells. An annoying waste of time.”
* He managed to sell two of these rejected stories to Harper's, “The Reasonable Music” and “Vega.” The second—an odd tangent for Cheever in certain ways, though by no means inferior—was a long story inspired by Peter Wesul's farouche daughter, who rarely showed herself or spoke. It appeared in the December 1949 Harper's with illustrations by a young Andy Warhol.
* Herbst would benefit in a similar way from Cheever's friendship. Because of her lifelong interest in left-wing causes—and because her former husband, John Hermann, was an actual party member—the State Department accused her of communism and refused to issue her a passport. On November 9, 1954, Cheever submitted the following affidavit in Herbst's defense: “Nothing that she ever did or said would have led me, or now leads me, to believe that she was a member of the Communist Party.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
{1949-1951}
MARY CHEEVER SUSPECTED there was something fundamentally wrong with her marriage almost from the start, though she'd had no serious boyfriends before Cheever and certainly knew almost nothing about homosexuality. Nevertheless, as she put it many years later, “I sensed that he wasn't entirely masculine.” She got a slightly more definite inkling in 1948, when she and her husband saw the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (“As decadent, I think, as anything I've ever seen on the stage,” Cheever wrote). The leitmotif associated with Blanche's dead, homosexual husband* stuck in Mary's head, and led to a subtle, perhaps only semiconscious epiphany: “I saw a connection there.” Did she discuss it with Cheever? “Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.”
“I can remember walking around the streets of New York on a summer night some years ago,” Cheever wrote in 1952. “I cannot say that it was like the pain of living death; it never had that clear a meaning. … The feeling always was that if I could express myself erotically I could come alive.” After several years of marriage, and burdened with almost every sort of anxiety, Cheever found it more and more of a strain not to yield to temptation. In his journal he called himself “the walking bruise,” a sensation he would attribute to Coverly Wapshot—”one of those men who labor under a preternaturally large sense of guilt that, like some enormous bruise … could be carried painlessly until it was touched; but once it was touched it would threaten to unnerve him with its pain.” Cheever was almost daily unnerved, almost daily reminded of his damnable secret (as he saw it), and such was the loneliness of his suffering that he considered returning to the church in hope of comfort.
His greatest fear was that his wife would discover his illicit desires. Because of this—and because his career at the time seemed to have “all the characteristics of a failure”—he was especially sensitive to any sign of discontent on her part. One night, when she asked to be alone for a while, Cheever's pride was so wounded that he considered asking for a separation or divorce, though he knew such an impulse was “perverse”: “There is some part of her that is not gregarious or affectionate, that has never been yielded to me or to anyone else without pain. She was alone much when she was a young girl and the habits of solitude sometimes return to her. Now and then, by a complete absence of privacy, she feels suffocated.