The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing
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mentioned the damages.
Perhaps realising he was in need of some city polish, Cheever moved to Manhattan in the summer of 1934, renting a fourth-floor walk-up on 633 Hudson Street for the princely sum of three dollars a week. His neighbours were longshoremen and sea cooks, and his room so epitomised the poverty of the period that it was photographed by Walker Evans (with whom Cheever had a brief liaison) as part of a series documenting the Great Depression. The image crops up periodically in reportage of the period: a claustrophobic low-ceilinged cell, furnished with a single bed that smelled powerfully of lice-preventive, the walls lumpily plastered, a pair of too-short curtains dragged shut against the night.
That first winter was intolerably cold. Cheever lived off milk, stale bread and raisins, spending his days with the drifters and down-and-outs in Washington Square, bundled up against the chill and talking obsessively about food. He worked at odd writing jobs, publishing occasional stories and précising novels for MGM, but none of these endeavours added up to anything like a steady income. Rescue came, once again, in the form of Malcolm Cowley. He suggested over dinner that his young friend might stop banging away at his hopeless novel and instead attempt much shorter stories, adding that if four were turned out over the next four days, he’d take a stab at placing them. The challenge paid off. A few weeks later Cheever received his first cheque from the New Yorker for ‘Buffalo’, initiating one of the most constant associations of his life.
Despite his growing reputation as a writer, for a long while Cheever’s life in the city remained fundamentally unmoored. Then, on a rainy afternoon in November 1939 he went to visit his literary agent and encountered a pretty, well-bred, dark-haired girl in the elevator. ‘That’s more or less what I would like,’ he thought, and married Mary Winternitz just before the start of the Second World War. Over the next decade they moved from Greenwich Village to Chelsea and then on to the bourgeois splendours of Sutton Place, renting a ninth-floor apartment with a sunken lounge and views out across the East River.
It was during the Sutton Place period that Cheever began to write some of his greatest short stories, among them ‘The Enormous Radio’, ‘The Day the Pig Fell into the Well’, ‘The Common Day’ and ‘Goodbye, My Brother’. These stories possess two kinds of magic. The first is a superficial conjuring of light and weather, of uptown cocktail parties and islands off the coast of Massachusetts. ‘The darkness would come as thickly into the soft air as silt.’ ‘The sea that morning was a solid colour, like verd stone.’ ‘There were a hundred clouds in the west – clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed.’ There then follows a deeper, more disquieting thrill, which arises from the way these radiant surfaces are undermined. In his best work there exists an almost perpetual ambiguity, a movement between irony and sheer enchantment that only Scott Fitzgerald has ever seriously rivalled. Listen, for example, to this:
That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and brassy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of a custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done very well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island. What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbours, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?
‘Remember the day the pig fell into the well?’ she asked.
Although he’s often described as a realistic writer, Cheever is stranger and more subversive than his increasingly Waspy scenery suggests. Sometimes an unexplained ‘I’ will assume control of the narrative, or else an eerie, collusive ‘we’. Stories blast forward in time, or contain false endings, false beginnings, midway swerves and points at which the thread of narrative is abruptly severed. He seems to take his greatest pleasure in abandoning responsibility for his characters, only to lean in, split-seconds from collision, and whirl them back into motion again.
In ‘The Pot of Gold’, a story from 1950, there’s a line of description I thought of often while I was in Manhattan. Two women meet regularly to talk in Central Park. ‘They sat together with their children through the sooty twilights, when the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace, and the air smells of coal, and the wet boulders shine like slag, and the Park itself seems like a strip of woods at the edge of a coal town.’ I found it pleasurable to say out loud. When the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace. There’s no writer I can think of so effortlessly capable of reconditioning the world.
The problem, as anyone who has read Cheever’s journals will know, is that the same gulf between appearance and interior that makes his stories so beguiling was also at work in his own life, though here it produced less pleasurable effects. Despite an increasingly command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever couldn’t shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle classes. Partly, this was a matter of money. Even when he was packing his daughter into the cab that took her each morning to private school, he was painfully aware that he remained too poor to tip the doorman or pay his bills on time. ‘The rent is not paid,’ he noted despairingly in his journal of 1948, ‘we have very little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs.’
An oft-repeated anecdote from the Sutton Place years has Cheever taking the elevator each morning: a dapper little figure in suit and tie, indistinguishable from the other hard-working, well-scrubbed men who crowd in on every floor. But while they stream out of the lobby, rushing off to workplaces across the city, he descends to the basement, strips to his underwear, and settles at his typewriter, emerging, suited once more, in time for pre-lunch drinks. The sense of himself as both forger and forgery could be thrilling, but in his journal Cheever added dolefully: ‘It is a tonic to my self-respect to leave the basement room.’
Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness. All the same, Cheever’s sense of double-dealing seems to have run unusually deep. After a New Year spent upstate with some wealthy friends, he wrote in baffled fury a thought that had occurred to him while folding, of all things, a monogrammed towel:
It was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
This burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever under wraps, was not just a matter of class anxiety. Cheever lived in the painful knowledge that his erotic desires included men, that these desires were antagonistic and even fatal to the social security he also craved, and that as such ‘every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol’. During this period, his sense of failure and self-disgust could reach such agonising heights that he sometimes raised in his journals the possibility of suicide.
Who wouldn’t drink in a situation like that, to ease the pressure of maintaining such intricately folded double lives? He’d been hitting it hard since his late teens: initially, like Tennessee Williams, out of a desire to quell his acute social anxiety. In the bohemian Village of the 1930s and 40s, alcohol was still the omnipresent lubricant of social exchange, and even in the depths of poverty, he’d managed to find the funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen manhattans or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends’ apartments, at Treetops (his wealthy wife’s family estate in New Hampshire), in the Breevort Hotel, the back room at the Plaza or in the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he’d pop in after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while he attended