John Cheever (6 page)

They were so wrapped up in hating each other, he thinks, that they had forgotten all about him.

Cheever felt much the same way as the boy in this story. In a journal entry, he writes of coming home from school to find “the furnace dead, some unwashed dishes on the table in the dining room and at the center of the table a pot of tulips that the cold had killed and blackened.” Anger had driven his parents out of the house. Their “detestation of one another had blinded them to their commitments to the house and to him.…” It was as if he'd been exiled.

Cheever did not run away from home. He found other ways of protesting against lack of love from his parents, against his father's downfall, and against his mother's shopkeeping. Years later he would look back on Quincy occasionally in his journal, a repository for innermost thoughts, or in his fiction. But he went back in person only on visits while his parents were alive, and not at all after they died. It was a painful place for him. He had been unhappy there. His family had been poor there. He did not want to face that time openly, without the scrim of invention.

Besides, his adolescent home was inhabited by the ghost of the father who had never had enough time for him and who in his decline sacrificed his self-respect. “The greatest and most bitter mystery in my life was my father,” Cheever wrote in 1977. He was convinced that his father had never loved him, and he revisited the sorrow and the pain of that conviction in almost everything he wrote.

Half a century earlier, in the Massachusetts suburbs south of Boston, the fifteen-year-old knew that his father failed him time and again, but he did not know whose fault it was. His tendency was to assign the blame to economic causes, or to his mother's domineering ways, or to any convenient explanation that would leave his father free of culpability. In the New England society of the day, you didn't tell your father off, and you didn't allow yourself to think he should be told off. In effect, he denied his father's failure and romanticized his shortcomings, repressed his own anger and acted out his own frustrations in the series of disasters that, he said, constituted his own adolescence.

Even in relative poverty, the Cheevers kept up certain appearances. Mrs. Cheever continued to invite to Thanksgiving dinner all of the strays she had been able to collect on “trains and buses and beaches and in the lobby of Symphony Hall during the intermission.” When the last guest left, Mr. Cheever would stand by the door and exclaim, “The roar of the lion has ceased! The last loiterer has left the banquet hall!” The ritual was important. Like having a maid who was the daughter of an Adams coachman, it seemed to bespeak the family's secure status in a society of early settlers. As an adolescent, Cheever was keenly sensitive to social slights, both real and imagined. On Thanksgiving morning, he pointed out, he played touch football with the Winslows and Bradfords, who were willing to overlook the fact that his ancestors had not, like theirs, arrived on the
Mayflower
. He claimed that he'd never learned to play tennis, though, because the Baileys, who lived slightly above the Cheevers on Highland and who had a tennis court, never asked him up to play.

His mother did what she could to make sure he was invited wherever he should have been and knew how to act when he got there. There were some advantages to knowing the forks early in life. Even as a kindergartner he had mastered social skills unusual in children of any age. Upon leaving a party one day, Bertha L. Wight recalls, young John was the only child who spoke to the hostess. “Thank you for inviting me,” he said. “I enjoyed it very much and I
mean
it!”

As he grew up, he was sent as a matter of course to dancing classes and to the junior and senior assemblies that succeeded them—experiences he memorialized in a 1937 memoir for
The New Yorker
entitled “In the Beginning.” The central figure in the memoir is Miss Barlow, a venerable dancing instructor who wore jet-black dresses that hiked up a little in the rear and who spoke as if addressing hundreds. Every Saturday afternoon during his middle school years, John had trouble finding the serge bag that held his patent-leather dancing shoes. He would kneel and pray to God that he'd find the shoes in time to be driven down to the Masonic Temple for the two-o'clock class. There ensued the same drill followed by upper-middle-class youngsters in every American city of the time. The boys gathered in the locker room, the girls in the ladies' room. They then marched upstairs, entered the ballroom in pairs, and bowed to the observing matrons. After an hour of instruction, the children practiced what they had learned by dancing in couples.

When Cheever was fifteen, he graduated to the junior assemblies held at the country club. These “began at eight and ended at eleven, and you could clap as hard as you wanted to but the band wouldn't play any encores.” Miss Barlow insisted on at least one cotillion and one elimination dance, the latter usually won by a good-looking boy who danced on the balls of his feet. Next came the senior assemblies, which were formal and lasted from nine to one. By this time the stock market had crashed, and along with it “most of the institutions our fathers had lived by.” But Miss Barlow did not change. She still wore the same black dresses and the same ankle-high beaded shoes; she still carried a corsage in her left hand and a whistle in her right. She was seventy at least, and had her dignity. One evening in her last season, she had the ballroom decorated with balloons. Seeing their opportunity, the teenagers began to break the balloons with matches and penknives. Miss Barlow sounded her whistle and commanded their attention with her sarcastic voice. “This is extraordinary,” she said. “I can't understand you young people.” Never before, she told them, had her guests taken so much pleasure in destroying her decorations. “Your amusement is really a revelation. Next week we'll have rattles. Alphabetical blocks the week after that.”

Cheever himself was the cause of Miss Barlow's final outburst. He used to dance a lot with a girl named Hope, and one night she asked the band to play “Diga-Diga-Doo”—so he wrote—and they “went all over the floor until that shrill whistle blew” and he heard Miss Barlow's confident and stagy voice address him. “John Cheever,” she said, “your dancing is atrocious.” She had seen a great deal of dancing, but never anything like his. “I am ashamed of you, John. I am ashamed of you. I'm glad your mother isn't here. I will give you an illustration of your dancing.” The illustration was not funny at all, and he did his best to dance on the balls of his feet the rest of the evening.

That night he went home and dreamed that Miss Barlow had died. A week later he found out that the dream had come true. “Of course I killed her,” he wrote in hyperbole, and he thought about it sometimes when he was with a girl who danced as if she had been taught in the assemblies “outside of Buffalo or Baltimore or Boston or Philadelphia.” He thought about the corsage and the whistle, and the dance music that had been popular, and the smell of the locker room, “and the black elms and the mansard roofs, and that whole world that has become … fugitive and strange.…”

He did not so much want to return to that world as to memorialize it, and to understand his feelings. He did not long for his youth, ever. And it was not by accident that he had helped to burst the balloons and had sailed around the dance floor in an exhibition sure to elicit the dressing-down he got. He could not change his family's circumstances, nor even talk about them. What he could do was to act out his frustration, to rebel not against his parents but against surrogate authority in whatever form it presented itself: the black-clad figure of his dancing instructor, and still more obviously, the teachers and administrators of Thayer Academy.

The most dramatic fact about Cheever's prep-school experience is that he was expelled in the spring of 1930, during the second term of his junior year. A long history led up to the expulsion, for the academic promise he had shown at Thayerlands seemed to vanish in the upper school. Louise Saul, who taught him freshman English, remembers him as a student who was “sloppy” about punctuation and who “didn't take well to discipline.” The sloppiness extended to his appearance as well. He looked so shaggy that at least once his classmates collected a few pennies and escorted him to the barbershop.

His grades ranged from mediocre to terrible. In the 1926–27 school year, he got Cs and C-minuses in English and ancient history, but flunked both Latin and Algebra. (“His math was horrendous,” classmate Robert Daugherty remembers.) The next year followed a similar pattern. He earned Cs in English, Latin, and medieval history, and flunked French and math. During 1928–29, whether because of family finances or Thayer Academy policies, he went to Quincy High School, where his grades were 55 in English, 45 in French, o in Latin, and 63 in plane geometry, with a D in physical education. In the fall of 1929, he was back at Thayer as a “special” student on probation, and at the time of his expulsion he had a B-plus/C-minus in an English literature course, a C in grammar, and a D in German, and was once again failing French. This 1929–30 course schedule, without any math or science or Latin, was most unusual and probably designed to give Cheever a chance to shine.

Grading standards were strict at the time, and it was possible for a C student at Thayer, like John's brother, Fred, to be admitted to Dartmouth, but a failing grade was a failing grade, and eventually the school asked Cheever to leave. He was in his own words “an intractable student” who did the assigned work when and if it pleased him. “John was not happy at Thayer nor was Thayer happy about his lack of achievement or his attitude,” teacher Grace Osgood recalled.

The roster of brilliant people who have failed in school is a long one—Churchill comes to mind, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and every year, hundreds of students are dismissed from American prep schools. But Cheever was probably the only one to use such a rejection as a way of launching his career. He sat down and wrote a story about it, applying a thin veneer of fiction to his own experience. Then he sent the story, called “Expelled,” to Malcolm Cowley at
The New Republic
and had it accepted for publication.

Surely this was one of the most unusual across-the-transom acceptances in magazine history. A youth in Quincy, Massachusetts, barely eighteen, is kicked out of school and writes a story about it that justifies himself by attacking the dullness and lockstep curriculum of the college preparatory system in general and his own institution in particular. In 999 cases out of a thousand, such a submission would have turned into a political harangue and been rejected without a second glance. But Cheever's tale was different. There was something about it that caught Cowley's attention and held it.

He knew how to start, for one thing: with a promise of revelations to follow and an economy of language and incisive wit reminiscent of the early Hemingway stories Cheever had been reading. “It didn't come all at once,” “Expelled” begins. “It took a very long time.… The first signs were cordialities on the part of the headmaster. He was never nice to anybody unless he was a football star or hadn't paid his tuition or was going to be expelled.”

The eighteen-year-old author also understood that it would be wrong to issue any diatribes. Instead, he drew a series of portraits that illustrate the school's problems far more effectively than he could possibly describe them. A former army colonel comes to make the Memorial Day speech. Usually a politician did the job, and told the boys that theirs was the greatest country in the world, and they should be proud to fight for it. But the colonel has seen his friends die in the Great War and cannot supply the expected sentiments. He describes the terrors of battle, then breaks down and begins to whimper. Everyone is embarrassed. Next Memorial Day, the school will be sure to invite a mayor or governor to speak. The charismatic Laura Driscoll, a history teacher who refuses to acknowledge that history is dead, is dismissed for speaking out in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. English teacher “Margaret Court-wright was very nice,” but she “pulled her pressed hair across her forehead” to hide the fact that she was slightly bald; her interpretation of
Hamlet
“was the one accepted on college-board papers,” so that no one had to get a new interpretation.

As for the headmaster himself, his is the inside world of the office, with chairs arranged in a semicircle and “gravy-colored” brocade curtains. When he tells Cheever of his dismissal, the youth gazes longingly out the window. “I was tired of seeing spring with walls and awnings to intercept the sweet sun and the hard fruit.… I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows.” The tension is strong between the confinements of school and the freedom of the natural world. The pull of the outdoors, “elegant and savage and fleshly,” would stay with Cheever always, and nearly always it would be opposed in his mind to the limitations imposed by ordinary existence, by house and workplace, commitment and duty.

Finally, the writer of “Expelled” knew how to win the sympathy of his audience. It is August now, he writes, and he is At Home as the fall approaches:

Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to.

I am not sorry. I am not at all glad.

It is strange to be so very young and have no place to report at nine o'clock.

When the story appeared in the October 1, 1930, issue of
The New Republic
, a left-wing periodical rarely consulted by Thayer students, their parents, or the faculty, it outraged the sensitivities of all three groups. Cheever had not been fair to the school, they felt. He had distorted the truth, they insisted: there was no crying colonel, and the history teacher had not been fired for political reasons. He had been cruel to Harriet Gemmel (Margaret Court-wright) and Stacy Baxter Southworth (the headmaster), they maintained. The only good thing was that he had not mentioned Thayer by name. The school's partisans were right to object, perhaps, that Cheever had taken liberties with the truth, and exaggerated the school's stagnation. But it was a story he was writing, after all, and a remarkable one coming from a student who had been expelled in his junior year. Without Stacy Baxter Southworth, Cheever was to say many years later, he might have ended up pumping gas. And “Expelled” might as well have been called “Reminiscences of a Young Sorehead,” he also observed. But that was to minimize the accomplishment of the story, an achievement so unusual as to make one wonder whether the failure in the classroom was his alone.