Read Online John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson - Free Book Online

strongly argues that he was dismissed for poor scholastic performance. As he reconstructed the story in later years, however, the immediate offense became smoking. He was caught with a cigarette ablaze and, he maintained, he wanted to be caught. He did start smoking young. As he wrote in “The Jewels of the Cabots” (1972), a bluestocking came to the school to make a choleric chapel speech against the vice. Could the students imagine Christ on the Cross, lighting a cigarette? Could they picture the Virgin Mary smoking? Didn’t they know that a tiny drop of nicotine would kill a full-grown pig? In short, she “made smoking irresistible.” Smoke he did, undoubtedly, but there is nothing in the records at Thayer or in the memories of those there at the time to suggest that it had anything to do with his dismissal.
    On rare occasions Cheever proposed yet another explanation. According to this version—and it was not unusual for him to supply alternative accounts of events in his own life—he was expelled for homosexuality, or as he once said extravagantly, because he had seduced the son of a faculty member. Probably he meant to shock his audience. But whatever the merits of this interpretation, and again there is no hard testimony in its support, it is significant that Cheever articulated it at all. Smoking was a subject that might be taken lightly. For a man of his generation, homosexuality was not. The issue troubled his last decades.

BROTHER
    1930–1934
    John Cheever grew up at risk. From a father dominated by his wife, he inherited a propensity to strong drink, an extraordinary sense of smell, a talent for yarn spinning, and a nagging fear of failure. His mother, fiercely independent, left him her vast fund of energy and strength of will, along with an acute social sensitivity and a deep resentment of powerful women. Both parents shared in bequeathing their second son the most unfortunate legacy of all: the conviction that he was not loved. As Cheever’s wife, Mary, came to believe, “that was the trouble” with her husband. “He never had any love. His parents never paid much attention to him.”
    In part, this was simply the Yankee way. In the Massachusetts of Cheever’s youth a chilly formality reigned. Even within the family, physical contact was taboo. This restraint had its effect on most New England writers. Emily Dickinson’s brother bent to kiss his father in his coffin, something he had never dared do while his father was alive. In inland Maine, E. A. Robinson wrote in some exaggeration that “children learn[ed] to walk on frozen toes” and thought passion “a soilure of the wits.” No more than fictional cousin Honora in The Wapshot Chronicle would John’s parents have wanted to be caught in “an open demonstration of affection.” When drinking, his father would sometimes fondle his mother and blow down her neck, but these attentions were not encouraged. For the most part his parents did not hug, did not kiss. John was brought up not to touch his face, much less any other part of himself, much less anyone else.
    In the case of the Cheevers, the physical reserve mandated by New England mores worked to conceal even as it confirmed the split within the family. At least in public, John adopted a similar conspicuous restraint (and later extended it to his own marriage and family). Understanding the cost of the coolly turned cheek, he turned his own first.
    There were times when he would gladly have repudiated his heritage. When Leander Wapshot smokes a cigarette in church, his son Coverly—the character in the Wapshot novels most closely modeled on Cheever himself—wishes he were the child of Mr. Pludzinski. Issuing from a position comfortably inside the dominant culture, the remark bespoke something of the author’s sense of alienation. His mother often cautioned him not to forget that he was “a Cheevah,” but