In 1961, John Cheever bought the only house he ever owned, in Ossining, New York. It was one of the most important moments of his life, his daughter, the writer and biographer Susan Cheever, told me as we toured the house recently. The Dutch Colonial, which is currently on the market, dates back to 1795, but it was rebuilt in the nineteen-twenties by Eric Gugler, the architect who designed the Oval Office for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Regarding the purchase, Cheever wrote:
Readers of “The Journals of John Cheever” know that the house did not solve all his problems. Instead, he lived there in a state of inner turmoil—about his sexuality, his sex drive, his affairs, his drinking problem, his marriage and family, and his writing or inability to write. Still, the house allowed Cheever to present himself as he would have liked to be seen, as what Susan—who published a biographical memoir of her father in 1984—described to me several times as “the country squire.” One time, her father went so far as to pose for a magazine photo shoot on a horse. “We didn’t have a horse,” Susan said. But it was a part of his myth-building.
When the family settled in at 197 Cedar Lane, Cheever was nearly fifty years old. He was already a famous short-story writer and a National Book Award-winning author, but it was his frequently photographed house, in which he wrote “The Swimmer,” that helped to cement his reputation as the Chekhov of the Suburbs—a nickname given to him by the critic John Leonard. Before that, the Cheevers lived in a house five miles south, which had previously been rented by the New Yorker_ _reporter E. J. (Jack) Kahn, Jr., and, before that, by Richard Yates. “It was a lousy little house, a remodelled toolshed on a huge estate,” Susan told me.
It was a relief when a more prosperous year allowed Cheever to buy the Ossining house, for $37,500, although Susan recalls that he wasn’t able to get a mortgage without a guarantor on the loan. The money, she said, probably came from work Cheever did with Jerry Wald, a producer at Fox, when he briefly worked in Hollywood. A previous owner had carved the name Afterwhiles on the stone gateposts in the front drive. Finding the name pretentious, Susan said, “my father called it the Grecian Earn. He made fun of everything. Or he called it Meanwhiles. Or we called it the Ancestral Homestead, or Homestead.” Cheever lived there from 1961 until his death, from cancer, at the age of seventy, in 1982.
Cheever’s wife, the poet, artist, and teacher Mary Cheever, continued to live in the house for the next thirty-two years. She died earlier this year, at the age of ninety-five, and the house went up for sale. Once upon a time, the Cheevers had the gardens planted with such exquisite care that the rhododendrons bloomed red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July, but now the roughly five-acre property has taken on a wilder look, and one must walk past bees swarming overgrown bushes to get to the front door.
The house itself is lovely, but it is rundown and suffering from decades of inattention, which helps to explain its seemingly low price of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Susan said that her mother hired gardeners, not carpenters. And although Mary Cheever lived until recently in the house, it has the feeling of a time capsule, as if it has changed little since her husband’s death. “She always claimed it wasn’t her house” but rather her husband’s, Susan told me, although in her later years the house became the only place Mary felt comfortable.
A literary award hangs on the wall. A page from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is taped to a bedroom door. Foreign translations of Cheever’s books line the shelves. With permission, I pulled a first edition of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”_ _from a bookcase in the master bedroom and found Cheever’s return-mailing label pasted on the front page. Susan pulled down a nice copy of Auden’s “Complete Poems”; on the dust jacket, in her father’s handwriting, is an abbreviated train schedule. “I’m going to take this home, I think,” she said, adding it to a small pile of items she collected as we walked from room to room, mostly framed photographs of her with her children. “Do I want this bowl I gave my parents?” she asked, turning it over in her hands. Putting it down again, she said, “Who wants another bowl.”
For visitors to a famous writer’s house, the spot where he worked typically has a great deal of power. About a desk in the Cheevers’ living room, Susan said, “Everyone would like this to be the desk that he wrote at. The real-estate agents will tell everyone this is the desk where he wrote. But that is not how it happened at all.” She continued: “My father very purposefully never had a place to write, and he always wrote in the humblest place in the house. Sometimes, like when he was on the cover of Time,_ _he pretended he wrote in the room that we called the Boyfriend Room, because it was where my boyfriend stayed, off the kitchen. But he didn’t always write in the Boyfriend Room at all. He would take his typewriter all over. When my brother went to boarding school, he would work in his room, and when I went to college he would work in my room. I think he felt that if he settled, physically, as a writer, or if he prepared in any way for the ‘visit from the muse,’ it wouldn’t happen. At one point, famously, we were all home, so he pitched a tent on the lawn and wrote in the tent.”
Although the Cheever children (Susan has two brothers: the writer Benjamin Cheever and Federico, a law professor) aren’t planning to maintain Afterwhiles as a shrine to their father’s work, Susan believes in the power of places. Recently, while writing a biography of E. E. Cummings, she retraced Cummings’s steps to Patchin Place, his home in the Village, and took a road trip to locate the spot of the train crash that killed his father. She told me, “I think the houses where people live have tremendous effect on who they are. If they build them themselves, it’s even greater, but I think you can tell everything about a person from their house.”
Were it not for her work as a biographer, Susan’s words about the house might sound sentimental. But when I asked her if she feels emotional about selling, she was firm: “I’ve said goodbye to it over and over again.”
