Читать книгу The Trip to Echo Spring - Olivia Laing - Страница 10

MONTHS AGO, BACK IN ENGLAND, when I was just beginning to think down into the subject of alcohol, I became certain that whatever journey I was making would begin in a hotel room on East 54th Street, ten minutes’ walk from Broadway. I don’t know why this, of all possible locations, seemed the necessary place to start, but the story of what had happened there worked its way inside me, as certain stories will.

In the small hours of 25 February 1983, Tennessee Williams died in his suite at the Elysée, a small, pleasant hotel on the outskirts of the Theater District. He was seventy-one, unhappy, a little underweight, addicted to drugs and alcohol and paranoid sometimes to the point of delirium. According to the coroner’s report, he’d choked on the bell-shaped plastic cap of a bottle of eyedrops, which he was in the habit of placing on or under his tongue while he administered to his vision. As a child he’d been poked in the eye with a stick, and in his twenties this damage manifested itself as a greyish cataract that covered his left pupil. Eventually it was cut away, but the sight in that eye was never good and eyedrops were among the extensive medical paraphernalia he took on all his travels.

The next day, the New York Times ran an obituary claiming him as ‘the most important American playwright after Eugene O’Neill’. It listed his three Pulitzer Prizes, for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana, adding: ‘He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.’

Later, after carrying out chemical tests, the city’s chief medical officer, Dr. Eliot M. Grosse, amended the autopsy report to add that the barbiturate secobarbital was in Williams’s system when he died. Much later, various friends and acquaintances claimed the choking story was a cover-up to stop the press from delving into Tennessee’s numerous addictions, though the official cause of death remains asphyxia.

It wasn’t the death he’d hoped for, either way. In his memoir, his wandering, anti-lucid memoir, he wrote that he wanted to die on a letto matrimoniale, a wedding bed, surrounded by contadini, farmers, their faces puzzled and full of sweetness, holding out in their shaking hands little glasses of vino or liquore. He wanted it to happen in Sicily, where he’d been happiest, but if that wasn’t possible he was willing to settle for the big brass bed at Dumaine Street, his house in New Orleans, where the clouds always seemed just overhead.

There should be nothing more arbitrary than the place where someone dies, on their way from one thing to the next, and yet it’s telling, too, that a man who was forever on the move should finish up in a hotel room, surrounded by pills and paper, two bottles of wine open on his nightstand. We die as we live, disordered, and while the manner of his death was accidental to the point of grotesqueness, its location exposes that cast of vagrancy that was, though it sounds a funny thing to say, one of the most certain things about him.

He kept all sorts of roosts in New York, though he never stayed in them for long. For years he had an apartment around the corner on East 58th Street that he shared with his partner, Frank Merlo: Frank with his sad horse face and ready charm, Frank the protector, the aide-de-camp, who died of lung cancer in 1963, inaugurating the very worst period of Williams’s Stoned Age. Later, he took an apartment in the Manhattan Plaza, the residential complex designed for performing artists. He’d been lured there by the promise of a swimming pool, but the partyish atmosphere didn’t suit him and even before he’d given up the lease he generally stayed in a suite at the Elysée.

The hotel was useful because of its proximity to the theatres, but by the time he died it had been three years since he’d had a play on the Great White Way. The last was Clothes for a Summer Hotel, an addled rehash of the difficult marriage between Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. ‘No growth, no change, no flow of life anywhere for us to piece together,’ Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times, adding crossly, as if the failure were wilful: ‘ Clothes for a Summer Hotel is Tennessee Williams holding his tongue.’

It was hardly the worst thing he’d heard from a critic. Back in 1969 Life magazine had called him a White Dwarf, continuing: ‘We are still receiving his messages, but it is now obvious that they come from a cinder.’ Imagine writing a play after that, let alone going on for another fourteen years, sitting down at your typewriter every morning, despite the depredations of drugs and alcohol, of loneliness and growing ill health. ‘Gallant,’ wrote Elia Kazan, the director who knew him as well as anyone, ‘is the word to describe Tennessee at the end.’

You get a sense of that courage, that indefatigable work ethic, in a 1981 interview with the Paris Review, the latter half of which was conducted in his rooms at the Elysée. He talks about his plays and the people he’s known, and he touches too, a little disingenuously, on the role of alcohol in his life, saying:

O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there’s a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that. And it’s all right up to a certain age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from drinking. Now my drinking has to be moderate. Just look at the liver spots I’ve got on me!

You know that. A little nervous support. My drinking has to be moderate. He was ‘tired’, the interviewer observes carefully, because they’d spent the preceding night in a bar called Rounds, which ‘boasts a somewhat piss-elegant decor and a clientele consisting largely of male hustlers and those who employ them’. Gallant, yes: but also not an entirely reliable witness to the traffic of his own life.

The Elysée was not the kind of place I could afford but a friend at Condé Nast had wangled me a room. There was a chandelier in the lobby and someone had painted a trompe l’oeil garden on the far wall. It looked vaguely Italian: lemon trees, black and white tiles and a box-lined path that narrowed bluely towards some wooded hills. As I checked in I asked which floor Tennessee’s old suite was on. I’d planned to pop up in the morning and see if a chambermaid would let me peek inside. But the Sunset Suite no longer existed. The boy at the front desk, who looked like he might play field hockey, added surprisingly: ‘We divided it up to get rid of bad spirits.’

People believe strange things. Rose Williams, Tennessee’s adored sister, who had a pre-frontal lobotomy at the age of twenty-eight and still outlived all her immediate family, refused to acknowledge death when it occurred. But once, or so her brother recorded in Memoirs, she said: ‘It rained last night. The dead came down with the rain.’ He asked, in the gentle tone he almost always used with her, if she meant their voices and she replied, ‘Yes, of course, their voices.’

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in absences, and the fact that the room had ceased to exist pleased me. I was beginning to think that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world, or at least of slipping one’s appointed place within it, though if you’d seen Tennessee blundering through the hallway, pie-eyed and legless, you might think conversely it made one all too painfully impossible to miss. It seemed appropriate, anyhow, that this place where I thought I’d start my journey should turn out to be a non-place, a gap in the map. I looked at the trompe l’oeil garden again. That was the path to follow, into the vanishing point, past the wavering blue brushstrokes with which the artist had indicated the threshold of his knowledge.

Time, Tennessee Williams wrote in The Glass Menagerie, is the longest distance between two places. I’d been trying to work out when he first came to New York. I figured from his letters that it must have been in the summer of 1928, when he was a shy, sheltered boy of seventeen – the same trip, as it happens, in which he tried alcohol for the first time. Back then he was still called Tom; still lived with his family in hateful St. Louis.

He’d been invited by his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, to join a touring party made up of various adventuresome parishioners. The group would travel by way of a White Star liner from New York to Southampton, and then go on to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy: a democratic, twentieth-century version of the aristocratic Grand Tour.

The trip began with a four-day blowout at the Biltmore, the hotel by Grand Central Terminal where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald had spent their honeymoon eight years before. ‘We have just concluded dinner with a multi-millionaire . . . in his seven room suite at the end of the hall,’ the would-be sophisticate wrote home in ecstasy. ‘I was sitting at the same table, in his private suite, where the Prince of Wales had sat during his stay at the Biltmore in 1921! Did that kill me!!’

Life aboard ship was even more riotous. They set sail at midnight on the ss Homeric, in what he recalled much later as a gala departure, with brass bands and a great deal of coloured paper ribbons tossed back and forth between the vessel and the well-wishers on Pier 54. The next day he drank his first alcoholic beverage, a green crème-dementhe, and afterwards was violently seasick.

Not wholly convinced by this newly adult pleasure, he reported to his mother: ‘Grandfather . . . keeps his tongue pretty slick with Manhattin Coctails and Rye-Ginger Ales. I have tried them all but prefer none to plain ginger-ale and Coca Cola. So I’m afraid I’m not getting all the kick out of this boat that the others are getting.’ Six days on, in the Hotel Rochambeau, he changed his tune, opening a letter home with the exultant declaration:

I have just imbibed a whole glass of french champagne and am feeling consequently very elated. It is our last evening in Paris which excuses the unusual indulgence. French champagne is the only drink I like here. But it is really delicious.

He didn’t add what he would later dwell on in his memoir, that in the boulevards of Paris he began abruptly to feel afraid of what he called the process of thought, and that over the weeks of travel this phobia grew so intense he came within ‘a hairsbreadth of going quite mad’. Later, he described this experience as ‘the most dreadful, the most nearly psychotic, crisis that occurred in my early life’.

It wasn’t the first time Tom had suffered from anxiety, though it was the most serious attack he’d had so far. He’d always been an acutely sensitive boy, a condition not helped by the disruptions of his household. His parents had met in 1906 and married the next year. Edwina Williams was a pretty, popular, talkative girl who had in her youth nurtured a fantasy of going on the stage. Her husband, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a travelling salesman who sold men’s clothes and later shoes. In addition he played poker, drank heavily and generally conveyed in all his habits his congenital unsuitability to domestic life.

After their marriage the couple lived together, but when she fell pregnant with her first child in 1909 Edwina returned to her parents, moving with them through a succession of rectories in Mississippi and Tennessee. Tom came along two years later, on Palm Sunday, 26 March 1911: a concentrated, watchful baby. The south suited him. He had his sister Rose for company, and would remember this period much later as ‘joyfully innocent’, though his father was rarely present. As a very little boy he was active and robust, but in first grade he caught diphtheria, and was taken out of school. He spent most of the next year on his own in bed, acting out invented scenes with a pack of cards for players. By the time he returned to his classmates, he’d changed dramatically, becoming delicate and frail.

In 1918, the southern idyll came abruptly to an end. Cornelius had been promoted to a management position at the International Shoe Company and wanted to set up home in St. Louis. Living with his children for the first time, he regarded the older two with contempt, though he liked Dakin, the son born a few months after their arrival in the city. The pattern of geographic instability established in the south didn’t stop once the Williamses were reunited, either. By the time Tom was fifteen, he’d lived in sixteen different houses, though it wasn’t until the family’s arrival in St. Louis that he realised how poor they were. The apartments they rented were tiny; the colour, he recalled later, of mustard and dried blood. In these nasty confined spaces, his parents’ incompatibility was ruthlessly exposed, while Rose began her precipitous descent towards a mental breakdown.

‘Life at home was terrible, just terrible,’ Dakin wrote decades later in a letter to Williams’s biographer Donald Spoto. ‘By the late 1920s, mother and father were in open warfare, and both were good combatants. He came home drunk . . . and he’d fly into a rage . . . there’d be a vicious row and finally mother would do her famous fainting act.’ The dainty, troubled Rose found these fights increasingly petrifying, while Tom harboured bitter memories of being called Miss Nancy for his cissyish interest in books and movies, recording as an adult that his father ‘was a terrifying man’.

In his teens Williams was pathologically shy, blushing whenever another pair of eyes met his. Not surprising then that on his first trip abroad he might experience an attack of paralysing anxiety. But something else had happened on the ss Homeric itself, a disturbing encounter that may also have played a role. Tom spent a good deal of his time aboard ship waltzing with a dance instructor, a young woman of twenty-seven. ‘I was in those days an excellent dancer and we “just swept around the floor: and swept and swept” as Zelda would put it.’ Later, he overheard her friend, a man with the baroque name of Captain de Voe, making a crack about his sexuality, an incident he found singularly disturbing, though it was a good while before he figured out its meaning. What the man had said was: ‘You know his future, don’t you?’ to which the teacher replied: ‘I don’t think you can be sure about that at the age of seventeen.’

As the party travelled from Paris to Venice, Milan and Montreux, Tom kept up his cheerful letters home, describing mountains, castles and the places where he swam. He never mentioned his fears, though by the time the tour reached the Rhine he was certain he was going crazy. The phobia, as he explained it later, involved the sense that ‘the process of thought was a terrifyingly complex mystery of human life’. Things came to a head in a cathedral in Cologne. He knelt down and began to pray. The rest of the party left. Light was flooding in through the stained glass windows in coloured shafts. Then something miraculous occurred. He had the uncanny sense of being touched by a hand: ‘and at the instant of that touch the phobia was lifted away as lightly as a snowflake though it had weighed on my head like a skull-breaking block of iron’. A religious boy, he was certain he’d experienced the hand of Christ.

For a week he was very happy, and then in Amsterdam the phobia returned. This time, he chased it away almost immediately by composing a poem on the comforts of remembering one is only an individual in a crowd of equally complex beings. The poem itself is barely more than doggerel (‘I hear their laughter and their sighs, / I look into their myriad eyes’), but the experience was pivotal. In Memoirs, he reflected on how important this recognition of being part of a collective was, not just for his own but for any attempt to achieve balance of mind: ‘that recognition of being a member of multiple humanity with its multiple needs, problems and emotions, not a unique creature but one, only one among the multitude of its fellows’.

It was a useful insight. Tom Williams, soon to become Tennessee, would suffer lifelong from moods of terror. Many of the ways he found of medicating and soothing himself were toxic, among them his relationship with alcohol. But discovering that he could dissolve anxiety by looking outward didn’t just save his sanity. It also alerted him to the importance of empathy, that cardinal virtue of the playwright.

I lay awake most of that first night at the Elysée, dreaming in a small window of sleep of a cat with raspberries tangled in its fur. The next morning I had two unprecedented appointments. The first was to visit a psychiatrist and the second was to attend an AA meeting. My cab driver had only just arrived in the city too, and together we muddled out a route to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital on 10th Avenue and 58th Street. The Addiction Institute was on the ninth floor, down a run of corridors that seemed to spiral inward like a snail’s shell. By the time I was ushered into the director’s office I was thoroughly disorientated. I thought I was deep inside the building and the presence of a window startled me. The books were arranged according to colour, lavender to violet, turquoise to green; a buttress assembled in praise of order.

Back in the day, the Addiction Institute was called the Smithers Alcohol Treatment and Training Center. It’s where John Cheever and Truman Capote went to dry out, though only the former was successful in his labours. At that point, in the spring of 1975, it was located in a brownstone at 56 East 93rd Street. ‘The house is palatial and not at all shabby,’ Cheever wrote in a letter during his voluntary incarceration. ‘The tenants are forty-two drug addicts and clinical alcoholics.’ He shared his room with a con man, a ballet dancer, a sailor and the owner of an unsuccessful German deli, who talked in his sleep, asking all night long: ‘Haff you been taken care of? Haff you been waited on?’ He was intensely miserable (hardly the place for such a distinguished Yankee as a Cheevah) and complained vociferously throughout his twenty-eight-day internment, but it got him sober and in all probability also saved his life.

In order to understand how an intelligent man could end up in such a place, it’s necessary first to know what a shot of Smirnoff or Scotch does to the human body. Alcohol, also known as ethanol, is both an intoxicant and a central nervous depressant, with an immensely complex effect upon the brain. In simple terms, it works by interfering with the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals by which the nervous system relays information around the body. Its effects can be divided into two categories. Alcohol activates the pleasure-reward pathways by way of dopamine and serotonin. In psychological terms this effect is known as positive reinforcement, since continuing to ingest the substance leads to pleasure.

But alcohol also works by way of negative reinforcement. In the brain, there are two types of neurotransmitters: inhibitory and excitatory. Inhibitory neurotransmitters depress activity in the central nervous system, while excitatory neurotransmitters stimulate it. When alcohol is ingested, it interacts with the receptor sites of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA, mimicking its effects. The result is sedative, reducing activity in the brain. In addition, alcohol blocks the receptor sites of an excitatory neurotransmitter: N-methyl-D-aspartate or NMDA (a subset of glutamate, the major excitatory neurotransmitter), preventing its activity. This also causes a reduction in excitation, albeit by a different route.

These sedative effects are what makes alcohol so adept at reducing tension and anxiety. Both positive and negative reinforcement drive alcoholism, but as the addiction progresses it is negative reinforcement that tends to take the larger role. ‘The click’, Brick calls it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ‘This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it. It’s just a mechanical thing . . . I just haven’t got the right level of alcohol in my bloodstream yet.’

The realisation that alcohol is capable of alleviating anxiety means that for susceptible individuals it can quickly become the preferred method of managing stress. There’s more than a hint of this in a letter John Cheever wrote about an early experiment with drinking. Intimidated by a social gathering, he discovered alcohol’s powerful knack for obliterating nerves. ‘The next engagement that threatened to arouse my shyness,’ he wrote, ‘I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat. The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I.’ In Memoirs, Tennessee Williams takes up the same refrain, noting that after a mezzo-litro of Frascati, ‘you felt as if a new kind of blood had been transfused into your arteries, a blood that swept away all anxiety and all tension for a while, and for a while is the stuff that dreams are made of’.

For a while. The problem is that over time the brain begins to adjust to the presence of alcohol, compensating for its effects on the central nervous system. In particular, it increases the production of excitatory neurotransmitters, so that normal activity can be maintained. This neuroadaptation is what drives addiction, eventually making the drinker require alcohol in order to function at all.

In the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known universally as DSM-IV-TR), alcohol dependence is categorised as a form of substance dependence, which is defined as:

A maladaptive pattern of substance use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by three (or more) of the following, occurring at any time in the same 12-month period:

1.Tolerance, as defined by either of the following:

–A need for markedly increased amounts of the substance to achieve intoxication or desired effect.

–Markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of the substance.

2.Withdrawal, as manifested by either of the following:

–The characteristic withdrawal syndrome for the substance.

–The same (or a closely related) substance is taken to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.

3.The substance is often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended.

4.There is a persistent desire or there are unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use.

5.A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary for obtaining the substance, using the substance or recovering from its effects.

6.Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of substance use.

7.The substance use is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance (e.g., continued drinking despite recognition that an ulcer was made worse by alcohol consumption).

As it gathers momentum, alcohol addiction inevitably affects the drinker’s physical and social selves, visibly damaging the architecture of their life. Jobs are lost. Relationships spoil. There may be accidents, arrests and injuries, or the drinker may simply become increasingly neglectful of their responsibilities and capacity to provide self-care. Conditions associated with long-term alcoholism include hepatitis, cirrhosis, fatty liver, gastritis, stomach ulcers, hypertension, heart disease, impotence, infertility, various types of cancer, increased susceptibility to infection, sleep disorders, loss of memory and personality changes caused by damage to the brain. As an early researcher into alcohol addiction wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry back in 1935: ‘The striking and inescapable impression one gets from a review of acute alcoholic intoxication is of the almost infinite diversity of symptoms that may ensue from the action of this single toxic agent.’

Not everyone who drinks alcohol, however, becomes an alcoholic. This disease, which exists in all quarters of the world, is caused by a multitude of factors, among them genetic predisposition, early life experience and social influences. In a 2011 paper entitled ‘The role of early life stress as a predictor for alcohol and drug dependence’, Mary-Anne Enoch, a long-term researcher in the field, wrote:

It is well established that the hereditability of alcoholism is around 50% . . . Therefore, genetic and environmental influences on the development of addictive disorders are equally important, although the proportions of risk may vary according to societal groups.

Later, when I was transcribing my interview with Dr. Petros Levounis, the Addiction Institute’s director, I realised that I’d asked the question of what causes alcoholism several times over, in varying formulations, and that each time his answer was slightly different. This isn’t to say that he was imprecise. On the contrary, he was a meticulous speaker. His understanding of alcoholism involved balancing a succession of models like spinning plates. The disease was primarily genetic, but social and psychological factors were very much involved. There isn’t an alcoholic personality per se, as early theorists suggested there might be, but alcohol does bring with it a constellation of behaviours (lying, stealing, cheating; the usual car crash) that will in all probability subside or disappear entirely when sobriety is attained; although – and here he laughed a little – there are plenty of jerks who become alcoholics and continue to be jerks after they’re dry.

Near the beginning of the conversation he used a phrase that intrigued me. He mentioned a process called the brain switch. If someone is particularly prone to alcoholism – if the genetic and social and psychological factors are all stacked against them – then they are likely to experience a change in brain function. As Dr. Levounis put it, ‘it seems that they engrave the addiction at the more primitive part of the brain, the mesolimbic system, and from that point on the addiction tends to have a life of its own, to a large extent independent of the forces that set it into motion to begin with’. He called this lively, liberated monster the big bear, and later the big beast. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘the majority of people do not really see that and have the false hope that if they go back to the root of the problem and yank out the root cause of what happened then they will be addiction-free for the rest of their lives.’

The brain switch wasn’t a concept I’d come across before. It was initially proposed about fifteen years earlier by Alan Leshner, then director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He suggested that neurobiological changes took place around the nucleus accumbens, the part of the mesolimbic system that deals with pleasure and reward, where addiction takes hold most strongly. These neural pathways, Dr. Levounis explained, ‘don’t only signify for pleasure and pain; they also signify for salience. Essentially, they tell us what is important and what is not. So instead of having all kinds of things that are pleasurable and rewarding and salient in your life, all these things start becoming less and less important and the one that remains is primarily the drug of abuse. It’s alcohol.’

The permanence of this hijack is due primarily to the geography of the pleasure-reward pathways, their anatomical position within the nutshell of the human skull. He mapped it out for me with his hands, showing how the mesolimbic system is sandwiched between the hippocampus, which is the memory centre of the brain, and the limbic system, which is its emotional core. It made sense to me. Memory and emotion. How else do we make decisions, except by cognition, by the pure application of reason? But that region of the brain, the frontal lobes, is far away, anatomically speaking, and imperfectly connected, especially in the young. Little wonder that alcoholism was once characterised as a failure of will. The frontal lobes weigh right and wrong, apportion risk; the limbic system is all greed and appetite and impulse, with the hippocampus adding the siren’s whisper: how sweet it was, remember?

I shifted in my seat. I could see The Line of Beauty on the shelf in front of me, filed among the blue books. There were pigeons outside. The city was hammering against the window, insistent as a drill. Dr Levounis was talking now about the long-term picture: how the pleasure-reward pathways stay hijacked even in sobriety, so that although the alcoholic might stop drinking they remain vulnerable to addiction. For how long, I asked, and he replied: ‘Although a lot of people manage to beat the illness, the risk of using stays with you for a long, long time, if not for the rest of your life.’

We turned then to a discussion of treatment. Dr Levounis outlined the two basic options for recovery: the abstinence-based model and the harm-reduction model. In the abstinence-based model (the version favoured by Alcoholics Anonymous), the alcoholic stops drinking entirely, concentrating on the maintenance of sobriety. In the harm-reduction model, on the other hand, the focus is on improving the conditions of one’s life and not necessarily on stopping drinking. He thought, pragmatically, that both were efficacious, depending on the individual’s circumstance and needs.

There was a lot to think about in this conversation, but it was the big beast that stayed with me when I went down into the street. What would Tennessee Williams have made of it, the idea that addiction has its own momentum, its own articulated presence within the skull? I’m not sure he would have been surprised. He had a gut sense of how people are driven by irrational cravings. I thought of poor Blanche DuBois, sneaking shots of whiskey in her sister’s house in New Orleans; of Brick Pollitt, hobbling back and forth to Echo Spring, saying to his dying father, ‘it’s hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle’. Williams might not have known where the frontal lobes were located (although he probably did, being a dedicated hypochondriac whose sister’s lobotomy left him with a lifelong terror of psychiatric care), but he certainly understood how a human being can navigate without the use of reason. I’m not sure Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about much else besides irrational compulsions – alcohol, money, sex – and how they can unshape a life.

The AA meeting was on the Upper West Side at 6 p.m. I slept a while at the hotel and then cut across Central Park, eating a hot dog on the way. The trees were maybe a fortnight away from coming into leaf and as I walked I saw a red cardinal in a bush beside the path. Nothing except changes in climate and language communicate so thoroughly a sense of travel as the difference in birdlife. A week later, on the way to Key West, I’d see vultures circling above Miami, ospreys in the Everglades, an ibis picking its way through a tropical graveyard. Another week on and thousands of miles north, on the outskirts of Port Angeles, I’d watch bald eagles fishing in a river and clouds of violet swallows swarming above a gorge. But the red cardinal was the first purely American bird of my trip and it heartened me. Whatever happens, happens here, in the populated earth. I was grateful for the science lesson, but I didn’t want to divorce the neural drama of alcoholism from the world, the quick and grubby world in which it takes place.

No chance of that at AA. I sat at the back, with an old-timer, Andi, who’d offered to show me around. People were drifting in, clutching coffees, in baseball caps and suits. It seemed at first glance almost comically New York, right down to the couple in the front row who looked like rock stars, one in enormous sunglasses and leather shorts, the other swaddled in a floor-length fur coat.

There was a sign on the wall that displayed the Twelve Steps, next to one that read ‘No spitting. No eating food on shared computers.’ The combination would no doubt have amused John Cheever, who struggled for a long time with the democracy of these dingy rooms, though in his last years he softened in his loathing of AA, becoming vocally grateful for its role in his sobriety. I read through them, step by step, for the hundredth time.

1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4.Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5.Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7.Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10.Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

No one knows for sure how AA works. It was from the very beginning a gamble, a shot in the dark. It was established in the 1930s by a doctor and a failed stockbroker, Dr. Bob and Bill W., both of whom suffered from alcoholism themselves. Among its central tenets are the beliefs that recovery depends upon a spiritual awakening, and that alcoholics can help one another by sharing their experiences: a kind of bearing witness that proved from the outset astonishingly powerful. As a statement by AA World Services puts it: ‘Together, we can do what none of us could accomplish alone. We can serve as a source of personal experience and be an ongoing support system for recovering alcoholics.’

I’d come to an open meeting. We all joined hands in the little room to singsong our way through the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. I had a flash of that tiresomely English reluctance to join in, the suspicion of group identities.

The speaker was a man in his forties, with fine dark hair and a beautiful, ravaged face. He spoke in a meandering, elegant way. Alcohol was the family disease. His father pushed him to succeed. He was gay, attempted suicide as an adolescent and at a late stage in his drinking stopped going out entirely, barricading himself in his apartment with crates of red wine. He used to suffer from blackouts and as he explained this period of vanishing from society he used another of those images that lodged itself painfully in my mind. He said: ‘It was like my life was a piece of cloth that I had shredded down to lace and then I tore the connections away until there was nothing left.’ Eventually he checked into a recovery programme and after that he stayed sober, even when – and here, for just a minute, he looked exhausted – his partner killed himself. No alcoholic ever dies in vain, he said then, because their story might be the one thing that catalyses someone else’s recovery.

After he’d finished speaking, which might have been half an hour, the group gave their responses. Each person began by saying their first name, the nature of their addiction and the length of their sobriety, with the rest chanting back in unison, ‘Hi Angela, Hi Joseph . . .’ At first it seemed theatrical. There was evidently a clique at the front, and their responses were annoying a man beside me. ‘Oh GROSS,’ he kept saying. ‘Oh fuckin’ love, love, love.’

I had some sympathy for him, but the next stage made me change my mind entirely. People were asked to put up their hands if they were celebrating a sobriety birthday that month. Some hadn’t touched alcohol for years; some for decades. An Indian man stood up and said: ‘I can’t believe my son is eighteen this week and that he’s never seen me or my wife drunk.’ It hadn’t really dawned on me before how much of a fellowship AA is, or how powerfully it depends on people wishing to pass on the help and friendship that’s been offered to them. By the time the closing prayer began I was close to tears. ‘Right?’ Andi said, nudging me, and I nodded back. Right.

We said goodbye at the kerb and I walked to the subway alone. I’d forgotten my coat but it didn’t matter. The air was almost warm and the moon was very high in the sky, bright as a nickel, ripe as a peach. On the corner I passed a little girl of eight or so roller-skating outside an apartment building. She was hanging on to the hands of a Puerto Rican woman I assumed must be her nanny and whirling in circles, calling out in an imperious voice: ‘Again! Again! I’ll just do one more!’ One more. It must at some time or other have been the rallying cry of every man and woman in that meeting. As I turned down towards the Elysée I could still hear her shouting ‘Seven! Eight! Ten!’ as she completed each triumphant, greedy circuit.

I’d made these two small pilgrimages as a way of immersing myself in the subject of alcoholism (an approach, now I came to think about it, not dissimilar to John Cheever’s preferred method of swimming in cold water: leap in, preferably buck naked, no namby pamby fiddling about on the side). What hadn’t occurred to me, foolishly, was that spending a day listening to people talk about drinking might trigger corresponding memories of my own.

My room at the hotel was very plush. The Italian influences of the lobby had given way to a French chateau (later, when I went down to breakfast, I found an English country house library, complete with hunting prints and a piano). There was a painting of smugglers huddled around a bonfire above my bed, and I slumped beneath it and tried to order my thoughts. I had ducks on the brain. I knew why, too. When my mother’s partner was in treatment she sent me a card. She must have been somewhere between Step Eight, which requires one to make ‘a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them’, and Step Nine, which is to make ‘direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others’.

What I remembered, lying on the overstuffed bed, was sitting by the bookshelves in my mother’s study, reading a card with a duck on it. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was a serious, sporting drawing of a mallard or pintail, its feathers marked with immaculate gradations of colour. I remembered the duck and I remembered that both sides of the card were filled with small dense writing in black ballpoint pen, but I had no idea now, beyond the vaguest sense of an apology, what it actually said.

I had only very recently become aware of these gaps in my memory. For years, I’d steered well clear of the period in which alcohol seeped its way into my childhood, beneath the doors and around the seams of windows, a slow, contaminating flood. I was aware of various exhibits tucked away in the lumber-room of my skull; the hippocampus, I suppose. Duck card, air rifle, the night with the police. I’d assumed that if I wanted to I could take them down and bring them out for scrutiny. Now, however, I was beginning to realise that they weren’t dissimilar to that piece of decomposing lace the speaker had referred to in the meeting. There is a school of thought that says willed amnesia is an effective way of dealing with trauma, since neurological pathways grass over, so to speak, with disuse. I didn’t buy it. You aren’t fully human if you can’t remember your own past. I put the duck to one side, to return to by way of daylight.

I woke to the sound of horns and lay in the big bed, luxuriating in the warmth. I was getting the train to New Orleans the next day, for the Tennessee Williams Centenary Festival, and so I had thirty hours or so on the loose in New York. I hadn’t made any particular plans. The next few weeks were very full and I wanted a day to orientate myself before plunging south. In the end, I did what I always do: I walked. I got a subway train to East Broadway and worked my way up the flank of the island, through the havoc of Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

The city impressed itself on me by way of a repeating currency of images, a coinage of yellow cabs and fire escapes, brownstones hung with wreaths of conifer and ornamental cabbage tied up with tartan ribbon. Delis stocked with smoked pigs’ legs and wheels of giant cheese. Plums and mangoes stacked in crates. Fish on ice, heaped in delicate, slippery piles of coral, silver, flint and grey. In Chinatown I passed a shop that sold lobsters in tanks brimful of greenish water, the glass murked by deposits of slime and God knows what else. I only looked for a second, enough to catch a queasy glimpse of armoured bodies lurching over one another, striped claws ticking in the insufficient space.

I got a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s and went on up Second Avenue. The city was dirty and beautiful and I was entirely seduced by it. I walked almost all the way to the Queensboro Bridge, where John Cheever once saw two hookers playing hopscotch with a hotel room key. The East River was pleating in little folds of blue and gold and I leaned beside it and watched the boats chug back and forth.

After returning to St. Louis, his hated home, at the end of the European tour, Tom Williams didn’t fetch up in New York again until 1939, when a play he wrote for a competition won him the attention of an agent. He’d shucked his born name by then, and loped away from his intolerable family. In a few years he’d get them down on paper for the first time with The Glass Menagerie, the play that made his reputation. For now, though, he was travelling: hitching and bicycling across the country, writing in the mornings and swimming and indulging himself in the afternoons, a pattern he’d stick to throughout his roaming life.

That first autumn he stayed mainly at the YMCA on West 63rd Street. ‘New York is terrifying,’ he wrote to an editor in Princeton. ‘Even when motionless the people seem to whistle through the air like bullets.’ In fact, it was he who was speeding. In his first eleven days in Manhattan alone he went through three separate addresses, and over the next year his letters from the city were interspersed with ones sent from Missouri, New Orleans, Provincetown, Key West and Acapulco, where he had an encounter with a group of unpleasant German tourists that would work its way years later into The Night of the Iguana.

While living at home he’d got into the habit of treating his almost-constant attacks of anxiety, insomnia and the agitated depression he called ‘the blue devils’ with liberal doses of membral, sodium bromide and sleeping pills. To this dangerous prescription he now added two new items. His experience of New York was ‘constant suspense and nerve-wracking excitement, which I evaded with drink and with sex’. For the rest of his life, these would remain his preferred methods of escaping difficult or stress-inducing situations, from failed love affairs to problems with the production of his plays.

Drink was also his antidote to shyness, something he still suffered from to an almost pathological degree. ‘I was still very shy except when drunk,’ he recalled in Memoirs. ‘Oh, I was quite the opposite when I had a couple of drinks under the belt.’ His journal from the time is packed with references to evenings of applejack brandy and beer chasers or too much whiskey, one of which ended dishearteningly when he stumbled into a table and tipped all the liquor to the floor. Still, life in the city was better than those interminable, suffocating nights in St. Louis, when he’d sat up into the small hours writing stories and experiencing such waves of panic he often convinced himself he was on the verge of a heart attack. Sometimes the stillness itself had been unbearable, and he’d got up and rushed from the house, pacing the streets for hours or swimming frantic lengths in the nearest pool.

The disadvantage of alcohol as an antidote to these unpleasant states was that it interfered with his ability to work. By the summer of 1940, he was already reporting a need to curtail his behaviour, noting in a letter to his friend, the dancer Joe Hazan: ‘I have started off on a rather disciplinary regime. Only one or two drinks a day, when very low, and a calm endurance of moods instead of a mad flight into intoxication and social distraction.’ A few paragraphs down, warning Joe against ‘trivial dissipation’, he added: ‘I am more likely than . . . you to be involved in these things. I have many times in the past – but always turned away in revulsion when it reached a dangerous point.’

And yet, despite all this distracting, dissipating activity, he kept on writing, producing an astonishing flood of poetry, stories and plays, a mass of material he perpetually reassembled into differing combinations. On one of his mad flights, to the resort town of Key West in 1941, he began a ‘beautiful’ short story that would turn by degrees into The Glass Menagerie, the most restrained and purely vocal of all his plays. I first read it when I was a teenager, in a pale green edition that also included A Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, I’d brought the book with me to America. It was in my room at the Elysée now: battered and full of mortifying marginalia in a hand long since abandoned.

All Williams’s plays are claustrophobic, but this one achieves its effects most simply, without resorting to the melodramatic fireworks of rape, lynch mobs, castration or cannibalism. It’s the story of a young man in an intolerable situation, and as such comes closer to home than any of his other works, never mind the fact that it’s populated with doll’s house versions of his own mother and sister, not to mention a Tom near-identical to the nervous, well-mannered boy he’d tried to leave behind in St. Louis. This Tom – Tom the semblance, the mirror self – is trapped in a small apartment with the two remaining players of the family quartet, Laura and Amanda Wingfield; his father having vanished some time previously. He works in a shoe factory, as did both the real Tom and Cornelius (the one a good deal longer and more diligently than the other), and spends what little free time he has at the movies, despite intense maternal opposition.

One of my favourite moments comes at the beginning of scene four. Tom blunders home late and very drunk, and drops his key on the fire escape. Williams, it should be noted, was obsessed with fire as a metaphor. Many of his plays include or end with conflagration, including the very early Battle of Angels and the very late Clothes for a Summer Hotel, both of which concern a pyrophobic who is later burned alive. In the latter play, this character is Zelda Fitzgerald, who was in many ways the archetypal Williams heroine, and who did in reality die in 1948 when a fire broke out at the mental hospital where she was incarcerated, killing all thirteen women in the locked ward on the top floor. As to the fire escape of The Glass Menagerie, it is, according to the stage notes, ‘a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation’.

Tom’s sweet, crippled sister Laura opens the door before he wakes his mother. Swaying a little in the cold night air, he raves to her about the movies he’s just seen: a Garbo picture and a Mickey Mouse and at the end a wonderful stage show by a magician who had the happy knack of turning water into wine and thence to Kentucky Straight Bourbon. ‘I knew it was whisky it finally turned into,’ he explains, ‘because he needed somebody to come up out of the audience to help him, and I came up – both shows!’ – a line that always gets a big laugh. ‘But the wonderfullest trick of all,’ he continues, blundering around the stage like a hooked trout, ‘was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me – get me out of this 2 by 4 situation!’

As it happens, none of this tomfoolery was in the original manuscript. During the first round of rehearsals in Chicago in the winter of 1944, the director Eddie Dowling, who also played the role of Tom, improvised a much cruder drunk scene. Williams was horrified, but eventually agreed to produce his own sleeker version. Intentional or not, the coffin trick serves as an elegant figure for the play’s larger concerns, its nightmare of genteel poverty and co-dependence. Coffin was also, it might be added, the middle name of Williams’s father Cornelius, from whose oppressive influences he’d only just escaped.

The audience never actually gets to witness the mirror-Tom’s version of the coffin trick. Instead, he tells them about it, in one of those lyrical asides that must have helped, along with Laurette Taylor’s extraordinary performance as Amanda, to seduce the theatregoers of first Chicago and then New York. ‘I didn’t go to the moon,’ he announces from the fire escape, as in a lighted window behind him his mother comforts his distraught sister:

I went much further – for time is the longest distance between two places –

Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox.

I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space – I travelled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.

I would have stopped but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise . . .

From the moment those lines first echoed around the Playhouse in New York, in April 1945, Tennessee was catapulted into a different kind of world. He became a public figure, with all the opportunity, scrutiny and pressure fame brings. It wasn’t by any means a comfortable shift, though he’d longed for it since he was a sickly little boy, lying in bed in his grandfather’s house in Columbus, Mississippi, acting out the fall of Troy with no audience or actors except a deck of cards, the black against the red.

Looking back decades later, in the Paris Review interview of 1981, he made two contradictory remarks about this sudden change in fortune. First, he described the play’s success as ‘terrible’. Although there were twenty-four curtain calls on the opening night and he was pulled from his seat to face wild applause, he claims that in photographs taken the next morning it’s obvious he was visibly depressed. A few lines on, he contradicts himself, or seems to, saying: ‘Before the success of Menagerie I’d reached the very, very bottom. I would have died without the money . . . So if I suddenly hadn’t had this dispensation from Providence with Menagerie, I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.’

Luckily, Providence sent something else his way, or God knows how he would have borne the increasing strain of the coming years. In the summer of 1947, he spent a blissful hour in the dunes in Provincetown with a beautiful Sicilian-American called Frank Merlo. They liked one another immediately, but because Tennessee was at the time embroiled with someone else they didn’t stay in touch. A year passed and then late one fall evening on Lexington Avenue, Tennessee saw the young man inside a deli. ‘Accidental and marvellous,’ he wrote of that re-encounter almost three decades later, when the walls had long since caved in on his own life.

Frank came back to Tennessee’s apartment on East 58th Street for a midnight feast: roast beef on rye with pickles and potato salad. ‘Frankie and I kept looking at one another,’ he wrote in Memoirs, peering back wistfully at those two bright-eyed boys, their hair slicked, their hearts, I’d guess, running a little fast. The apartment belonged to a sculptor and was all white inside, with an exotic garden behind walls of frosted glass. The bedroom was decorated like a merman’s cavern, with an illuminated aquarium and a tangle of sea shells, driftwood and fishing nets. ‘A piece of enchantment,’ he wrote, and then: ‘the magical carpet of the big bed’.

As for falling in love, that took a little longer. It wasn’t until Tennessee was staying in St. Louis, under his mother’s roof, that he realised how much he missed Frank, who he’d nicknamed the Little Horse on account of his long face. He sent a wire, asking him to wait at the apartment, but when he arrived home it seemed deserted. ‘I felt quite desolate,’ the older Tennessee remembered. He went into the enchanted bedroom and there on the big bed was little Frankie, fast asleep: his companion and guardian for the next fourteen years.

It was getting late. I walked back to the hotel through Sutton Place, took a bath, put on a dress and heels and went out again into the twilight. It was the cocktail hour, that lovely moment which in cinema is called magic time, the hour of the wolf. On its way to darkness the sky had turned an astonishing, deepening blue, flooding with colour as abruptly as if someone had opened a sluice. In that instant the city resembled a huge aquarium, the skyscrapers rising in the wavering light like underwater plants, the cabs flashing through the streets like shoals of fish, darting north at changeover as the lights tripped green all the way to Central Park.

I walked by way of 55th Street to the King Cole bar at the St. Regis, where among ten thousand other illustrious events the opening night party for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was held. If you want old-style glamour in New York you come here, or else go to the Plaza, or to Bemelman’s at the Carlyle, where the walls are painted with debonair rabbits getting up to mischief in a fantastical version of the park.

The room was low-lit and subtly burnished. I ordered a King’s Passion and sat on a banquette by the door, catty-corners from a Russian woman in a slippery white blouse. I’d entered Cheever territory, no doubt about it. John Cheever: the small, immaculately dishevelled Chekhov of the Suburbs, who despite his long association with the wealthy upstate town of Ossining lived in Manhattan from the age of twenty-two until the morning after his thirty-ninth birthday.

His last residence was just around the corner, on East 59th Street, and the St. Regis was among his favourite haunts. He liked anything that smacked of old money. In 1968, long after he’d left the city, his publishers put him up at the hotel for a two-day press junket, during which time he impressed one reporter by ordering two bottles of Scotch and gin. (‘Guess what the bill is?’ he said gleefully when they arrived. ‘Twenty-nine dollars! Wait until Alfred Knopf sees that!’) 1968: five years before he went careering around Iowa City with Raymond Carver, and seven years before he found himself at Smithers, sharing a room with a failed delicatessen owner and learning how to live without either the sorrows or the consolations of gin.

Cheever fascinated me because he was, in common with many alcoholics, a helpless mix of fraudulence and honesty. Though he feigned patrician origins, his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts was both financially and emotionally insecure, and while he eventually attained all the trappings of the landed Wasp he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and self-disgust. He was an almost exact contemporary of Tennessee’s, and though they weren’t friends, their worlds in the New York of the 1930s and 40s often overlapped. In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her husband wasn’t entirely heterosexual while they were at the first Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

According to Blake Bailey’s beautiful biography, Cheever, there was a leitmotif associated with Blanche’s dead homosexual husband and this tune lodged in Mary’s head and led to some kind of underwater realisation that her husband’s sexuality was not as she’d assumed. She never mentioned it to him. ‘Oh Lord, no,’ she told Bailey. ‘Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.’ As for her husband, he noted in his diary, ‘as decadent, I think, as anything I’ve ever seen on the stage’. He loved the play, adding rapturously:

There is much else; the wonderful sense of captivity in a squalid the chords struck seem to lie close to insanity. Anxiety, that is – confinement and so forth. Also, he avoids not only the common clichés but the uncommon cliché, over which I trip, and also works in a form that has few inhibitions and has written its own laws.

The entry concludes with a prescription to himself ‘to be less inhibited, to be warmer . . . to write, to love’: the same arenas in which he’d struggle for the next three decades of his life.

John Cheever was conceived after a sales banquet in Boston and born in Quincy, Massachusetts on 27 May 1912. Like Tennessee Williams, he was the second child of a profoundly ill-suited couple, and though he adored his brother Fred he was aware that he wasn’t his father’s favourite child. Indeed, on learning of his wife’s pregnancy, Frederick Senior’s first recorded act was to invite the local abortionist to dinner. He already had one much-loved son; why did he need another? Cheever never felt like he secured much of Frederick’s affection, and some of this mood of neglect and longing wells up in his short story ‘The National Pastime’, in which a small boy tries to persuade his father to teach him to play baseball, that needful hand-me-down of American masculinity. Frederick was a shoe salesman, and when this business failed in the Depression he withdrew into eccentricity and depression. He drank heavily, and it seems that his father was also an alcoholic, who died of delirium tremens.

Luckily, Cheever’s mother, Mary Liley, was an immensely capable woman, though she was profoundly unaffectionate and suffered from a neurotic and overbearing temperament. She was claustrophobic, and as an adult Cheever remembered with intense irritation her behaviour at the theatre. Often she’d have to grab her bag and gloves and push her way out, overwhelmed by the confinement of the stalls. Financially, though, it was she who kept the family afloat during the black years of the mid-twenties. Before her husband’s downfall she’d channelled her chilly and remarkable energies into various good works. Now she established and ran a gift shop in Quincy, the existence of which filled her snobbish son with shame.

As for Cheever, he was a skimpy, lonely boy, a little effeminate and dismally untalented at sports. His real gift was for telling stories, marvels of fabrication and ebullience. Apart from a brief spell at Quincy High, he was educated largely at private schools, where he failed to shine academically despite an evident flair for English. His academic career ended for good when he left his last school, Thayer Academy, voluntarily at the age of seventeen. Showing a flash of his mother’s enterprising spirit, he wrote a story about what he cannily reframed as his expulsion and sent it off to the New Republic.

The editor who bought it, Malcolm Cowley, was an old friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He took a shine to Cheever, and as well as inaugurating his literary career was responsible for providing him with what was probably his first experience of New York-style intoxication. He threw an afternoon party and invited his protégé, who fifty years later would queasily recall:

I was offered two kinds of drinks. One was greenish. The other was brown. They were both, I believe, made in a bathtub. I was told that one was a Manhattan and the other Pernod. My only intent was to appear terribly sophisticated and I ordered a Manhattan. Malcolm very kindly introduced me to his guests. I went on drinking Manhattans lest anyone think I came from a small town like Quincy, Massachusetts. Presently, after four or five Manhattans, I realized that I was going to vomit. I rushed to Mrs. Cowley, thanked her for the party, and reached the apartment-house hallway, where I vomited all over the wallpaper. Malcolm never 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 to his needs.

Though not all these scenes were exactly civilised, alcohol was an essential ingredient of Cheever’s ideal of a cultured life, one of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent shadows of inferiority and shame. In a journal entry written the summer before he married Mary, he recorded the following fantasy:

I found myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I’ve never learnt to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles’ five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones’ Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty . . . moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.

In this pleasant daydream, drinking is not about anything so vulgar as gratifying an appetite, but rather part of an elaborate social code, in which the right thing done at the right time conveys a near-magical sense of belonging. The monopole is ordered and iced, not drunk; the martini only tasted; while the Vouvray is merely transferred from one container to another, more appropriate to the demands of the season and the hour.

The same note sounds again from another, later diary entry, written in September 1941, when Cheever was on a ten-day furlough from the army. ‘Mary was waiting,’ he writes happily, ‘all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad-greens, etc., filled the ice-box.’ What’s interesting about this memory, which recalls Ratty’s gleeful iteration of his picnic in Wind in the Willows, is the emphasis on cleanliness as well as largesse. Shined, clean, shining, clean: an antidote to the grubby privations of camp life, perhaps. But in its obsessive repetitions, it also resembles an incantation, a spell for safety and good health (clean, after all, is a hospital word, particularly clean sheets, while the preserving ice-box also has a hospital, even a morgueish, chill about it). As such, it’s hard not to read those ranked bottles as a kind of medicine, a prophylactic against the sense of dirtiness and disorder that would continue to dog Cheever from house to house, from year to year.

I was jolted out of this line of thought by a man in the bar saying distinctly Ossining. How strange. Ossining is a small town in Westchester County, forty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. It’s still best known, years after his death, as Cheever’s adopted hometown (after he died the flags of the public buildings were lowered for ten days). Coincidentally, it’s also where Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister Rose spent most of her adult life, in an institution he both chose and paid for. It’s one of those places that exist in the limbo of the reader’s mind, inexorably associated with the melancholy, suburban stories Cheever used to write for the New Yorker.

I looked up. The Ossining man was sitting with the woman whose blouse I’d coveted. He was balding and wore one of those jaunty navy blazers with gleaming buttons that are supposed to lend one a nautical air. They were evidently cornering into a spectacular row.

‘So,’ she said. ‘What is your marriage? Are you happily married? What is your home situation?’

‘Happily? Happily would be the right word. I guess I’m happily married. But I’m attracted to you. I can’t control that.’

‘I’m just wondering what you’ve been doing since this morning.’

‘As a matter of fact I went home around noon. I told work I had a very important client to entertain. Don’t be hurt or confused if I say I have a happy marriage. Really, if I was truly happy I wouldn’t be here with you.’

Jeez. I wondered for a minute if they could be actors, rehearsing for some rotten soap, though perhaps I’d just seen Tootsie one too many times. The man got up and moved around the table, sliding in beside her on the banquette. ‘I think most men would think they’d have sex with a Russian woman with their wallet in their hand,’ he said. ‘Russian women are crazy about money.’ She looked at him blankly and he added: ‘Oh come on, you’ve heard that before.’ I began to gather my things, and as I did I heard him say: ‘It was the most important moment of my life. I remember every second of it. And now you’ve ruined it for me.’

If this was a Tennessee Williams play she’d lose the plot and start screaming, or else she’d crush him like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth, who can’t be made into a victim by anyone, even though her looks are fading and she is terrified of death. And if, on the other hand, it was a John Cheever story, he’d have sex with her and then go home to his wife and children in Ossining, where no doubt someone would be playing a piano. He’d mix a martini and go out on to the porch and look over the orchard to the lake, where the family skate in the winter months. Gazing dreamily into the blue light of evening, he’d see a dog, a dog named Jupiter, who’d come prancing through the tomato vines, ‘holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.’

I’d stolen, of course, the closing scene of ‘The Country Husband’, with its swerve up and away, out of the trenches, the animal earth, as if gravity were just a joke and the yaw and pitch of flight was somehow in our repertoire. Recently, I’d begun to become suspicious of this weightless element in Cheever’s work, to see it as another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking. Now, however, the line seemed very lovely, an antidote to the harshness that is all too present in the world. I folded a few dollars on the table and left the King Cole then, spinning through the revolving door and escaping, a little tipsy myself, into the cold, illuminated air.