Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [101]
It came at a good time, since relations with Lobrano had soured over the past couple of years—beginning with that string of rejections after the failure of Town House, whereupon Cheever noted that his “long love affair with The New Yorker seems like an unhappy marriage, repaired now and then with a carnal exchange, a check.” Matters took a turn for the worse when Lobrano responded unenthusiastically to “The Bus to St. James's,” the only decent piece of writing Cheever had managed that summer on Martha's Vineyard. Lobrano had advised him to cut the story, and when that didn't work he asked to see the deleted scenes again so that he, Lobrano, could perhaps cobble together something salable. Cheever realized the suggestion was made in “pure kindness and helpfulness,” but couldn't help feeling insulted: “I do resent the fact that my stories, imperfect as they are, must undergo so much manipulation,” he wrote in his journal, “from people who are paid much more than I for tampering with my fiction.” Lobrano had stumbled, then, while walking the tremulous wire between being a friend and being editor and banker, and may himself have been feeling a little put out two months later, when he took Cheever to lunch after accepting “Goodbye, My Brother” and proceeded to speak at length about the sale (for thirty-five thousand dollars) of a recent Newhouse story to the movies.* “I listened patiently to these triumphs,” Cheever glumly reflected, “thinking that it is difficult to be petulant when you don't have a buck to get your hair cut …” But perhaps Cheever did allow himself a hint of petulance, because Lobrano promptly turned him back over to William Maxwell. What would prove a happier association—at least for the next ten years or so—began with Maxwell's editing “Goodbye, My Brother,” which forever remained his favorite Cheever story (“John seemed to have a joyful knowledge that no one else had”).
Cheever, with some misgivings, also admired Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction—especially his 1945 novel, The Folded Leaf, which Cheever vividly remembered reading for the first time in a Hollywood hotel room (presumably while taking a break from George Eliot's oeuvre). His admiration for that particular novel is worth considering. “The whole of my youth is in it,” Maxwell once observed. Like at least two of his other novels, it touches on the sudden death of his mother when he was ten years old, as well as the suicide attempt that eventually followed. It's also regarded as one of the first serious novels in American literature about an overtly (more or less) homo-erotic male friendship. “Bill never made a secret of the fact that he'd had a brief homosexual life before [his marriage],” said Shirley Hazzard. “He felt he was so sensitive he could never have friends or a normal life.” A few years after his suicide attempt, Maxwell began an intensive seven-year course of therapy with the controversial Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud who did much to popularize psychoanalysis in the United States with such books as Listening with the Third Ear and Masochism in Modern Man. Reik also treated Cheever's old Signal Corps colleague Arthur Laurents, who was struck by Reik's tendency to mention, somewhat luridly, the progress of another patient—Maxwell—perhaps because Laurents and Maxwell were seeking help for much the same problem. Laurents would presently decide Reik was a “charlatan,” though Maxwell was nothing but grateful to the man (“He gave me a life”), and seems to have discussed the matter up to a point with Cheever, who remarked on his friend's “courage and perseverance”: “I think of Bill who did penance for seven years with a screwy hungarian [Austrian] in order to conquer his partiality to death. And conquer it, he did.” Shortly after finishing The Folded Leaf, Maxwell interviewed a beautiful young woman, Emily Noyes, for the job of poetry editor at The New Yorker; she wasn't hired, but the two were soon married and by all accounts were ecstatically happy with each other the rest of their lives.
Apart from his work as a writer and