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By Root 4119 0

editor, Maxwell was legendary for his kindness, his vast empathy, a warmth he conveyed despite an ironclad sense of decorum. To some he gave the appearance of a man who was very carefully holding himself together. Laurents met him for lunch, at Reik's insistence, and naturally expected a discussion of their common problem (since, after all, Reik had mentioned a number of intimate details about Maxwell's sex life)—but the subject never came up: “We talked about writing,” Laurents recalled. “He was very reticent.” Not that he was apt to deny anything—he was too honorable for that. Once, in a gathering, he was approached by a man who rudely referred to a certain disreputable character from their mutual past. Gently but firmly, Maxwell replied—ending the exchange—that such matters were “very remote from [his] life now.” For his part, Cheever thought his friend “terribly fastidious,” and liked to tell of the time Maxwell had suddenly phoned to say he was coming to tea: “Mary went wild and cleaned, waxed, arranged flowers, etc. When he arrived everything seemed in order. Mary poured the tea. The scene was a triumph of decorum until Harmon, an enormous cat, entered the room, carrying a dead goldfish. It seemed to be our relationship in a nutshell.”

Whether Maxwell was aware of Cheever's predilections is hard to say, though Cheever certainly knew about Maxwell and sometimes longed to air the matter between them, while worrying, too, over the “devastating turn” their friendship might take as a result. Reunited as writer and editor after Lobrano's defection, the two met for lunch at the Century Club; afterward Cheever wrote: “Here is an old friend, a boy to play with, an answer to the lonelyness that I still seem to carry from childhood and upon which I do not choose to act. And here is a man who is lonelier than I will ever be. He talked about childhood dancing school, his step-mother, this and that—rather in the end like a woman—and I talked about my parents, my brother, and held through it all the affectations of gentility. I avoided the looming truths.”

Cheever would always esteem Maxwell's literary advice, and was properly grateful for the man's support in almost every department of life; this created a vague intimacy between them that, for various reasons, didn't quite translate into intimate words or acts—though with Maxwell, again, Cheever longed to find “some way of expressing our indignation at the fix we have got ourselves into, some reassuring nostalgia for what appears to be a lost and natural way of life.” In the end, though, he was invariably disappointed with the actual fact of Maxwell and his “terribly fastidious” manner: as he often noted, he loved the man and always looked forward to seeing him, but he tended to feel “bored stiff” in his company.

TOWARD THE END of 1950, Cheever's apartment building changed ownership and would soon be turned into a cooperative. Present tenants were given eight months to move, which was imminent in the Cheevers’ case anyway: their growing children were sharing a tiny bedroom and needed more space. Like so many of the postwar middle class, Cheever considered moving to the suburbs—better schools, cheaper housing, fresh air—though he had some typical misgivings: “My God, the suburbs!” he later wrote. “They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Be that as it may, his friend and fellow New Yorker writer E. J. (“Jack”) Kahn, Jr., would soon be vacating his rented house in Westchester County, and invited Cheever to take his place. For a while the search continued for a larger but affordable apartment in the city, until Cheever neglected to pay his electric bill and the lights went out; he spent the night sitting in the dark, solemnly pondering his poverty. The next day he paid the bill and took a train to Westchester,