Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [109]
The Impostor slogged along until, at the beginning of 1952, Cheever's debts outweighed the balance of his Guggenheim money; rather than go back to writing stories, he decided to “complete a rough draft as rapidly as possible and send it off to Bob.” What he actually managed, by March, were a few relatively polished chapters—about a hundred pages in all—which he hoped were good enough to persuade Linscott to give him some money to finish or, failing that, at least a vote of confidence. When, however, he wrote Cowley that he thought this latest effort had “gone very well,” his old mentor replied with decorous skepticism: “I'd begun to think that the only way you'd work up to a novel was simply by expanding a long story, or by fitting two or three long stories together, but now you sound as if you were writing a novel just—like—that.” This would prove a prescient assessment of Cheever's novelistic approach, and meanwhile some such misgiving had occurred to him in regard to The Impostor, even as he tried to cheer himself up in his journal: “I think they will like it … [a]lthough it may seem to them jerrybuilt, unhealthy and comical. We will see.”
At Random House the manuscript was received with “an all around air of profound embarrassment,” such that Cheever suspected his editor had given the pages to an assistant “to read among her cats.” As the days passed, one after another, Cheever waited for the telephone to ring while writing little more than the odd despondent note in his journal: “[I]f the work I've sent him is bad I have made some grave mistakes. My eyes are wrong, my heart is wrong, and I have been mistaken in listening for all these years to the rain.” Writing to Herbst—two weeks had passed by then—he indulged in the usual jaunty stoicism, predicting that when the telephone did ring (“but it will probably never ring”) he'd be told something along the lines of “We like some of it” or “We like the way you've handled the material, but we don't like the material.”
This, as it turned out, was overly optimistic. Perhaps to force a verdict of whatever sort, Cheever arranged to have lunch with Linscott on a day (March 27) when he was in town anyway to see his dentist. The editor greeted him more sheepishly than ever, spoke of other matters as long as he could manage it, then finally announced that he didn't like Cheever's manuscript. At all. (“He had nothing generous to say about anything,” Cheever noted afterward. “He looks at me as if I were a cistern or manhole into which 4,800 dollars had been dropped.”) He thought the characters were unbelievable, that the overall negativism was not “timely”—and so on. When Cheever wondered aloud how he'd ever manage to pay back his advance, Linscott replied that Random House had insured his life via the contract, which Cheever took as a sober suggestion that he commit suicide. Thirteen years later (Linscott had been safely dead a year), Cheever related the following sad, comic, and largely apocryphal account of their meeting:
When I reached the office [for lunch] they said [Linscott] was out. I waited nearly an hour. He presently drifted down the stairs, gave me his left hand and took me to a basement restaurant. He did not mention the book. He said he thought it worthless, that I should give up writing and try to make a living in some other way. As we parted he asked softly: “You wouldn't do anything foolish like kill yourself, would you?” “No,” I said. These were the last words we exchanged.
Cheever was not quite suicidal, though he was getting there (again). During a follow-up visit with his dentist, he lay in the chair brooding: “I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. Oh, I think, if I could only taste a little success.” Meanwhile he needed to write more stories, and fast, but his confidence was shot. With much effort, he finally finished a long story that summer (“The Children”), but couldn't