Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [125]
Cheever's students remember him as helpful, modest, and soft-spoken. Sometimes he'd give them assignments (“Write a description of Richard Nixon”), but mostly he was content to read his own work and listen to theirs. “Most of the girls are so subtle you can't tell whether the characters are alive or dead and there is a good deal of loneliness and moonshine, etc.,” he wrote Eleanor Clark, though in the classroom he kept his sarcasm in check. Which is not to say he wasn't critical when warranted. One woman liked to write erotica, and Cheever would listen to her stories with a polite poker-face—evidently finding them distasteful, but willing to be patient. He raised one mild objection, however, when she described a man abruptly withdrawing his penis and thus forgoing climax: “There is no recorded instance in history when a man was able to do this,” he said. It was a fairly typical observation. Regardless of what they chose to write—and generally Cheever thought it a good idea for them to write what they knew—he insisted that characters behave in a plausible manner, and (reminiscent of Harold Ross) that the reality of a story be made accessible to readers with vivid, specific detail. One of his students, Judith Sherwin (who'd already published a poem in the Atlantic*), wanted to write something akin to magical realism, and thought Cheever's strictures precluded this. But of course Cheever was no stranger to magical realism; he simply insisted that, while revising, Sherwin “put in a few signposts”—that is, the kind of details that make up a believable world.
Mostly his students adored him. They balked when he asked them to memorize “Fern Hill” for its lovely cadence; a week later, though, three of his best students came to his office and recited the poem in unison. Such moments made it almost worthwhile, but not quite: teaching was too much effort (“[it] takes the skin off your back”), no matter how relaxed his approach. Besides, his novel was finally taking off and he resented distractions of any kind, especially the muddling static of apprentice prose. Toward the end of his second and last term, he was doing little more as a teacher than reading aloud from The Wapshot Chronicle—not that his students seemed to mind. As one remarked, “It was an honor to be sitting there, at age nineteen, with this writer on the cusp of greatness.”
Such greatness was the result of a truly mulish persistence. After his last, disastrous meeting with Linscott in March 1952, Cheever had very nearly given up the idea of ever writing a novel at all. “I think maybe I might stick with short stories,” he wrote, then immediately proceeded to argue with himself: he'd never make any real money as a short-story writer, or establish a durable reputation; a novel was “massive, longlived,” whereas the short story “has the life expectancy of a mayfly.” Still, a long year would pass before he could dust himself off and try again. “It's been my intention for the last twenty-five years to complete a sustained piece of fiction and I feel sure that I will,” he wrote Linscott in early 1953, adding, however, that he'd abandoned his previous draft in toto after the editor's scathing appraisal, and hadn't made any progress since.
To Cowley he reiterated the necessity of writing a novel—as a career imperative, if nothing else—but complained that he found the genre “bankrupt.” Cowley replied that perhaps he shouldn't try to write a “conventional” novel at all, but rather pursue one of the alternatives Cowley had mentioned before: namely, either write what amounted to a long short-story—”take some situation like the one you treated in Goodbye, My Brother and work back (not forward) till the characters assumed their full roundness”—or else take two or three stories “and weave them together.” The latter method evidently struck a chord with Cheever, but structure wasn't his only problem. There was