Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [130]
At the beginning of 1956, her diabetes took a turn for the worse, and her sons arranged for a nurse to look after her. Before long, however, Cheever got a telephone call—the nurse had been fired—and he hurried back to Quincy on the train. “Who told you?” his mother demanded when he appeared at her bedside. With typical self-reliance, she was working her way through a case of Scotch, having been warned by the doctor that alcohol would kill her.* “You must not be upset when I die,” she said. “I am quite happy to go. I've done everything I was meant to do and quite a lot that I wasn't meant to do.” She died a few days later, having finally won her son's unequivocal esteem. “[Although she was afraid of many things in her life—” he wrote, “crowds, confinement, deep water—she seemed to face death completely unafraid.” So it was, on a snowy day in February, that Cheever paid his last visit to the scenes of his childhood, noting his “strong emotion” as he stood at his parents’ graves in Norwell—one of the little towns in that “forgotten valley of the North River” where part of his heart remained. Mostly, though, the environs of Quincy reminded him of a time when he'd felt like “an ugly and useless obscenity,” and he was glad to be shut of it forever.
His mother's death freed him in another crucial respect. “The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother's death,” he told at least one interviewer, though of course he'd been trying to write (and publish) such a book for almost twenty years before her death. Perhaps it's fair to say, though, that his worst inhibitions were lifted, that he felt a bit easier about conferring his mother's quirks on Mrs. Wapshot and Cousin Honora—the latter's tendency to toss her unopened mail into the fire, say, or read Middle-march over and over—not to mention his mother's death, which he would re-create with some exactitude when writing of Honora's death in The Wapshot Scandal. But, mother or no, he was determined to finish his first novel as soon as humanly possible—”to prove [Linscott] wrong” and liberate himself, at least somewhat, from the constraining label of “New Yorker writer.”
Certainly the time was ripe: Cheever was finally receiving a degree of acclaim from his peers, something he'd fully expected after “The Country Husband.” “I have written to myself imaginary letters of praise from Auden, Bellow, Trilling, Mizener,” he reported in his journal the day after the story appeared—and the next day: “Still this low comedy of waiting to be complimented … Half asleep I saw letters so numerous that they had to be tied into bundles; but nothing this morning at the PO (which I visited twice) but a belltin [bulletin] from the League of Women Voters.” Presently, however, some mail began to arrive. A. J. Liebling wrote that he considered Cheever the “American Chekhov” (an almost proverbial title in later years); Katharine White called him “one of our most original writers and one of the most gifted.” And finally, when Malcolm Cowley became president of the National Institute of Arts and