Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [131]
What Cheever was specifically hoping for—even counting on—was the Prix de Rome: a fellowship subsidizing a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome.* Cowley of all people knew how badly Cheever had wanted to go abroad these last five years or so; indeed, it was Cowley who kept insisting such a move was essential, lest Cheever lapse into hopeless provincialism. But apparently Cowley's endorsement wasn't enough, for that year's fellowship went to the poet John Ciardi.† Cheever, however, was not entirely overlooked: along with James Baldwin and five others, he was awarded a one-thousand-dollar grant in recognition of his “wry sympathy of heart, [which] has commemorated the poetry of that most unpoetical life, the middle class life of the American metropolis and its suburbs.” Cowley may have sensed chagrin on Cheever's part over what amounted to a relative booby prize; in any case, he accused his old protégé of ingratitude when Cheever declined (in all modesty) to donate an original manuscript to an exhibition at the award ceremony. “I am crushed and miserable,” Cheever promptly wrote the Institute librarian, Hannah Josephson, assuring her that a manuscript was in transit. “I know myself to be drunken and lazy, foolish and lewd, nervous and long-winded, runty and improvident, but God preserve me from ever being balky with such an old friend as you.” (“Spent most of the morning writing letters to repair my fences at the institute,” he wrote in his journal. “Malcolm pompous, I think.”)
It galled Cheever that such occasional sops hadn't translated into anything resembling big money, whereas a mediocre rival like New-house had scarcely written a word in five years because (as he was happy to explain) he'd taken his movie money and tripled it in the stock market; meanwhile his last (ever) novel, The Temptation of Roger Heriott, had been “aimed straight at the cockles of Sam Goldwyn's leathery old heart,” as Cheever saw it. Irwin Shaw had also continued to prosper. Having sold The Young Lions to the movies and gone to Switzerland, he occasionally blew through New York and entertained Cheever, distractedly, in his hotel (“I read the Sunday paper while Irwin talked large sums of money with Hollywood”). But then Cheever was not a worldly man. For years his old Signal Corps buddy John Weaver had exhorted him to hire a proper Hollywood agent—Weaver's own agent and friend, Henry Lewis—but Cheever “kept putting it off”: he didn't like haggling with show-business types, and he didn't want to be seduced, ever, into writing anything remotely like The Temptation of Roger Heriott. At long last, though, he did rather grudgingly assent to Hollywood representation, and roughly two weeks after “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” appeared in the April 14, 1956, issue of The New Yorker, he got a call: Dore Schary of M-G-M had bought the rights for twenty-five thousand dollars. Cheever drank off a glass of whiskey, told his dog Cassie the news, and piously read Winnie-the-Pooh to Ben. “The reason I told the dog about it,” he wrote Weaver afterward, “was because when Henry Lewis called there was no one here but Ben and me and the dog. Mary and Susie had gone to a movie called The Little Kidnappers. I don't believe that children Ben's age should be told about money and so that left me with the dog. … Then Mary came home, received the news sniffily, and went upstairs to sleep. This made me cross so I drank more whisky and sat broodily on the sofa thinking how with this money I could have prostitutes of all kinds, dancing to my whip.” His journal corroborates this account, more or less, including the part about prostitutes.*
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ON A THURSDAY IN JUNE, Cheever finished a draft of The Wapshot Chronicle and dropped it off at a typing agency. The next day he drove his family to Friendship,