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By Root 3876 0

Maine, where he'd rented the Spears’ house (The Spruces) on a point overlooking the Atlantic. “Bostonians, rocks, sunsets, fir trees, a lovely coast line and at dusk the whole point awash with tea,” Cheever wrote. “Lovely, lovely.” The “Bostonians” were three or four sprawling Yankee clans who populated the point in summer, wandering around The Spruces calling “Yoo hoo, yoo hoo,” while drinking martinis out of jelly glasses. Cheever was apt to receive them with perfect magnanimity. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he didn't have to worry about money, and, even better, his novel was finished, his wife was pregnant, and in the fall they were all going to Italy (and the Prix de Rome be damned). “Took Mary and the others out to Ram island in the outboard,” Cheever wrote of a serenely typical day. “Boiled lobsters over a driftwood fire on the rocks … Back here, feeling no pain, ate some excellent chowder, dozed on the sofa listening to Vivaldi. Rain on the roof at four in the morning.”

As long as his novel was out of sight, he was somewhat able to relish the accomplishment. He wrote himself congratulatory letters (“The Greatest thing since War and Peace”), while anticipating book-club deals, movie sales, every conceivable award. Indeed, he could hardly believe his good fortune—and so he began to doubt it. He suspected the book was, at best, unfinished and full of holes, imagining a letter from Harper & Brothers reminiscent of the rebukes he'd gotten from Linscott over the years (“you may have the beginnings of something here but we feel it would be best if you put this behind you and made a fresh start”). Several times a day he went to the post office, waiting for his freshly typed manuscript, but when it finally arrived he could barely look at it. Fearing the worst, he sent copies to Maxwell and Bessie. “And I'm still up in the air over the book,” he brooded in his journal. “I think that Bill and Mike are reading [it] today. … A telegram cannot reach me here, but this does not keep me from writing them to myself.”

“WELL ROARED LION,” Maxwell wrote in his first telegram—which arrived safely—and then he sent another: “I don't expect to enjoy anything as much for a long long time. The places and people are all real, the ‘hearty fleeting vision of life’ is consistent and recognizably yours, and the writing is brilliant everywhere. I think it is going to be enormously successful.” This, Cheever reflected, was the very thing he might have written himself, and made all the difference “between feeling alive and feeling like an old suit hanging in a closet.” Maxwell said nothing about “holes” in the structure or making a “fresh start,” and a week or so later he reported further that Shawn and Katharine White had also loved the novel, and wanted to publish two or three long sections in The New Yorker. Mrs. White even wrote separately: “One of the most cheerful things that has happened to me—and to the New Yorker—all this summer is the fact of our going to be able to publish the chapters from your book. … I know it will be a tremendous thing.”

Heady stuff, and Cheever's elation lasted all of a day or two before he resumed brooding. He'd yet to hear from Bessie, after all, whose “prosaic” turn of mind had worried him ever since that meeting on Nantucket. It was one thing for Maxwell to like the book—he was a fellow artist: he understood Cheever's love of atmospherics, his need to listen (as it were) to the rain. Bessie, like Linscott, was liable to miss the point of all that. “I'm not prepared to remove any smells from this book,” Cheever had declared in his cover letter. “I'm a very olfactory person and I will not be disposed to remove any smells.” But Bessie hadn't minded the smells at all; he'd found the book delightful from start to finish, as had everyone else at Harper. Finally, almost a month after receiving the typescript, he even called Maine to say so: “Tell me!” he greeted Cheever. “How are Mary and the children? And how is Maine?” Cheever—overwrought, all but certain the long silence meant an imminent Linscottian