Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [133]
A few days later, Bessie and Cheever met for lunch at the Ritz. As they sat down, Cheever abruptly announced (eyes slightly averted) that he was happy to return the twenty-four hundred dollars if Bessie didn't like the book; also he repeated that business about the smells. “John”—Bessie interrupted—”I tried to tell you for half an hour on the phone the other day what a wonderful book it is, and I'll be glad to start all over again, and somebody [Evan Thomas] said ‘that it's the best thing that has happened to Harper's fiction in a long time’ …” At length Cheever appeared to be mollified, but afterward wrote in his journal that he was still “not satisfied”: “[Bessie] reminds me of other people who put one into the position of a patsy. They stuff you into taxi cabs, buy you plane tickets and buy you the drink you don't need and in the end they leave you standing alone at the bar, surrounded by your luggage and screwed.” He did, however, decide to accept the situation (“I've settled”), but continued to suspect some nastiness in the offing. A week or so later, Mrs. White wrote that she'd recently chatted with Bessie (a friend), who went on and on about The Wapshot Chronicle: “He is very happy about it.” “Harpers seemed to like it but it was very hard to tell,” Cheever replied. “Your good opinion has fortified me over the summer and made me a loving husband and a patient father. Without it I would have got drunk and broken all the dishes.”
FOR WHATEVER REASON, Bessie had expected Cheever to be something of a lightweight when they first met in Westchester a few years back (quite possibly Cheever had picked up on this), but was pleasantly surprised when the subject of Saul Bellow came up. “Bellow”—said Cheever on that occasion—”is the first American novelist of parts who writes neither in sympathy with nor in opposition to the Puritan tradition. He writes as if it didn't exist.” This was high and insightful praise, coming from a writer whose own work was marred (so he thought) by an inordinate preoccupation with the Puritan tradition. Little wonder Bellow would always be Cheever's favorite contemporary, both as a writer and as a man—this even though they'd met on one of the worst days of Cheever's life. “These are the hardest days, hours anyhow,” he wrote on March 27, 1952, after his bad, bad lunch with Linscott. “Then to an unhappy drink at the Commodore and a party at Eleanor's where Saul Bellow was.”*
Bellow had yet to become an obsession, though Cheever had been impressed by Dangling Man (“Here is the blend of French and Russian that I like”) and doubtless said so in lavish terms. Then, in 1953, Cheever read The Adventures of Augie March and (as he later put it while presenting an award to Bellow) “had the experience, that I think of as great art, of having a profound chamber of memory revealed to me that I had always possessed but had never comprehended.” If anything, the book was even more overwhelming than these orotund words suggest. At the time, Cheever was writing his first Shady Hill stories, and had a sense of coming into his own powers at last; Augie March—as both a vision of life and a piece of writing—was an incitement to do better. “There is to learn that in writing of carnal love he shakes the gloom, the morbidity, the mud, and proseyness (an unclothed woman, etc.) that gets under my feet,” Cheever wrote. “His optimism I share, having reached it by my own, crooked, lengthy, leaf-buried path. We cannot spend our lives in apprehension.” But of course the book was not altogether pleasurable. Faced with “the challenge of