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By Root 4116 0

a brilliant contemporary,” Cheever tried hard to compare himself favorably. For one thing, he tended to find vernacular prose “distasteful” as a rule, but then his own relative precision was in the service of expressing “the genteel symbols of the middle class”—constricted, in short; small. Meanwhile he kept reading Augie March (“I read it backwards. I read it upside down in a bucket of water”), and finally wrote a letter to its author: if Bellow was as good as all that, then it was Cheever's “manifest destiny” to return to the South Shore “and pump gasoline at one of those service stations on the way to the Cape.” In loftier moments, though, he considered Bellow's work an exalting reminder that literature was “a key part of the human enterprise”—and besides, “writing is not a competitive sport,” as Cheever's public persona liked to say.

He might have been less generous if he hadn't been so smitten with the man. In the summer of 1956, Cheever was elected to the Yaddo board of directors, and when he returned to Saratoga for the meeting in September, his main concern was seeing Bellow: “At dinner I am conscious of being in the same room with Saul.” The two went for a walk afterward, and Cheever remembered other “passionate friendships” which had begun at Yaddo—with Reuel Denney and Flannery Lewis—wondering why he should feel an almost “mystical” bond with a Chicago Jew. “I cast around for some precedent of two writers with similar aims who are strongly drawn to one another,” Cheever mused. “I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte.” Nor did it seem to matter whether he had anything weighty to say with Bellow. The two had rapport—”we joke, fool, as I like to”—and Cheever couldn't help reflecting a little sadly on “poor BM” [Maxwell], “who never extends this pleasant feeling of friendship, who never quite seems to get out of doors except to bend over his roses.”

The admiration was wholly mutual. “I loved him,” said Bellow. “A wonderful man.” Both were charming, difficult personalities, and both were at their best with each other on the rare occasions when they met. If anything Bellow was the more prickly of the two, alert to slights of any sort—especially from goyim—but with Cheever he felt “no sense of rivalry,” and certainly never a hint of Yankee condescension. As he remarked in his eulogy, “It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.” Reduced to their essences, the two were fundamentally alike. “We share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain,” said Cheever. Or, as his wife would have it, “They were both women haters.”

* A number of Cheever's Barnard students went on to become professional writers—among them Sherwin, Emilie Buchwald, Irma Kurtz, and Piri Halasz.

* There is no evidence in Cheever's notes (after 1950 or so) that he ever intended to call this character anything but Leander. Probably the name was changed in the magazine to avoid confusion with the Leander of “The National Pastime,” published in The New Yorker about nine months before.

* The house had belonged to Sally Swope's aunt, who'd recently died of cancer. “Sally was reluctant to use it so soon after her aunt's death,” her son David explained, “so she let the Cheevers have it.”

* Cheever often referred to his depression as le cafard, “the cockroach” or (colloquially) “the blues.”

* In his journal, Cheever often referred to himself in the third person, using alter egos such as “Coverly,” “Bierstubbe,” or “Estabrook.”

* This smacks of mythology, and one can only point out that it was a story Cheever stuck to, with little variation, the rest of his life. From his medical record at Smithers (dated April 10, 1975): “Father was a heavy drinker, mother was not, but at 82 developed diabetes [and] bought a case of scotch and drank herself to death.”

* The American Academy of Arts and Letters, that is, whose fifty distinguished members were elected from the 250-member National