Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [138]
Cheever's love of the language would prove an elusive, lifelong affair. In Rome he diligently attended La Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri, where a heavy woman “with a large amethyst brooch and a bum leg” scrawled verbs on the chalkboard and hissed (“psssst!”) for silence. To little avail. Aside from a few stilted phrases, Cheever was never able to master la bella lingua, whereas his wife got good enough to chat with the maids and keep secrets from him. Cheever's own attempts to communicate with his staff had a way of going awry. The teenage Vittoria would bring him breakfast in bed, but didn't understand that he preferred to eat his boiled egg from the shell, un-peeled. As his daughter remembered, “He studied the dictionary carefully, finding the word for egg, the word for kitchen, and the word for peel. In the morning, when Vittoria appeared, he cleared his throat and carefully asked her not to peel the eggs in the kitchen. Vittoria shrieked, blushed, and rushed from the room in tears. What my father had said was, ‘Do not undress in the kitchen, you egg.’ The fact that Vittoria had been changing her clothes in the kitchen didn't help.” But Cheever kept trying to learn, and eventually came to believe that Italian was his “linguistic hole card,” as he put it. People like Shirley Hazzard, who really did speak the language, would sigh whenever a tipsy Cheever gave a telltale leer and began speaking “his ghastly Italian.”
CHEEVER DIVIDED the American colony into “Academy and unAcademy,” and found a fair number of “duds” in both groups. While unAcademy people were often provincial and generally foolish, Academy people were dull in their own right and doubtless intimidated Cheever with their intellectual airs. In early December he attended a reception for Robert Penn Warren—Eleanor Clark's husband of four years—and reported afterward that he hadn't “been so uncomfortable since they discontinued the old 59th Street cross-town trolley cars.” For the rest of his life, Cheever would see the Warrens once or twice a year, at Institute functions or the couple's Christmas parties in Connecticut, but he and “Red” never became close—except perhaps for a single afternoon when he visited the Warrens’ apartment in the Academy complex atop the Janiculum, one of the highest hills in Rome. The two went for a walk along the Via Aurelia and discussed their various projects and ideas. “We saw some pretty country, bought bread and cheese and ate it in the sunlight, throwing our scraps to a pair of tame magpies,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “Then, walking back a terraced hill covered with sheep, he recited and Dante'd [i.e., recited Dante]. We must have walked sixteen miles. All very pleasant.” Warren noticed, however, that Cheever tended to grow “impatient” whenever the erudite Kentuckian resorted to “generalizations”—that is, the sort of formalist lingo he was apt to exchange with Cleanth Brooks. Cheever himself “always talked specifics”—nice little details from the books he loved—and privately mocked Warren as an “academic charlatan” who confused philosophy with literature.
Ralph Ellison was also at the Academy (he'd gotten his 1955 Prix de Rome renewed for another year), and he and Cheever were friendly in a somewhat constrained way. “His face can shine with light,” said the latter, “but it doesn't seem to shine for me.” Though he would never admit it publicly, Cheever had found Invisible Man “longwinded”—an allegorical novel of ideas, after all—and when Ellison would start “talking about negros” and using terms like “mass motivation,” Cheever would make a sympathetic face and cast about for ways of changing the subject. At the Academy, at least,