Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [140]
Cheever would not stop yearning, to be sure, but neither would he ever love another human being as much as his younger son, Federico.* Though easily disappointed in people (particularly his family), Cheever noted toward the end of his life that Federico had always been “a source of boundless pleasure” and even his own “salvation”—quite true, if not unfailingly mutual. And Cheever wasn't the only one whose love of the boy was lifelong and unconditional. “Il Ducef! Il Ducef!” Iole cried ecstatically when they brought him home. Unmarried and childless, she spirited the baby away and would only yield him at nursing time. Dubbing him picci—”little one”—she did not abide contradiction on matters pertaining to his care: she ignored Princess Doria's complaints about the diapers hanging from one end of the balcony to the other, and when Cheever returned from the doctor with a bottle of brown medicine (a purgative of some sort), she snatched it out of his hand and poured it down the sink amid a long incomprehensible harangue of rapid-fire Italian.
* He wanted to name the boy Frederick, of course—after his father and once-beloved brother—but ran into trouble with the birth certificate: there is no “k” in the Italian alphabet (“I gave up after an hour or two”). As a grown man Federico is generally called Fred, though I use the Italian by way of distinguishing him from other Freds in Cheever's life.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
{1957}
WHEN OBLIGED TO DISCUSS his almost total inability to work during those first months in Italy, Cheever would sometimes explain that he couldn't find the right sort of paper, or that he didn't have enough privacy in the Doria salon, or even that the ceiling was too high. Mainly, though, he was obsessively “woolgathering” about The Wapshot Chronicle. He couldn't help wondering what sort of reception the book would get, and this led to rereading it over and over (“I hope to become so bored and tired with it that I will forget it”) in order to reassure himself. Usually he rather liked the book, and this in turn led to further woolgathering about fame and fortune—or at least a sale to the Book-of-the-Month Club, so he could really afford life as a leisured expatriate. As it happened, the club was all for it, except for one problem: the word “fuck.” As Ralph Thompson (the editorial director) explained to his old friend Mike Bessie, the club had never distributed to its members a book with that word in it; therefore he wondered if the author might be persuaded to come up with some reasonable equivalent. Bessie got hold of Cheever in Rome and mentioned the money at stake, then told him about the hitch. There was a pause. Finally Cheever replied: “Mike, the answer is no. That's the right word. That's the only word.” Bessie pointed out that the word had been changed when the passage had run in The New Yorker,* but Cheever remained obdurate—there were things he'd do for the magazine that he wouldn't do for anyone else, and that was that. Thus history was made: The Wapshot Chronicle became the first-ever selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club that contained the word “fuck.”
Cheever had continued to take a dim view of Bessie and Harper, whose attitude he likened to a large “Boston trust company with a very small investor.” Then, in late February 1957, he received an advance copy of The Wapshot Chronicle and had to admit it was very handsome indeed; that same day he also received a complimentary letter from Bellow, all of which left him in grave danger of “commit[ting] the sin of pride”: “But dizzy with excitement I went out to buy cigarettes,” he wrote in his journal, “and the pretty girl at the cafe, quite a flirt, gave me a look of pure uninterestedness and so I am crushed and feel like myself again.” And still he had a month to go until publication, and still he couldn't get back to work. Instead, he mentally wrote reviews (“I've written them all, even the Albany