Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [145]
The Wapshot Chronicle (and its reviews) behind him, Cheever was trying to get back to work with an almost alarming lack of success. For the time being, at least, he had nothing in particular to say—or rather nothing fit to print. Such was his desperation that he even considered writing (“oh so boldly”) about the homosexual romps of his youth, perhaps having the stuff published privately in Europe. The notion, however, was short-lived: “I seem to have one, and only one axe to grind and this is the enormous and monotonous question of sexual depravity and I trust that I may see the face of the devil in some other guise.” He thought it might help to get away from the commotion of Rome, so he bought a Fiat (“a rotten little car,” as Mary remembered) and drove back and forth on weekends to a friend's country villa—an idyllic place with a fountain and willow trees, located at the bottom of a steep wall of stairs leading to the pleasant town of Anticoli.
Probably it was here that Cheever completed the one and only story he would write in Italy, “The Bella Lingua,” rather inevitably about alienated Americans in Rome. Kate Dresser, a language teacher, tries to believe that the seedy life she's made for herself and her teenage son is better than going home to Krasbie, Iowa, where her father had been a trolley conductor. Meanwhile one of her students, a middle-aged businessman named Streeter, finds the city and its people unknowable and even a little sinister, as when he observes a man struck by a car: “The victim lay in a heap on the paving, a shabbily dressed man but with a lot of oil in his black, wavy hair, which must have been his pride. A crowd gathered—not solemn at all, although a few women crossed themselves—and everyone began to talk excitedly. … Streeter wondered why it was that they regarded a human life as something of such dubious value.” A string of other, similarly aversive vignettes follow—where arguably one or two would do—most of them culled almost word for word from Cheever's journal, and indeed the whole story suffers from a diffusion of effect. Cheever himself realized he was showing rust, and advised Maxwell to “just put [the story] in a drawer somewhere” if he didn't like it. When Maxwell promptly bought it, Cheever assumed he did so out of friendship (“I wish it had been better”), and remained skeptical when Maxwell suggested he return to Rome in September 1958—financed by The New Yorker—and “write some more pieces with an Italian background.”
By then it was summer and Cheever had almost had his fill of Italy, at least for a while. As a last adventure, he'd arranged to take the Warrens’ place at La Rocca, an enormous sixteenth-century fortress in Porto Ercole—a move that began ominously, with rumors of a polio epidemic in nearby San Stefano. “Yes, the city is dangerous!” Cheever's doctor shouted over the telephone, having been called away from dinner. “Life is dangerous! Do you expect to live forever?” Under a pall of doom, then (Cheever smelled spoiled meat in the air), they departed after a slight delay, and were taken aback by the awesome beauty of the place as well as its daunting lack of amenities. The bedrooms—beetle-and scorpion-infested—were gloomy barracks with straw mattresses; the one toilet could only be flushed with a bucket of icy water drawn from a well (and there was no paper except a pile of old magazines); the