Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [147]
* The line in question—”You've talked yourself out of a fuck”—was changed in The New Yorker to “Shut up, Melissa. Shut up.”
* Granville Hicks was a Yaddo director, whom Cheever tended to call (privately) “Granny.” Little did Hicks know that the actual Hamlet Cheever had gone west in the same feckless, anachronistic style.
* The latter had “a vaguely suggestive cover,” as Susan Cheever recalled, which her father removed from every copy that came into his house. He asked his teenage daughter not to read The Wapshot Chronicle.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
{1957-1959}
IT WAS A MORE BUOYANT Cheever who returned to Westchester in the fall of 1957. His time in Italy had enhanced his cosmopolitan airs, or so it seemed whenever he slung a lot of Italian-sounding phrases at Iole, his own donna di servizio, who cooked wonderful homemade pasta and changed the baby's diapers. While in Italy, he'd gotten letters from home that were all about “surly soft-ball games” and “great advances in amateur theatricals”—at this rate, said Mary, he'd never return to the States. But in fact Cheever was “very excited”: The Wapshot Chronicle was a hit and its author a world traveler whose daughter would soon attend the posh Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. He was eager to tell old friends (and detractors) all about it at the Schoales's welcome-home party on September 14.
He was in for a nasty shock. “We think a skunk is in the woodpile,” Zinny told him, calling him on the carpet at the Cow Barn. The word was out that certain characters in The Wapshot Chronicle resembled members of the Vanderlip family—for instance, the repulsive Cousin Justina seemed a caricature of Mrs. Vanderlip, and Justina's browbeaten “ward,” Melissa, was likely modeled after Mrs. Vanderlip's daughter and namesake, Narcissa (Mrs. Julian) Street, who'd once been scolded for presuming to speak to her mother without first making an appointment. (And never mind the fact—so noted by Cheever—that Mrs. Vanderlip was “a dedicated feminist in favor of separate bedrooms and a minimum of sexual intercourse.”) Nor was this the first time such rumors had circulated. A few years before, an “Iagoesque nuisance” had told the family that Cheever's reason for moving to Beechwood was to gather material for a book “implicating the late F. A. Vanderlip in the Teapot Dome oil scandal”: “The family was galvanized,” Cheever wrote a friend at the time. “People were telephoned to ask about my character, letters and copies of letters were sent here and there, and I was finally told the secret. I demanded apologies, and got none; but things have quieted down.” Even then, truth be known, Cheever was not quite so innocent as he claimed: writing about stale political scandals was hardly his line, but right from the start he'd been intrigued by, say, a story about the time Mrs. Vanderlip had learned her paintings were forgeries, which was one of several chestnuts he was finally able to use in The Wapshot Chronicle.
Zinny warned him that he was in danger of being banished from Beechwood—a threat that had hung in the air for years. Narcissa Street, for one, had never liked him: Jack Kahn had been her pet, and now the resident writer belonged to Zinny. As for the mother, her favor toward Cheever had always been qualified by a kind of seigneurial hauteur, lest he forget whose estate he was (for the time being) squatting on. Perhaps Cheever explained to Zinny how an artist transmutes his material (much of which, in the present case, had been provided by Zinny herself), but at any rate she interceded so effectively that he soon received a magnanimous note from old Mrs. Vanderlip:
I was awfully pleased to have The Wapshot Chronicle from you with your very pleasant little message. I am sure it must be very entertaining to be the author of such a controversial