Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [148]
You do not need to worry about anything you may say about Beechwood. Personally, I thought several points were very well taken. I have always been horrified by the roofs of this house. … There were other references that I recognized too, but I am very flattered to figure in even a remote way in a book by “one of the modern authors.”
She couldn't resist the implication, however, that she'd found the work as a whole rather distasteful, with or without the “flattering” personal references: “Except for Leander I do not think you presented a really loveable character in the whole book, and I think, just for contrast, this is always pleasant in any novel or play.”
The immediate danger was averted, but Cheever never again felt quite so welcome in Scarborough. For the most part he drifted away from the old crowd, including Kahn, who one day let him know that he (Kahn) had advised the Vanderlips to rent Beechtwig to the new headmaster of the Scarborough Country Day School. Cheever interpreted this as “the callousness of an intensely competitive nature”—and certainly, by then, Cheever was far more esteemed by the world than was Kahn. His social confidence was another matter, though that too seemed to be gaining somewhat. “In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah—a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing,” he wrote shortly after his return from Italy. “Then I take a deep breath, stand up straight, and the loathsome image falls away. I am no better and no worse than the other members of the gathering. Indeed, I am myself. It is like a pleasant taste on the tongue.”
AMID THE PHILISTINE DOMAINS of Westchester or Wauwinet, Cheever sometimes repined over his “lack of literary companionship.” When a young Elizabeth Spencer remarked, in Rome, that she wasn't keen to meet other writers, Cheever seemed slightly affronted: “Some of the nicest people I've ever known are writers,” he replied. Even apart from the prestige, then, it must have been a pleasure for Cheever to be elected in May 1957 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, where he took his place as one of 250 of the most celebrated personages in literature, art, and music. He even composed a ditty for the occasion: “Root tee toot, ahhh root tee toot, oh we're the boys from the Institute. Oh we're not rough and we're not tough, we're cultivated and that's enough.” In years to come, this august body would prove a comfort to Cheever, providing him with a kind of nominal respectability as well as all the literary companionship he desired. “I love my colleagues,” he wrote a friend in 1975, “embrace them, kiss them, and sometimes weep with them over our cruel separation, but why is it that we only do this once a year?”
Whatever his irreverence, Cheever took his responsibilities within the Institute very seriously indeed. Soon after his election, he nominated Bellow (“the most original writer in America”) and proposed a grant for Maxwell, whose own successful nomination he seconded a few years later. (“When I open my handkerchief drawer,” Maxwell wrote Cheever, “there among the cufflinks is the rosette that you took out of your buttonhole and placed in mine, and the symbolism of this overcomes me, morning after morning.”) But his greatest and certainly most grueling contribution was as a member (and thrice chairman) of the Committee on Grants for Literature, which obliged him to read stacks of novels by “young associate professors with scandalous affectations”: “[W]hat is that old man doing at twelve o'clock noon?” he wrote Maxwell while in Wauwinet one summer. “He is pouring himself a glass of gin. What does he hold in his hand? He is holding a sensitive novel by a young man who wants to go to Rome. How can a drunken old man judge the merits of a sensitive novel? He cannot. What a cruel world is it where the destinies of the young lie in such shaken hands!” It must be noted, though, that in the actual presence of a sensitive