Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [149]
Meanwhile his own reputation was decidedly ascendant. The Wapshot Chronicle won the 1958 National Book Award—scoring a major upset over James Gould Cozzens's acclaimed best seller, By Love Possessed, whose stock had plummeted after Dwight Macdonald's career-destroying abuse (“By Cozzens Possessed”) in Commentary* Cheever's own feelings toward Cozzens were typically mixed. In his journal he opined that By Love Possessed was “excellent”—the product of a “loveless” but “broad intelligence”—and years later, when told that Cozzens admired his work, Cheever claimed to have been so appalled at winning the National Book Award that he'd considered sending Cozzens the blue Canton dishes his grandfather “is supposed to have brought home from China.” At the time, however, he acknowledged at least one congratulatory note—Katharine White's—by writing how “pleasant” it was to win, “partly because I've always felt that Mr. Ross would not have liked By Love Possessed.” And whatever else Cozzens had going for him, he didn't have “at least three good friends among the [NBA] judges”—as did Cheever, who cheerfully admitted as much. Actually he had two friends, William Maxwell and Francis Steegmuller, as well as a staunch supporter in Elizabeth Ann McMurray Johnson; what he didn't know, and would never find out, was that Steegmuller had actually been the lone dissenter, preferring Malamud's The Assistant. Maxwell not only adamantly supported The Wapshot Chronicle, but afterward took Steegmuller aside and insisted they make it unanimous. “Bill was very protective of John,” said Shirley Hazzard, later Steegmuller's wife. “He knew better than almost anybody how much John needed the reassurance, whereas someone else may not have cared all that much.”
On the day of the award ceremony (“a gathering of nearly 1,000 writers, publishers and booksellers in the grand ballroom of the Commodore Hotel,” reported the Times), Cheever was very nervous. After Clifton Fadiman presented him with a plaque and a check for one thousand dollars, Cheever recited a very brief speech “in a swift mutter that verged on unconscious discourtesy,” as one observer recalled. He spoke about the loneliness of the writer and how much the writer depends on the “good opinion of strangers;” fortunately, said Cheever, there were still so many readers in America who, “beset with an unprecedented variety of diversions, continue to read with great taste and intelligence.”* The audience sat in rigid silence, straining to hear, but suddenly it was over and Cheever was replaced on the dais by Randall Jarrell—then the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—who proceeded to deliver a jeremiad that vividly contradicted Cheever's sunny view of the American reading public. As long as people preferred Peyton Place to the works of Proust, said Jarrell, they would be “enemies of [their] own culture;” he also said some hard things about South Pacific and the like. (As Cheever wrote a friend afterward, “Randall Jarrell, who had just washed his beard, made a long speech, the gist of which was that Bennett Cerf is a shit, that South Pacific is shitty and that people who look at the sixty-four thousand dollar question are virtual cocksuckers.”) An even graver ordeal had to be faced the next morning, when Cheever appeared with Robert Penn Warren (the poetry winner) on the Today show. Outside the studio window on Fifty-second Street “were about four hundred women milling around and holding up signs saying: HELLO MAMA. DORIS. SEND MONEY. GLADYS. HELP. IDA,” Cheever noted.
I was asked to wait in a green room where there was a chimpanzee drinking coffee, a man with a long beard and a lady in Arab costume practising a song. … [I]t took two strong men pushing and pulling to get me into the studio and everybody on the street shouted: