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By Root 3808 0

than a frank admission of failure, and though Cheever regarded the story as “close to parody,” the fact remained that he'd worked on it for six weeks and wanted money for his trouble—hence, a little reluctantly, he sent the thing to Maxwell, who seemed almost startled by its badness: “[It] doesn't work, everybody feels. … I guess what it is is that you really don't care what [the boy] does with his passport or himself. One doesn't, the reader doesn't, meaning, surely, you didn't. And all the other ingredients—the palace, the expatriate mother and so on, are from other stories of yours.” Cheever apologized (“I have not written so feebly in eight years”), though in fact he was offended by Maxwell's tone—and, feeble parody or not, he allowed “Boy in Rome” to circulate among seven magazines (at least) before finally dumping it on Esquire for a thousand dollars.

One problem was that Cheever's life had simply become more distracting. The little house was crowded now with a crying baby and a flamboyant maid, while the telephone rang more frequently, too, what with Cheever's growing celebrity. As a young man starting out in the Depression, he'd gotten used to writing wherever he could find a flat surface, and was never pompous about the trappings of his profession: he worked in odd spare rooms and seemed almost to welcome distractions such as runaway mice or the arrival of a drinking companion. Amid one of the worst slumps in his career, though, Cheever decided he could use a little more privacy after all, and rented a room over a real-estate office near the train station. This entailed a short walk each day in his working uniform of “wash pants” and seedy crewneck sweaters (one or the other usually torn), and presently he was stopped by police on suspicion of vagrancy. Cheever was furious, and refused to give his name or address. “I do not like to have this slight irregularity in my habits misinterpreted,” he fumed in his journal.

Under the circumstances, Cheever was drinking more heavily than ever, and this made him peevish about things. To the Blumes he confided that the gist of his recent journal entries was as follows: “Drank too much; talked too much or just: Drank too much or sometimes Drank too much; very choleric. I don't do anything about this because as I tell Mary it's the way I feel about life.” More often than not, he awoke in a condition of physical and emotional distress: his hands shook, his kidneys ached, and he felt a depressive anxiety about everything and nothing—his family was in danger, financial ruin was imminent, and what was that smell of smoke (was the house on fire)? Such a “liverish grasp of disaster” could only be relieved by one thing—another drink—and Cheever found himself longing for the “noontime snort” in the middle of the morning. The prospect of mixing with friends was another source of thirst, which in turn had a corrosive effect on his genial public persona. “Phil [Boyer] leaves without saying either thank you or good night,” he wrote in his journal. “He has often done this before, but tonight I have no patience and when he calls to apologize I tell him he is an ill-mannered bore.” Cheever also ticked the man off for drinking up his liquor, tracking “dog-shit all over [his] rugs,” and making “dirty passes at [his] wife.” The next morning, however, he awoke feeling “confused and sad” and eager to make amends.

Such “choleric” outbursts were a minor loss of control, as Cheever saw it, next to the ghastly possibility of succumbing to “certain forms of concupiscence.” Thus, in the early phases of drunkenness at least (and depending on the company), Cheever had come to seem even more fretful, shy, and constrained than the mannerly person he was when sober. “He became physically self-conscious, as though he were feeling a sensuality he was at pains to conceal,” said Michael Bessie, who'd suspected from the beginning that Cheever was bisexual. Given his restless, questing libido, combined with worsening alcoholism, Cheever had begun to worry it was only a matter of time before he disgraced himself