Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [153]
A year that began in triumph ended in a Westchester hospital room, where Cheever spent New Year's Eve “in the company of a dozen faded roses” (sent by Maxwell) “and a copy of La Garabaldina [sic].” For years now he'd referred to himself as “an old man, nearing the end of his journey,” and when a “rotten headcold” persisted for a few weeks, the forty-six-year-old Cheever began to feel sorry for himself in earnest: “Mary's love of me does not seem to include my infirmities,” he wrote Weaver. “She seems lost in some race memory where primitive men, once they began to sniffle, stripped themselves naked, lay down in the snow and let themselves be eaten by crows.” It was almost a relief, then, when the doctor assured him he had “something as manly and straightforward as virus pneumonia,” though it was perhaps too much of a good thing when X-rays showed a large spot on his lung that seemed to indicate a resurgent case of tuberculosis. Cheever noted in his journal that he'd made “all the arrangements for his death,” but soon the spot cleared and he was left convalescing with Maxwell's roses.
Alone with his thoughts, Cheever brooded over his recent refusal to write a blurb in behalf of Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair. “He seems to me an unusually gifted young man,” he wrote the Knopf publicist, “but perhaps not as a novelist. His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” Cheever had kept an eye on Updike ever since the latter's stories had begun appearing in The New Yorker in 1954; he told his Barnard students that Updike was one of the most promising writers of his generation, though almost in the same breath he remarked that Updike seemed a bit too talented—”too pretty”—for his own good. But in the hospital his better nature kept reproaching him, and he couldn't resist writing a second note to the publicist: although, alas, his opinion of the novel hadn't changed, for the sake of his own “peace of mind” he wanted to reiterate that he considered Updike “unusually brilliant.” And to Maxwell (their common editor at the The New Yorker) he also wrote of his troubled conscience, repeating that he'd been “disappointed” by The Poorhouse Fair but had liked Updike's most recent story in the magazine—except, that is, for “the shaven armpits of the poor girls playing pingpong. One should never remark idly on the armpits of ladies.” Such a punctilio went to the heart of a certain dialectic between the writers. For Updike's part, his first published story in the magazine, “Friends from Philadelphia,” had been conceived as a riposte to “O Youth and Beauty!”: “I thought to myself, ‘There must be more to American life than this,’ “ Updike remembered, “and wrote an upbeat little story, with an epiphanic benefaction at the end, to prove it.” When the story was “accepted into that exalted fold,” Updike felt a sense of debt to Cheever for having provided “the crystallizing spark;” Cheever, meanwhile, continued to brood over the uses to which Updike put his gifts, to say nothing of how those gifts compared with his own.
“It was nice while you were away to have a dry toilet seat,” his wife greeted him when he returned from the hospital, or so he reminded himself whenever he was feeling especially ill-used. Mostly he wondered how he might deploy such a perfect insult in his fiction.