Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [162]
FRED CHEEVER WAS TRYING to stay sober, but he was having a hard time finding work, and he still had children to support. One day in early October 1959—Dr. Winternitz had just died—John got a call from his brother asking if they could “discuss some business,” and the two met for lunch. “Fred talks on about his trip across the country in August and finally I ask him, as gently as possible, what is on his mind,” John wrote. “‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘nothing,’ but as I press him a little I find that he plans to open a men's-clothing store in either San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Palo Alto, California. … I ask him if he would like some money. No, this will not be necessary; but we drive back to the house and I write him a check for five hundred dollars. He puts this in his pocket and leaves.” Within a few weeks, Fred got a salesman job for the Hearst Sunday supplement, American Weekly, but he seemed in poor health (“fat and very lame”) and of course he could always start drinking again. John had borrowed from The New Yorker to make up the “loan” to Fred, which he realized was likely the first of many: “[A]t the moment I have nine dependents,” he wrote Weaver. “This is one hell of a burden for my childlike sense of wonder.”
It was a bad time to be strapped for cash. In the past few months, Cheever had flogged himself into writing as many stories as possible (“wanting to prove to myself that I can”), but the work wasn't very gratifying anymore, except materially. He often felt as if he'd done about as much as he could in the short form, at a time when most writers of the first rank were focusing almost exclusively on novels. Also, he was more embarrassed than ever to be associated so closely with The New Yorker—appearing constantly amid the “bland poetry” and “bad cartoons,” he wrote, had begun to seem a kind of “confinement”: “I must realize that the people who read my fiction have stopped reading The New Yorker; I must realize that the breach here is real and happy.” And yet, three and a half years after finishing The Wapshot Chronicle, he had only the vaguest idea what his next novel would be about. A story he'd published earlier in the year—”The Events of That Easter,” about an egg-hunt contest gone awry—seemed part of something bigger, but he was far from certain what; all he knew, more or less, was that he wanted to write a Wapshot sequel treating “Coverly as Apollo and Moses as Dionysus,” since the theme of fraternal competitiveness was on his mind at the moment.
He refused, however, to say even that much when he asked Harper for an advance at the end of the year, or, for that matter, when he applied for another Guggenheim: he simply stated, as was true, that he wanted to work on a novel without (“for once”) having to support himself with story writing at the same time. Harper gave him $6,850—a paltry sum for a writer of his stature (though Cheever might have wanted it that way)—and meanwhile he worried that he'd queered his chances for a second Guggenheim by “smashing] into” the foundation's president, Henry Allen Moe, at the Century Club (“what with the gin and one thing or another”). When he was, in fact, awarded a fellowship, Cheever asked for the same amount he'd gotten ten years before—three thousand dollars—since he only needed roughly ten thousand (he said) to “feed, shelter and educate” his family, and he hoped the Harper advance would account for the rest.*
“My one New Year resolution,” he wrote Herbst at the beginning of 1960, “is that I Will Not Write Anymore Short Stories, so help me God.” It was a resolution he'd soon break, but first he tried his hand at writing a play, which, if he could bring it off, might sell for big money. A few surviving notes indicate The Rules of the Game was to be a three-act teleplay satirizing the nuclear age in some mysterious