Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [164]
Large questions, to be sure, and one could go on and on—such that the story (surprisingly short) strains a little at its all-too-visible seams. But then, too, it's funny and profound and unlike any story written at the time, which might explain why The New Yorker “summarily rejected” it: “B[ill] says the satire lacks support and I suppose he means that it is over-intense.” Cheever responded with his usual show of equability. As he wrote Maxwell, he thought he'd just go ahead and break the story into its constituent parts—that is, save the dream sequence and commercials for some other project (probably the novel), and sell the Justina plot to a lesser magazine like The Reporter. On further reflection, however, he decided against this. Instead he sold the story (intact) to Esquire, and later—with the rejection of “Justina” (and other stories) decidedly in mind—remarked of Maxwell: “If you don't grow and change he baits you; if you do grow and change he baits you cruelly.” At the time he expressed a similar sentiment in his journal, albeit in the words of an old adage from his father: “If you run they'll bite you. If you stand still they'll fuck you in the arse.” At any rate Cheever loved the story, and for the rest of his life he generally chose to read it at any public gathering. If the audience responded well, he knew they were the right sort and would favor them with a second story. And almost always, delightedly, he'd announce that The New Yorker had rejected “Justina”: “They thought of it as an art story,” he'd say with breezy contempt.
* As Susan Cheever related in Treetops, “When Winter died in 1959 at the age of seventy-four, the autopsy found that his body was riddled with ulcers. … [I]n the end, they perforated his stomach lining and killed him.” As for that birthday party for Phil Boyer, Cheever described it as a “big blowout” hosted by his fellow New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway When he first received the invitation, though, Cheever had noted his reservations: “I am tired of [Boyer's] lechery, tired of the rudeness and the frustrations of his friends, tired of alcoholics, tired of promiscuous women in their middle forties, tired of finding myself back in this train of thought.”
*”Effeminate” was Cheever's invariable epithet for the boy, and it appears to have been the mot juste: “At the time I had no idea of my sexuality,” said Rick, a very good-humored (and gay) man in his fifties when we spoke. “My family never made an issue of it. But later I asked an old junior-high friend if she thought I was effeminate, and she said, ‘Yes, I certainly did.’ “
* He was given thirty-six hundred dollars this time.
† One presumes that Moses is Moses Wapshot and the title character is Cousin Justina from The Wapshot Chronicle, but Cheever doesn't constrain himself with a lot of intertextual exactitude: the story's Moses reflects on the “neglected graves of [his] three brothers,” whereas the novel's Moses has only one brother, Coverly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
{1960-1961}
AFEW DAYS BEFORE the fifties ended, Cheever wrote in his journal that he'd been watching his beloved Benny Goodman on TV one night when he began to