Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [166]
So he thought. The house cost $37,500, and officers at the Knickerbocker Mortgage Company and Bank couldn't help wondering how a self-employed man in his late forties, with little in the way of personal assets, proposed to pay for such a spread. With some slight trepidation, Cheever suggested they get in touch with Milton Green-stein, a lawyer at The New Yorker who handled payroll matters and might be expected to cosign a mortgage on the magazine's behalf. Greenstein—”a pathological cheapskate,” according to one editor—had always thought Cheever a bit on the profligate side, but this took the proverbial cake. “Freelance writers,” he told Maxwell, “should not own property.” At the time Cheever had been having second thoughts, but when Maxwell (“tactlessly”) repeated this remark, he made up his mind. Mary contributed a ten-thousand-dollar down payment out of her own savings, and Cheever persuaded Dudley Schoales to cosign a mortgage for the rest (“and all I have to do now,” he wrote Cowley, “is to write a short story a week for the next twenty years and turn out plays and novels in the evenings”). For a day or two he may have gloated over trumping The New Yorker, before reminding himself that (in addition to other misgivings) he was now positively doomed to remain amid the “crushing boredom” of Northern Westchester:
I feel imprisoned, angry and bitter and when I think of taking a walk with A or drinking with B I only feel more bored and disappointed. Everything I look at, the gateposts, the rooftops across the street, the majestic elm—they all seem like old ticket stubs to plays that bored me. Nothing is interesting. And I think angrily of the house, that I am trapped within the circle of the commuting area that spreads out around the city, as clearly defined as a stain, that M[ary] wants the pleasures and none of the risks of my life.
THEY WEREN'T MOVING until January, and in the meantime Cheever did a fair amount of traveling. Rust Hills had invited him to San Francisco to appear with Philip Roth and James Baldwin for an Esquire-sponsored symposium titled “Writing in America Today.” The program began October 20 at the Berkeley campus, where Cheever was scheduled to speak followed by a panel discussion; Roth would speak the next night at Stanford, and Baldwin the third night at San Francisco State. It was not a miscalculation to invite a Wasp, a Jew, and a Negro, two of whom were young and reputedly angry about things, while the third was supposed to be the suave embodiment of the Eastern literary establishment. As the New York Times reported, “It was the general hope that Cheever, Roth and Baldwin would disagree violently about practically everything and that San Franciscans would not have seen anything so lively since Kerouac and Ginsberg left town.” In fact, Cheever got along fine with Baldwin—they'd met at the Institute—and he admired Goodbye, Columbus so extravagantly that he'd been moved to write a little note to Roth's publishers: “This is not for publication because I don't believe in setting a good book afloat on a spate of quotations but I would like to thank you for the immense pleasure I took in the Roth stories. It was my wife who said that she is very grateful to Mr. Roth for having proved to her that somebody lives in Newark.”
And so the three were pretty much en rapport among themselves, if not always with their audiences. That first night, Cheever was (as ever in public) very nervous, excusing himself to take a calming swim in the Berkeley pool before mounting the dais, where he read “Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel”—a numerical list of items (with witty, illustrative vignettes) which Cheever wished to eliminate from his own work and, as far as possible, the work of others. “Out with … explicit