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description of sexual commerce,” he proclaimed, “for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if—jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts—we were describing the changing of a flat tire?” He also wanted to dispose of “all lushes,” and perhaps gave Baldwin pause by declaring a moratorium on “all those homosexuals” too—a statement mitigated somewhat by the (personally fraught) rhetorical question that followed: “Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on?” Finally he asked the audience to consider the career of one Royden Blake, who'd begun by writing “bitter moral anecdotes … that proved that most of our deeds are sinful,” before entering a “decade of snobbism, in which he never wrote of characters who had less than sixty-five thousand dollars a year.” Toward the end, Blake found himself in a rut, writing about all the tedious things Cheever had just proscribed: “You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged … the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.” Such an ecstatic vision was the very thing Cheever longed to recover, for (he asked in closing) how otherwise could one “hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream?”*

Having described what he viewed as his own predicament, Cheever spoke of the “abrasive and faulty surface of the United States in the last twenty-five years,” which had led to the coarsening of American fiction: “[H]aving determined the nightmare symbols of our existence, the characters have become debased and life in the United States in i960 is Hell.” Under the circumstances, Cheever concluded, “the only possible position for a writer now is negation”—which jibed nicely with Roth's own manifesto (“the alienation of the writer in America from a grotesque contemporary society”) and drew an ovation from Berkeley students. According to the Times, however, older members of the audience were indignant, “climb[ing] and totter[ing] to their feet” to accuse Cheever of “deliberate obscurity” and “anti-Americanism.” Cheever responded with an air of patient, wistful politesse. Asked why he bothered to write at all if he thought everything was so terrible, Cheever replied, “I write to make sense of my life.”

But when his next collection was published a few months later, Cheever himself was repulsed by his bitterness: “Love never enters these pages and the prose seems precious. Here is a display of my worst characteristics and a devastating self-portrait of a man in a decline …” Having just returned from a book-signing in New York, Cheever was doubtless in low fettle when he wrote this; in any case it's too harsh. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel is hardly “devastating” evidence of decline, though perhaps it's a slight comedown from the two superlative previous collections. At least half the stories (including “Boy in Rome” and “The Wrysons”) are mediocre by Cheever's standards, but “The Death of Justina” and “The Scarlet Moving Van” are proof of how cogently he was responding to the times—”a sort of apocalyptic poetry,” as Cowley put it, “as if you were carrying well observed suburban life into some new dimension where everything is a little cockeyed and on the point of being exploded into a mushroom cloud.” Such a viewpoint was also noted by the reviewers—likewise as a good thing, for the most part. Charles Poore praised Cheever's “remarkable inventiveness” in the daily Times, and David Boroff in the Book Review singled out “Justina” as “masterly” and thought the collection as a whole reaffirmed Cheever's “prowess and defines anew the terrain features of the curious suburban Gehenna his characters inhabit.”

But story collections were not going to pay for a life of landed ease on the Hudson, and hence Cheever appealed to his Hollywood agent, Henry Lewis, to find him a screenwriting job. Less