Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [172]
*Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel was the title of Cheever's next collection, and this particular piece was reprinted as “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” in which a number of items from the magazine version were deleted. One such item had borrowed verbatim from the eccentric preamble to “The Death of Justina”—which ran the same month in Esquire (November i960) as “Some People” in The New Yorker!—and another was a transparent attack on Salinger, though Cheever would later claim, “The only writer I meant to attack was myself [i.e., in the person of Royden Blake].” The Salinger-slurring item called for the elimination of “all autobiographical characters who describe themselves as being under the age of reason, coherence, and consent” and included a little parody of Catcher in the Rye: “I mean I'm this crazy, shook-up, sexy kid of thirteen with these phony parents, I mean my parents are so phony it makes me puke …”
* Eventually—with the spectacular success of Rich Man, Poor Man in 1969—the transformation would be complete. As Cheever succinctly described this massive potboiler: “It is the history of an emigrant family, much fucking.”
† After his arrest, Arvin was ordered to have a psychiatric examination that resulted in a “classic homosexual profile,” as Barry Werth wrote in his excellent account of the Arvin affair, The Scarlet Professor. Whatever one may think about the state of psychoanalytical theory circa i960, it's interesting to consider Arvin's profile in light of Cheever's own history: “[Arvin] was fixed at a prepubertal stage of development and consequently sought solace in an inner world. … He was insecure as a result of early parental conflicts. He had a strong affinity for his mother but resented her dominance. At the same time, he had an indifferent and inexpressive father to whom he yearned to be close. … This compensatory longing for affection from other men, he was told, was the chief source of his depression.”
* This seems as good a place as any to make the indelicate point that Cheever almost certainly meant oral intercourse. One has it on good (and diverse) authority that he was just as entitled to the claim Farragut makes in Falconer: “When I die you can put on my headstone: ‘Here lies Ezekiel Farragut, who never took it up the ass.’ “ Or, as he wrote in his journal in 1967 (and elsewhere in so many words), “I have no conscious desire to have anyone put their cock up my backside.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
{1961}
IN JANUARY, Cheever moved to Ossining—about five miles from Beechwood and thirty miles from Manhattan, on the eastern shore of the Hudson. “We know that it commands the greatest views except for the Bay of Naples,” Cheever was fond of saying (tacitly paraphrasing Tocqueville) once he'd become the town's most celebrated resident. At first, though, he was nothing if not conflicted. For one thing, he was still suffering “overwhelming anxiety” about the Kent-field affair and his sexuality in general (“I wonder … if by repressing these instincts I don't crush myself”), and this led to the question of whether such “a shabby and ridiculous figure” was worthy of so grand a demesne. He found himself standing frozen in one room or another—bemusedly examining the pilasters in the library, the cheerful yellow walls of the dining room, his grandfather's Canton handsomely on display—and wondering what on earth he was doing there. It was a long way to come for the seedy but self-sufficient youth knocking about in an old roadster during the Depression, living in rooming houses and fourth-rate hotels. “I feel very much like a bum,” he wrote Peter Blume a few days after moving in, “and think that what I would like most to do is grow a long beard and recite dirty poetry in my underwear at the YMHA. This revery alternates with