Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [177]
Salinger, it bears repeating, was a sore point: Franny and Zooey had been published that September and had dominated the best-seller lists ever since, at a time when Cheever was struggling to get on with another novel while supporting himself, as ever, with inventive—but relatively less acclaimed (and now maimed)—short fiction for The New Yorker. Reading the Life tribute, Cheever went into a “slow burn” and began drinking heavily, until finally he phoned Maxwell in a rage; writing to Weaver, he recounted his rant thus: “You cut that short story … and I'll never write another story for you or anybody else. You can get that Godamned sixth-rate Salinger to write your Godamned short stories but don't expect anything more from me. If you want to slam a door on somebody's genitals find yourself another victim. Etc.” According to Maxwell, it was the “only time” Cheever really showed anger toward him, and as he admitted, “I blundered. I thought there were two endings and one was better.” That said, he also claimed (albeit at a distance of some twenty-five years) that he'd only removed the “second ending” in a preliminary “working proof,” so that Cheever could “see how it would read in print”: “[The story] wasn't about to go to press,” said Maxwell. “It wasn't scheduled.” Not so. That fulsome Salinger article ran in the November 3, 1961, issue of Life; “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” appeared the following week (November 11) in The New Yorker. As Cheever asserted at the time, “[T]he magazine had gone to press and they had to remake the whole book and stay up all night but they ran [the story] without the cut.”
When it was over, Cheever wrote in his journal that he felt “troubled”: “The whole incident seems senseless and indigestible, perhaps because I cannot accept the degree of my dependence upon the tastes of others and in general my lack of success.” Success or no, he seemed genuinely remorseful for having insulted Salinger so rashly: “I admire Salinger, of course, and I think I know where his giftedness lies and how rare it is,” he wrote in a mollifying letter to Maxwell. “Another reason for my irritability is the fact that I am never content with my own work; that it never quite comes up to the world as I see it. This is not to say that I despair of succeeding; I think I may—but I am touchy.”
* In 1958, Maxwell had nominated Cheever for membership in the prestigious Century Club on Forty-third Street—a privilege that meant a lot to Cheever, though as ever he was at pains to downplay it: the main point of membership, he liked to say, was “to have a place to pump ship in midtown.”
* It should be noted that drastic, peremptory editing was not Maxwell's style, as Cheever himself pointed out: “[I]t has been my experience that Bill intends stories to be printed exactly as they are written,” he remarked in 1957, and surviving manuscripts bear this out. Vis-à-vis Cheever, at least, Maxwell usually restricted himself to the odd marginal comment. “Don't believe it,” he wrote beside a line in “The Bella Lingua,” where Cheever had written, “To be a trolley-car conductor in Krasbie was a position of some importance …” Cheever deleted the line. “What is a shapely day?” the literal-minded Maxwell queried a bit of description in “The Country Husband” about a day “as fragrant and shapely as an apple.” Cheever (happily) retained the line.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
{1962-1963}
ON THE FIRST DAY of the new year, 1962, Cheever noted that he hoped to finish his novel—now titled The Wapshot Scandal (though he wasn't yet sure what constituted the “scandal” in question)—by the spring. “I think of the enormous responsibilities and burdens that have, very recently, overtaken fiction,” he wrote four months later; “to hold the attention of an audience