Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [180]
Fred's remarks about his children's love—innocuous enough on the surface—seemed to infuriate his brother: he brooded over them for years. In a nutshell, they seemed to express all of Fred's maddening perversity, and perhaps in a general way suggested just how lost in self-deception a man—his “only, only brother,” no less—could become. Where would it end? “F[red] calls and he will call again,” John noted later in 1962. “I suppose he needs money. If he's at the club says F[red] to M[ary] then I'll go there; and here is the nightmare I have already worked out in detail. I am sitting in the reading room, looking at La Nouvelle Revue Francaise when I hear his loud voice in the downstairs hallway. It is the voice of a totally broken spirit shored up by a pint of lemon-flavored gin.” And there was another, even more disturbing nightmare that seemed parlously close to realization: “I was planning to take him trout fishing up at Cranberry Lake,” John said, a year after his brother's death, “which is just miles away from everything in the wilderness, and I realized if I got him up there he would fall overboard. I would beat him with an oar until he stayed.” It was the kind of obsession that drove one to drink.
AT A COCKTAIL PARTY he gave in the sixties, the publisher Sol Stein remembered how Cheever had glared at another celebrated guest, Leslie Fiedler, whose sweeping critical studies of American writers had omitted any mention of Cheever. Indeed, the only notice he'd received from anything resembling academia was in Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence (1961), which had described The Wapshot Chronicle as a “collection of quaint episodes” that were “far from unified.” But that summer a promising overture came from Frederick Bracher, a respected scholar at Pomona College: “My credentials for this overdue bit of criticism are a relative freedom … from academic bias, a dislike of the current critical jargon … and a real, and I hope true, feeling for your work.” He proposed to write the first serious study of Cheever, focusing mostly on The Wapshot Chronicle, and wondered if he could put a few questions to the author. Cheever responded with great wooing enthusiasm, discussing at length his rationale for omitting certain historical and topographical details from the novel in order to create a more universal world and so forth. Bracher duly incorporated these points in his paper (“The Wapshot Chronicle is loosely situated in time and space …”), which so delighted its subject that he literally couldn't put it down (“He's reading Professor Bracher's paper again,” said Susan): “That you should have undertaken to diagnose so unarchitectural a work as mine seems to me one of those admirable pieces of generosity that keeps the world from flying apart,” Cheever wrote with abject gratitude.
Academic critics, however, didn't share Bracher's esteem for the well-known New Yorker writer. The Hudson Review returned the paper with a printed rejection slip (“the first I've ever received,” Bracher noted), as did a lesser journal out of Purdue, until finally a reworked and shortened version—”John Cheever and Comedy”—was published in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. A few months later Bracher came to New York, and Cheever took him to lunch at the Century: “He is generous, intelligent and colorless and I feel somehow that I fail him,” Cheever wrote afterward, sensing he'd drunk too much and been in bad form generally. To Bracher, of course, he wrote with ornate graciousness: “[Considering the complexity of all human relationships, the powers of gin, the stuffiness of the clubrooms and the bitter weather outside, I hope that somewhere along the line I made my pleasure in meeting you apparent.”
Cheever would go on corresponding with Bracher for years, and when he was at Yaddo that September (1962), it was Bracher to whom he confided that he couldn't “ever recall having been so discouraged and melancholy.” He'd gone there hoping to