Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [183]
Finally, on his fifty-first birthday, Cheever took a matinal slug of whiskey and gave Maxwell a call: “He seems plainly unenthusiastic about the book if not gravely troubled by its failure. This is the devastation of my most intimate aspirations and dreams.” Doubtless Maxwell sensed as much, and so the kindly man called back a couple days later to say he'd reread the book at once and found it quite wonderful after all (words to that effect). Cheever thanked him effusively, though on reflection he decided to keep the novel's dedication (“For W.M.”) in the vitiated form to which he'd emended it: “The initials are intended to represent the lack between what I mean to write for you and what I produced. If it seems better in galleys I'll add the illiam and the axwell.” But apparently it seemed no better, and so the dedication remained; nor was Cheever ever really persuaded that Maxwell liked the book, and he was right to be skeptical. Ten years after Cheever's death, Maxwell admitted that he'd much preferred the Chronicle “because it is the most realistic”: “[I]n The Wapshot Scandal he began to play ducks and drakes with plausibility and the psychological consistency of his characters … in order to be freer, more fanciful, more didactic, more violent.” Cheever would continue to be less plausible and so forth—as Maxwell would have it—and the rift would continue to widen.
Facing imminent ruin, or so he thought, Cheever became all the more caustic on the subject of his wife's duties at Briarcliff Junior College, where she'd begun teaching part-time the year before. Once again Cheever invoked Newhouse's wife, Dorothy (the renowned violin teacher), as an example of a working wife who was paid decently, at least, at Juilliard, whereas Mary taught a bunch of debutantes how to spell cat “at an eighth-rate college.” (“Now, John,” she'd reply, “it's a fifth-rate college and you know it.”) The pittance she made, said Cheever, was just enough to force them into a higher tax bracket. (In fact, the pittance—about three thousand dollars a year “at most”—went to Iole for looking after Federico on the two or three mornings a week that Mary taught, while her Watson inheritance continued to pay about ten thousand dollars of their annual expenses.) But of course these were nominal quibbles, beyond which lay an old trauma. “I think again and again and again of the mixed rewards of sexual equality,” Cheever seethed in his journal. “I have been looking at them, it seems, for three generations. Grandmother's love of her children was sparse and capricious she was so busy redeeming whores. Mother's love was chancy, she was so deep in women's club politics. And now M[ary] going off to teach freshman English burns the breakfast.” For this she'd relegated her celebrated husband to housewifery while she corrected themes “for her pleasure.” After a bitter stint of babysitting, Cheever felt tainted and even depraved: “I read Hannah Arendt on the repulsive moral chaos in Fascist Germany and turn these facts back on myself. I am the immoralist, and my failure has been the toleration of an intolerable marriage. My fondness for pleasant interiors and the voices of children has destroyed me.” The banality of evil indeed.
It was true Mary could be strident about “women's liberation” (a rather novel topic in 1963, even among the liberal middle class), until