Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [189]
Forty years later, Ben Cheever read Yagoda's book and was taken aback: How could this be? After his father's death, he and Maxwell had become close friends—indeed, Maxwell was a surrogate father of sorts—and so he approached the man: Did he know? Maxwell replied that he'd had no idea; it was shocking to him too. Yagoda, however (who pored over the whole massive archive of New Yorker editorial correspondence at the New York Public Library), doesn't think this likely: “Whoever was editor of a particular writer knew what that particular writer was paid,” said Yagoda. “That particular editor would know the rates of all the writers he worked with.” Maxwell's writers included Updike and Shirley Hazzard, among others with presumably higher rates than Cheever's. But then, Cheever was (as his daughter would say) a “patsy” when it came to money: Yankee reticence or no, it was a subject that made him extremely uncomfortable (“Perelman screams and I guess it keeps his prices up, but I can't”). Which is not to say, necessarily, that he didn't know when he was getting screwed. Toward the end of 1975, as Maxwell was about to retire from the magazine, Harold Brodkey (one of Maxwell's discoveries) told Cheever that Maxwell had been “financially, intellectually and emotionally dishonest” with Cheever, who reflected, “Some of this I know to be true.”
* Perhaps the only instance in Cheever's enormous journal where he uses the word homosexual (or some explicit equivalent) in the context of his brother, though it obviously colors our interpretation of certain other passages.
* There was, in fact, more than a grain. Though Fred's children were naturally anxious to distance themselves from an unbearable situation, they continued to care deeply for their father. “I separated the alcoholism from the man,” said his son David, and even the more estranged Sarah wrote to her father at the time, “I love you. … I have a great deal of respect for you. … It hurts both you and me to have me tell you to stop drinking. Or to have me tell you to go to AA. Or for me to see you in such bad shape.”
* While at Yaddo, Cheever had witnessed Marc Blitzstein's will “by chance,” and so was summoned to the probate in 1964 when Blitzstein died—beaten to death by Portuguese sailors in Martinique. Sharing a cab to the courthouse with Aaron Copland (“I cannot find a trace of the fact that he is queer but my examination is unremittent”), Cheever found the whole business “shocking” and “unimaginable” and longed more than ever “to love what is seemly and what the world counsels one to love … a lighter destiny than to court a sailor in Port-au-Prince [actually Fort-de-France in Blitzstein's case] who will pick your pockets, wring your neck, and leave you dead in a gutter.”
* Cheever's Russian translator, Tanya Litvinov (who loved Cheever and vice versa), was also revolted by the story. While translating The Brigadier and the Golf Widow in 1965, she wrote that she was “side-stepping the Educated woman for the while … I'm woman enough to resent its unfairness.” As for Mary, she was quoted in Time a few months after the story appeared: “I did go to one or two meetings of the League of Women Voters,” she coolly remarked, “but I do think he should not have killed the little boy.”
* One of the story's pleasant ambiguities