Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [190]
* Edith Haggard at the Curtis Brown agency had negotiated Cheever's book deals and foreign sales until her retirement in March 1963, after which he severed relations with the agency. As for short stories—his main source of income at the time—Cheever's later agent, Lynn Nesbit, pointed out, “The New Yorker made it clear they didn't like agents fussing around. It was a gentlemen's club, and they dealt with each other in a gentlemanly way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
{1964}
AFEW WEEKS AFTER SUBMITTING the final draft of The Wapshot Scandal* Cheever had lunch at the country estate of his publisher, Cass Canfield, who lovingly recited one of his favorite passages from memory. Everyone seemed excited about the book except its author. Cowley had found it a “pure delight” and praised Cheever's “power of invention” with an almost paternal pride: “That riot of the housewives over the plastic easter eggs: it's a Breughel vision of hell. I've been disturbed by the slowness of readers in realizing that your work is completely outside the New Yorker pattern or any other; that it's something unique in contemporary fiction.” But Cheever was unpersuaded. Right up to publication, he continued to suffer “seizures” of melancholy: “I have a feeling that [the novel] is not only a failure—it is an odious crime—and the world is whispering about it at my back.”
Such fears were somewhat dispelled by Elizabeth Janeway's frontpage rave in the January 5, 1964, New York Times Book Review: The novel, she wrote, was “a riotous, slapstick, tragi-farcical show of the world today.” And perhaps Cheever was particularly gratified by her remarks on “mythic elements” such as the maenadlike housewives, Melissa Wapshot's “suffering for her Adonis,” and so on: “More than anyone except perhaps Nabokov (and he does not suffer from Nabokov's plunges into pure grotesquerie), [Cheever] is able to use the objects, the scenes and the attributes of contemporary life for the purposes of art.” Two days later, Charles Poore concurred in the daily Times, noting that the book “should be on everybody's list for the best novel of the year.” In his journal Cheever reflected that he found it “disconcerting” to be “embraced by an institution,” though he couldn't resist showing the Poore review to Maxwell over lunch that day. The latter's response, he wrote, “seemed close to unfriendly”: “I do not understand the nature of this friendship; I think I never have.”
Most of the other notices seemed to indicate that the world was indeed realizing (as Cowley would have it) that Cheever was a good deal more than just a proficient writer of New Yorker fiction. “I can think of no other writer today who tells us so much about the way we live now,” Joan Didion observed in the National Review, while Cheever's (secretly despised) colleague at the Institute, Glenway Wescott, applauded the novel on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Book Week as an improvement over its vaunted predecessor—”a true novel, not just a nouvelle expanded, not a set of stories strung along like matching or contrasting beads on arbitrary string, not a disguised memoir or autobiography.” Wescott also wrote Cheever a personal note, expressing his almost feverish gratitude: “[N]ow and then, as it were by chance, a particular book comes along, and it's a love affair.”* A few prominent reviewers, however, delivered the sort of pans that Cheever had anticipated with such terror. In The New Republic (“Sugary Days in St. Botolphs”), Hilary Corke wrote that Cheever's Wapshot novels were marred by “unredeemable carelessnesses and loosenesses of construction” as well as “arrant sentimentality.” And perhaps the most distinguished reviewer of all, Stanley Edgar Hyman, began his review in the New Leader with this rather prescient salvo: “When a highly-esteemed story writer tries a novel and fails at it, in this amazing country, he is rewarded just as though he had succeeded. … John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle won a National