Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [196]
CHEEVER USED TO SAY that he had “two conspicuous lacks”: a singing voice and a self-image. By the latter he meant (on one level) a public image, the lack of which was due, he said, to “a genuine horror of notoriety” engendered by his Yankee upbringing; also, sober, he was a desperately shy man who felt oppressed by strangers. He tended to drink before any public appearance and then would “smile, smile, smile” until his face ached—what else to do?—and afterward he felt so ashamed of himself that he drank more. “I feel like a remorseful masturbator,” he wrote after a recent reading, “holding his aching, softening cock in one hand while sperm runs down the wall paper like the white of an egg.” But then he always professed not to care about fame: literature, he was fond of saying, was like a vast impersonal “stream.” He himself had been influenced by everything since the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and though his own work might be forgotten (“it wouldn't disconcert me in the least”), it would forever be part of that “stream” running into the future. Asked about his father's “stream” concept, Federico laughed: “To say he stood on the shoulders of giants is to say he's Isaac Newton. It's a wonderful kind of double play. You say ‘Ah, I'm nothing in the great stream of things,’ but in saying that you put yourself in the great stream of things.”
His appearance on the cover of Time increased his visibility in the stream, and also gave him the beginnings of an image—that of a “serious and likable person,” no less, not to mention one of the great writers of his generation. He began to be noticed on the street, and didn't really mind it at all (“Me tickled”): now perhaps he'd be fussed over in restaurants and whatnot; his barber might tack his picture to the wall. Meanwhile his mailbox was stuffed almost daily with Time covers to autograph, and Cheever was only too happy to oblige. This serious and likable, witty and gifted author began to worry about things like publicity photos, and was dismayed when others failed to share these concerns. Shown an advertisement featuring her husband's likeness, Mary remarked: “What are they going to do with it, pin it up in the post office?” “Should there be some way of seeing this humorously,” Cheever fumed in his journal, “I would be most grateful. Gin seems to be the only way out.”
What Cheever anxiously sought in these photos, perhaps, was some further confirmation of the image so perfectly captured by Time, which had initiated (as Federico put it) “the media shakedown cruise for the new landowning Cheever.” “[Cheever] wears Brooks Brothers shirts with their conspicuously missing pockets and would never consider having a mongrel dog,” Alwyn Lee noted, alongside pictures of the tweedy author and his faithful retrievers, strolling around his West-chester estate. And lest he seem an arriviste—a cartoon gentleman like John O'Hara, with his spats and hard-finish suits—Cheever wore clothes as though he'd been born in them: one collar-point of a button-down shirt was carefully unbuttoned, his crewneck sweater was gone in the elbows, and his “wash pants” were rumpled and stained. Real aristocrats (to say nothing of real men) didn't worry about whether their creases were ironed, as long as the label said Brooks and certain other touches were right. “I am a Wasp, my God, look,” he remarked (with his usual protective irony) to a journalist: “Palms over a Seth Thomas clock on Maundy Thursday!” His next remark, perhaps, would be some drawling reference to