Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [200]
No wonder he forgave her for being middle-aged (at least), though it wasn't a matter he could forget entirely. Again and again he tabulated her defects—her face had evidently been lifted at least once (“the firmness of her chin contrasted with the slackness of her neck”); she dyed her hair in the “silvergilt” pattern of aging blondes; her legs and breasts “show the mileage they've traveled”—and yet: “[S]he is so easily approachable that I am delighted to be with a woman who does not flinch at my touch.” She also had a fine swimming pool* and skating pond, and never seemed to mind if Cheever was drunk or naked or (usually) both. All she asked was that he sign a legal waiver absolving her of any liability in the event of accidents.
* In 1959, Mike Bessie had left Harper to co-found a new publishing house, Atheneum, and was startled by Cheever's refusal to follow him. The Wapshot Scandal was edited at Harper by one of Cheever's oldest friends, Frances Lindley.
* The following year, when The Wapshot Scandal was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters, Wescott was one of Cheever's main detractors: “[H]e forced some perfect stories into a somewhat loose, somewhat arbitrary novel,” Wescott demurred—in direct contradiction to his Book Week review—noting his own preference for Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools.
* Such digressions serve the same purpose as, say, the dumb show in Hamlet—indeed, a Hamlet motif is yet another ingredient in this generous, sprawling novel, an incidental spice Cheever uses whenever he happens to think of it. Like Hamlet's father, Leander's ghost haunts the early pages as an emblem of protest against the decadent modern age (“Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?”), and then vanishes altogether—qua ghost anyway—after only forty pages or so. Talifer is a kind of Elsinore, with Cameron its murderous king; Gertrude Lockhart evokes Hamlet's tragic, debauched mother; and Melissa is explicitly likened to the mad Ophelia.
* When first conceiving the novel, Cheever had meant for Moses to play a larger role—the “Dionysian” part largely taken over by Melissa. It's possible that Fred Cheever's grinding decline in these years left his brother disinclined to dwell on his fictional surrogate. In Cheever's working notes, anyway, references to Moses dwindle away until we come to this: “MOSES: nothing much. He's a goner.”
† The Wapshot Scandal eventually sold almost fifty thousand copies in hardback.
* Kopkind went on to gain a certain degree of fame as one of the sixties’ leading radical journalists, a frequent contributor to such magazines as Ramparts (one of whose founding editors was Susan Cheever's third husband, Warren Hinckle).
* Though Cheever would see more of the Pakulas (especially Mrs. Pakula), the Wapshot movie was never made. According to David Lange, Tad Mosel wrote a screenplay that was deemed “professional but not quite filmable.” A pity, as the cast would have been illustrious if Pakula and Mulligan had gotten their way: Spencer Tracy (Leander), Katharine Hepburn (Honora), and Robert Redford (Moses).
* Fifteen years later, when Hope Lange began to show her age, she too became “Mrs. Zagreb” in the journal.
* A pool “fed by an artesian well,” which Cheever gave to the Westerhazys in “The Swimmer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
{1964}
AMID THE (SOMETIMES) LONELY doldrums of that summer, Cheever consoled himself with thoughts of his “somber and mysterious trip to Russia in October,” as part of the State Department's new cultural-exchange program. Previous emissaries had been obvious candidates such as Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell, what with their proletarian themes, while Edward Albee had gone in 1963 on the strength (mostly) of his Death of Bessie Smith, since American racism was another favorite topic among Soviet readers.
The first Cheever story to be translated into Russian was “The Superintendent” (1952), about a humane, competent building super named Chester, who mediates squabbling among his crass, bourgeois tenants (“ ‘You