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By Root 3994 0

Chukovsky said that Cheever looked just like his old friend H. G. Wells, with particular reference to a pen drawing he'd kept from the twenties. He also produced a number of other souvenirs—Oxford robes, an Indian headdress—and asked Cheever to add his name to the distinguished list of visitors in Chukovsky's guest book. “May I kiss you?” Cheever asked, saying goodbye, and Chukovsky said he supposed it was all right, since they'd never meet again.* Ten years later, Cheever told Raymond Carver that one of his fondest memories was falling asleep that evening with his head in Tanya's lap during the drive back to Moscow, and then waking just as the lights were coming on in the city (“note how this is the dream of a little boy sheltered by his mother,” said Carver). Cheever was supposed to go to the Bolshoi that night with Breitburd, but the man wanted to write his report on the Peredelkino meeting, so he gave his ticket to Litvinov. Left alone for once, the two decided to skip the Bolshoi and spend the night walking around Moscow. As they passed the zoo—closed at that hour—Litvinov indicated a place in the fence where the stakes had been loosened, and Cheever excitedly insisted they squeeze inside. Litvinov was tempted, but then imagined the headline in Pravda: “American ‘So-Called Writer’ Caught Spying on Soviet Animals!” She told him that he would be “non-grataed” and sent home, while she would end up in the Gulag.

Cheever's friendship with Litvinov would continue—with occasional interruptions both personal and political—the rest of his life. “We all enjoy your letters tremendously and they are the only letters I have ever saved,” he wrote her a few months after his return to the States.* Whenever his friends went to Russia, it pleased Cheever to put them in touch with her, so he could hear about their meeting afterward and vicariously partake of her company. The summer after Cheever's visit, for example, Art Spear and his wife went to Moscow “on some sort of International Amity Excursion,” after which Spear and Litvinov exchanged affectionate letters for years. Spear returned with some stories written by Litvinov's English mother, Ivy, which Cheever passed along to Maxwell with the result that (1) a number were published in The New Yorker, and (2) Maxwell and Tanya also became lifelong friends. “We had a heartwarming reunion with the Maxwell's,” she wrote Cheever in 1978, after she and her family had defected to England. “They took Vera [her daughter] and me to an Italian restaurant in South Kensington and we poured our monologues into the din.” By then she and Cheever had grown apart in more than a geographical sense, though they both felt there was some inviolable aspect of their friendship that transcended worldly differences: “I am sure that when I die and you (many years later) die we will meet at once and have a very stimulating eternity,” Cheever wrote.

CHEEVER HAD TO DISPOSE of his publisher's rubles while in Russia, and one day he told Litvinov he wanted to stop and buy a football. “What do you want a football for?” she asked. “Well,” he said, “I'll toss the ball with the other John.” The “other John” was Updike, who arrived with his wife Mary in the middle of Cheever's month-long visit. Cheever was nothing but eager for his American colleague's company, though his opinion of the man's work remained problematic; in the privacy of his journal, at least, he found it hard to pay him an unadulterated compliment. “Read Updike's new book with pleasure,” he wrote of the collection Pigeon Feathers (1962), adding: “with mixed feelings but always with pleasure; what we call pleasure.” He continued to disapprove of the way Updike “retard[ed] the movement” of his narrative with excessive detail, though at the same time he found the details oddly compelling: “[H]is prose has that pace, that intensity that, when we put down the book and step out of the house on to the road, we have a heightened acuteness of feeling.” Meanwhile the public Cheever was a veritable fount of praise and good works in the younger man's behalf: “I