Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [205]
In any event, Cheever was at his ebullient best when Updike arrived in Russia with his attractive wife. “He greeted us with glee,” she remembered, “as if all three of us were about to embark on an enormous adventure in a place as outlandish as the moon.” Cheever, well adapted by then, acted as a kind of ideal host and tour guide, telling stories and jokes as the three of them were herded around schools and catacombs and the like; what might have been a “glum” ordeal, said Updike, became “as gay as an April in Paris.” Certainly “Big John” (Cheever) and “Little John” (Updike)—a distinction based on age rather than size—gave the impression of being “really chummy,” as Litvinov put it: “John was proud of [Updike] like an uncle.” And sometimes, when Cheever and the Updikes were alone together in their hotel rooms, they'd gossip and gripe about their Soviet minders (despite the bugs, into which they often made a point of speaking), or chat about their children and even their literary careers. Cheever cheerfully admitted that he was fed up with The New Yorker, and found it “a considerable relief “ to be less dependent on its vagaries. “Cheever's confession made me sad and, yes, exultant,” Updike later wrote: “one less competitor for that delicious glossy space …”
Even then Updike couldn't resist keeping his hand in, finding time “in one neo-czarist hotel room or another” to order his impressions into a few poems that Cheever described as “assinine” [sic] when they appeared in The New Yorker the following June. By then Cheever had decided that Updike was rivalrous, and had rearranged his Russian memories accordingly. “At the University of Leningrad”—he wrote a fellow writer—”[Updike] tried to upstage me by reciting some of his nonsense verse but I set fire to the contents of an ashtray and upset the water carafe.” Lest one think this is so much lighthearted hyperbole, much the same thing appears in Cheever's journal, where he brooded over the way Updike “hogged the lecture platform” and even stepped in front of him when pictures were taken. Cheever also liked to describe, in letters, how he and Updike competed to see how many of their books they could dump on the Russians: “[Updike] then began distributing paper-back copies of the Centaur while I distributed hardcover copies of The Brigadier. The score was eight to six, my favor. … On the train up to Leningrad he tried to throw my books out of the window but his lovely wife Mary intervened. She not only saved the books; she read one. She had to hide it under her bedpillow and claim to be sick. She said he would kill her if he knew.”
Cheever's ambivalence toward the gifted young man isn't all that puzzling. For one thing, he was intimidated by Updike's intellectual versatility, which he scorned or praised according to mood. “John reviews a French novel in his most graceful and erudite manner,” Cheever noted in 1971 (when Updike was in good odor for the moment). “This would be beyond me and I do not understand all the words and have forgotten, if I ever knew, what is the Descartian man. He writes with that authority and comprehension that makes it seem as if writing—literature—was the legitimate concern of a distinguished man.” Which was well and good, of course, but when Updike was holding forth in such a “graceful and erudite manner” for the benefit of Russian audiences, it was perhaps an uncomfortable reminder that Cheever himself (as he'd blithely admit in less invidious circumstances) had “no formal education,