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By Root 3894 0

we all cheered, sang, and got drunk,” he wrote. “It was like getting out of prison. I sat in the Amsterdam airport with a gin and tonic and thought with longing of vast, slothful Mother Russia but had I been asked to return I would have fought with my life.” Lonely and exhausted from the whole fraught adventure, Cheever still had one more stop to make in West Berlin, where he was supposed to give a reading at the Amerika Haus. Perhaps his greatest fan in the city was a forty-year-old writer named Paul Moor, who as a young man in Texas had been a devotee of The New Yorker and particularly John Cheever. Reading of the latter's arrival in the newspaper, Moor learned from the Amerika Haus that Cheever was staying at the Hilton, and promptly gave him a call. He (Moor) was a friend of the Styrons, he said, offering to put himself at Cheever's disposal for the duration of his stay. Cheever was delighted—all the more so when he discovered that Moor could quote long passages from his work, and seemed insatiably curious as to how that glorious work had come into being. “May I kiss you?” Cheever asked, with lingering Slavic brio, after a particularly enjoyable evening. Moor accepted the buss as innocent, since Cheever had lengthily discussed his passionate attachment to Hope Lange.

That last night in Berlin, Cheever invited Moor up to his room for a nightcap. “I've had some very pleasant homosexual experiences,” he suavely declared, filling Moor's glass. Moor was “thunderstruck”: it was true that he himself was gay, and he'd assumed that Cheever had figured as much, but … what about Hope Lange? (“As for Paul [Moor],” Cheever wrote Litvinov, “I think he was or may be a homosexual. … This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too deep.”) At any rate, Moor responded to this unexpected sally with a guarded nod—”I adored him as a writer, but not physically”—and the evening passed without further incident.

Moor kept in touch with a stream of letters, to which Cheever courteously replied, until Moor came to New York in June 1965 and the two met for lunch at the Algonquin. Saying goodbye on Forty-fourth Street (“He was on his way to The New Yorker office to do something catty about John Updike,” Moor recalled), Cheever suddenly gave the man a tight and definitively final embrace, after which the letters from Ossining dwindled to nothing. “I would like to live in a world in which there are no homosexuals,” he wrote of Moor, “but I suppose Paradise is thronged with them.”

• • •

FOR MONTHS after his return from Russia, Cheever spoke of little else. He'd refined the whole experience into a nice comic routine, commencing with his arrival on that rainy night in Moscow (cheep cheep cheep) and proceeding amid the Georgian sheep, the songs, the drinking, the mistaken statue of Pavlov, and culminating in a “fifteen minute impersonation of Yevtushenko.” He distributed fur hats among his friends, whose company he found more intolerable than ever. “There is no self-consciousness at all about the banality of the conversations,” he wrote of a Westchester dinner party. “One goes on calmly for hours about the difficulty of getting a plumber; the difficulties of getting a boy into college; the expense of fertilizing the lawn.” Cheever determined not to go to any more such parties if he could help it, because they did “severe damage to [his] spirits and [his] health.” Staying home, then, and drinking in his yellow wing chair, he ruminated over all the emotional things he'd say about the Russians at the State Department debriefing: “They gave me no trouble. They gave me friendship and at least the illusion of love.” What's more, he thought his rapport with all these affectionate people had changed quite a few minds about the United States, and surely all that was to the good. Indeed, this appears to be what he did say, more or less, and perhaps that's why the FBI made Cheever the subject of “internal security interest.” In 1967, the agency intercepted a note from Cheever to Ryurikov of Foreign Literature: