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By Root 3832 0

appeared at Cedar Lane looking sober, relatively fit, and rather chastened. He was going to AA three times a week, he said, and attending the Unitarian church on Sunday. More than ever he was unabashedly worshipful of his celebrated little brother, as if their family connection was the last source of self-esteem he had left. (After their meeting, he related to his daughter Sarah, among other things, that Updike and her uncle John “can do the twist beautifully, and they drew admiring crowds. The Russians just aren't built to do it.”) When Fred remarked that he made ends meet with freelance work for the Famous Writers School, John replied that he'd been offered a chair at Harvard (“I'm not sure this is true,” he wrote in his journal, “and if it were it would have been a terrible mistake on the part of the University”). At length Fred came to the point: “He describes his bookshop, his dream; old fashioned lamps, hooked rugs a rolltop desk, really a gem, he says. Why do I find this so embarrassing. Do I come from a family of born shopkeepers, people who dream of shelves, inventories, firesales.” As if to reproach himself for unkind thoughts, John agreed to loan Fred five thousand dollars for the bookshop, and shortly thereafter they drew up papers at a lawyer's office, where Fred told jokes in a Jewish accent.

Within less than a year, his dream—the “eagle i” (lower case) bookstore in Westport—had come to an end, and he was “trying to establish a sales pattern” for a small FM radio station. As he explained to his children, he'd “put his whole heart and soul” into making a go of the “eagle i,” but had to close the place when Uncle John refused to loan him any money. “F[red] telephones,” John noted, roughly a month after the “eagle i” had expired. “Are you all right, he asks, are you sure you're all right? What he wants is six hundred dollars, bringing my loans for less than a year to eight thousand. When he was drunk he always used to ask: Are you all right, are you sure you're all right.”

* A 1980 edition of Cheever's Selected Stories (Moscow: Progress Publishers) includes ten canonical stories along with three specimens of juvenilia chosen for their congenial themes: “I'm Going to Asia,” about a frivolous bourgeois family who willfully ignore the tides of history which threaten to engulf them; “The Pleasures of Solitude,” about a selfish old woman who savagely beats an urchin with her umbrella; and “Frère Jacques,” about an engagé man who reads about the Spanish Loyalists while his vapid mistress sings to her laundry bundle.

† He was replaced in 1939 by Molotov, who went on to negotiate the “nonaggression” pact with the Nazis. Maxim Litvinov, known for his friendly overtures to the West, served as ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1943.

* When the ordeal was over, Cheever visited the suburban home of F. Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie Lanahan, where he was received by her then husband, Jack: “There seems to be cheese spread on his mouth and he has been drinking. He treats me, first, as if I were trying to sell encyclopedias but presently we settle down to drink.” Eventually Mrs. Lanahan arrived and began to complain about the recent publication of Hemingway's posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, wherein the size of her father's penis (among other things) had been impugned.

* After his visit to Russia, Cheever often sent copies of The New Yorker to Litvinov, who shared them with her friend Chukovsky. Said the latter, “I'm getting conditioned to the ads, and quite enjoy looking at the girls I'll never kiss, the cars I'll never drive, the sweaters I'll never wear, the shoes which will never pinch my toes, the places I'll never visit …” The list went on, and ended with “the cemetery I'll never recline in.” He died in 1969.

* This is true. Though Cheever corresponded with hundreds of people over the course of his life, the only surviving letters I found among his papers—kept in an old sewing box in his library—were a few letters from his children, various odds and ends, and perhaps fifty letters from