Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [210]
* Cheever told Litvinov that his wife had declined to accompany him because of anti-Semitism in Russia—though of course it may have been for any number of reasons. Whatever the case, he felt very bitter about it: “Wasn't it sleazy of her not to come?” he said. Litvinov had never encountered the word “sleazy” before.
† When I asked the former Mary Updike (now Weatherall) about her alleged remarks, she was mystified and absolutely denied saying anything of the sort, even in jest: “John [Updike] loved Cheever's writing,” she said. “We both read everything he wrote.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
{1964-1965}
CHEEVER AFFECTED TO BE INDIFFERENT to reviews, and liked to say that he made a point of leaving the country so he wouldn't have to bother with them: he'd been in Italy when The Wapshot Chronicle was published, and went again when the sequel came out seven years later. The truth was, of course, that Cheever scrutinized almost every word of every review from the Times to the Salt Lake Tribune, though he did keep up appearances by kiting off to Russia when his fifth collection, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, was published that October. “Where the hell are the reviews?” he complained in Leningrad, as he had rather high hopes for the book, which included some of his best work (“The Swimmer,” “The Ocean,” and the title story).
The reviews were mostly positive, as usual, though some of them sounded a vaguely troubled note about the direction of Cheever's work. An anonymous reviewer for Newsweek remarked that his sensibility was becoming “so weird that it veers perilously close to Charles Addams,” and the Washington Post worried about Cheever's increasing “pessimism,” while conceding “the gloomy brilliance of his prophecy.” Orville Prescott, in the daily Times, called Cheever “one of the most gifted, original and interesting of contemporary American writers of fiction,” and considered all sixteen stories worthwhile—however: “Four seem to me less successful than the rest and these are all rather sinister fantasies.” Prescott—a champion of virile realists à la Cozzens and Marquand (“our American Galsworthy”)—was referring, of course, to such stories as “The Swimmer” and “The Ocean.” One of the most presumptuous and damning assessments of Cheever's work as a whole was John Aldridge's long review in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. Cheever, he declared, “is one of the most grievously underdiscussed important writers we have at the present time”—a claim that might have made Cheever smile, though the smile was liable to die horribly as he read on. Aldridge thought that Cheever's Time cover and National Book Award had actually precluded serious critical attention, for these honors were regarded (in serious circles) as “a kind of good housekeeping seal of middlebrow literary approval”: “It was no accident that Time should have offered Cheever to the world as a kind of crew-cut Ivy-League Faulkner of the New York exurbs.” Cheever's vacuous characters took refuge in “small, arbitrary” rebellions, or in pathetic, misguided nostalgia, or in daydreams “not of Walter Mittyish grandiosity, but of almost girlish modesty and poignance.” The Walter Mitty reference was wont to remind Cheever of the time Irving Howe described him as a “toothless Thurber” in Partisan Review* and never mind the “girlish” crack. As for the weirdness of Cheever's sensibility, Aldridge—like that Newsweek reviewer—also invoked Charles Addams: “Somehow the nightmare tonalities of his work come to seem after a while a little too coy and cloying, the postures of psychic torment a little too much like the smartly macabre decor of some Fifth Avenue shop window in which creepy mannequins stand around draped in the latest creation by Charles Addams.” Evidently, though, Aldridge had not despaired of Cheever, as he closed by echoing Gertrude Stein's hectoring but hopeful advice to the young Hemingway: “Begin over again and concentrate. For he [Cheever] does not yet disturb us enough.”
Cheever dismissed Aldridge as little better than a vandal, while privately