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By Root 3980 0

agreeing with him somewhat. “I seem neither sane enough nor mad enough,” he wrote in his journal shortly after the review appeared. He'd been looking over some old work and had found even the best of his stories “circumspect” and “small.” The resolution of one, for example, “The Cure”—about a man who begins to go mad when his wife leaves him, until she returns and he feels fine again—was “superficial,” a characteristic problem, though Cheever felt reluctant to go “any deeper into that storm.”* For his new novel, however, he wanted to be disturbing in earnest—a task, he wrote Litvinov, that he approached “warily”: “[I]t is like letting oneself into a labyrinth.” A year before, he'd written what was perhaps the first incubatory note for a story that would become Bullet Park: “a man who looks in the windows of buildings all over the world trying to find an interior a yellow room where he will be happy.” As Cheever continued to ponder this man (apparently mad to some degree), it occurred to him that such a character might serve to “introduce violence, in order to dramatize a moral dilemma, into a landscape, a way of life that might be characterized by its monotonous lack of violence.” Even then, vaguely, Cheever liked the idea of an attempted “crucifixion” in the suburbs (let Aldridge call that “coy and cloying”): “I would like to write a gothic novel,” he wrote, “without being caught in the act.”

The better to gather these disparate thoughts, Cheever went to Yaddo in February 1965 and found himself sharing a bathroom with Maxwell's old protégé Harold Brodkey. Thirty-four at the time, Brodkey seemed already in decline. With Maxwell's help, he'd published his first New Yorker story, “State of Grace,” in 1953—a year out of Harvard—and five years later his collection First Love and Other Sorrows had made him a minor literary celebrity; in the years since, however, he'd published only two more stories in the magazine, and (so he told Cheever) he'd resorted to “hacking trash” for a living. He'd also entered what he later called his “binary” sexual phase, a matter he elaborately impressed on Cheever: “B[rodkey] talks about sexual orgies (two) he has participated in, a position I have never heard of, and the homosexual community which he seems to know well. … He is young, one might say wayward and immature. So we dance, play psychic games, then ping pong and I go to bed feeling lonely, lonely, oh lonely.” For a number of reasons, all disturbing, Brodkey reminded Cheever of Calvin Kentfield (“he is, as C[alvin] was, in the process of selfdestruction”), but when the beguiling youngish) man “embraced” him in the “winter twilight,” Cheever couldn't help putting reason aside for a while: “I think that I am in the throes once more of a hopeless love.”

Fortunately the visit lasted only a few days, and Cheever soon came to his senses. A wistful letter from Brodkey left him feeling vaguely disgusted: “I want hearty and robust friendships; not men who write emotional letters to one another.” Reflecting on the flirtation—and probably it was no more than that—Cheever decided the “book of the month club had something to do” with Brodkey's ardor. A bit later, he invited Brodkey to Cedar Lane, and amid that heartening domestic tableau he wondered how he could have ever taken such a man seriously: Brodkey, he noticed, had exchanged his “dismal beard” for a mustache, and adopted or refined an accent that was distinctly on the “faggoty side.” This, he concluded, was the quintessential “mirror person”—the Freudian homosexual doomed to abide in the “barren country” of prenatal narcissism: “I think of Brodkey in St. Louis,” Cheever mused, “falling in love with himself because there was no one else so intelligent handsome and rich in the neighborhood; and how bitter this marriage was.” Every so often Cheever would cast back to those three or four days at Yaddo, and shudder over the way Brodkey had forever been fishing for compliments: Did his beard look all right? Had his tan begun to fade? And meanwhile, at The New Yorker's offices, a young (and later