Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [212]
AT THE BEGINNING of May, Cheever and his wife boarded the Twentieth Century Limited for a weeklong vacation in Chicago, where Cheever had agreed to serve as a visiting writer in Richard Stern's fiction class. He'd engaged a roomette on the swanky Century in the hope of “[tying] on a can,” but when he climbed down to his wife's berth she determinedly feigned sleep, and her recalcitrance continued for most of the trip: “Mary complains about the smell of the hotel, the smell of the train, the smell of the world.” Stern, too, was startled by Mary's sharpness toward Cheever—”I felt defensive for him,” he said, and the feeling was mutual: “[Stern's] wife greets the guests but says nothing for the rest of the evening,” Cheever observed in his journal. “[Y]ou realize that it was he who bathed the children and put them to bed; it was he who cooked the goulash. She has not spoken to him for a week.” The two unhappy husbands enjoyed each other's company, at least, and Cheever also had a pleasant lunch with Bellow. The year before, he'd read Herzog and been rather comforted to find it a sub-par performance, or so he thought: “The fear that he was without parallel, that I should always be second or third best seems to have faded …” Thus he was able to relax even better in Bellow's company, enjoying the man's “erudite, bellicose and agile” mind without feeling the usual inferiority.
Perhaps his happiest encounter, though, was with a total stranger. “Mary flew back on Thursday and I took the Twentieth Century Friday night,” he wrote Weaver, “carrying a lot of nice, serious books. … Well the engine took fire somewhere east of Gary and in the confusion I got horribly mixed up with a broad from Evanston who was drinking rusty nails. This went on until three when the conductor told us we couldn't play strippoker in the observation car.” The “broad” in question was one Sherry (Mrs. Donald H.) Farquharson, who was taking the trip with a girlfriend to see a few shows in New York. They were sitting in the club car when (as Mrs. Farquharson recalled) Cheever came over and asked, “May I join you?” (“[I]t pleases me to make friends when I travel,” Cheever once noted.) Before Cheever could even mention it himself, the women realized they'd seen this very face on the cover of Time, and a “delightful” evening ensued: the three had drinks and dinner, and later Cheever did in fact coax Sherry to the observation car and ply her with Rusty Nails; the vivacious matron was not, however, so far gone as to play strip poker with a new acquaintance, who in any case was a perfect gentleman throughout. Indeed, he called her in New York the next day and asked her to have lunch with him, but she had to decline—with regret that persisted for decades—because of a previous engagement.
Just over a week after his return, Cheever was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished novel of the last five years. He claimed to feel appalled at the honor (“Mother would have been indignant”), not only because of his Yankee humility, but also because he didn't have a high opinion of the novel in question and found the very concept of such an award ridiculous. Repeating his usual chestnut about literature not being “a competitive sport,” Cheever added, “I don't think that you can divide American fiction into five-year periods.” Perhaps an even more compelling reason for his distaste was an uncomfortable awareness of just how dubious the politicking had been this time—that is to say, even more dubious than usual. “I had lunch with Ralph Ellison and asked him if he knew what sonofabitch had put me up for it,” Cheever wrote Helen Puner, a neighbor.
He said angrily, that it was he and that it had been uphill work. Louis Kronenberger abstained. Everybody else wanted to give it to Saul except Glenway Wescott who had promised it to