Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [213]
In all likelihood, Ellison's zealous support of The Wapshot Scandal over Herzog had little to do with a quarrel about dogshit, but may well have had plenty to do with the fact that Cheever had helped Ellison get into the Century Club a few months before. Because of the racial issue, it was apparently no easy task. In the summer of 1962, Cheever's old friend Lib Collins had visited Cedar Lane with the Ellisons and Albert Murray; she later distinctly remembered Cheever telling Ellison (in effect), “I'm sorry, but they won't let you in, and that's all there is to it.” Eventually, however, Cheever managed to pull it off with the help of Red Warren, to whom he wrote: “I am very fond of Ralph and would not want him to suffer that unreasonable bitterness that seems to overtake grown men when they are turned down by even so arterosclerotic an organization as ours.”
On the day of the award ceremony, May 19, Cheever awoke feeling “crushed” with malaise, and when Mary told him that she intended to teach a class even though (as he saw it) it would make them late, there was a nasty exchange: “Her voice goes up an octave and cracks,” he wrote in his journal while waiting for her to return. “It seems the voice of a child; then the voice of some female mouse in an animated cartoon.” He told Weaver that he “took some gin” to calm down (“cheap bourbon” in his journal), and when he arrived at the auditorium, “The secretary took one look at me and said: ‘Every single year, someone has to be carried out feet first.’ “ It was, in fact, a lively ceremony. Academy President Lewis Mumford (“who seems to be losing his marbles,” Cheever wrote) kicked things off by denouncing the Vietnam War as a “moral outrage,” whereupon artist Thomas Hart Benton stormed off the stage and later threatened to resign. Finally it was time to present the Howells Medal, and Ellison made an orotund speech about laughter in the face of the “chaos that we've made of our promise”: “It is John Cheever's achievement to have made us aware not only of what our laughter is about, but of that tragic sense of reality, that gracious-ness before life's complexity which is its antidote.” By comparison, Cheever's own remarks were almost aggressively modest, perhaps reflecting his considerable cynicism toward the proceedings. “Thank you very much, Ralph,” he began.
When The Wapshot Scandal was completed my first instinct was to commit suicide. I thought I might cure my melancholy if I destroyed the novel and I said as much to my wife. She said that it was, after all, my novel and I could do as I pleased but how could she explain to the children what it was that I had been doing for the last four years. Thus my concern for appearances accounted for the publication of the novel.
Mumford was far from alone in his outrage over Vietnam; already in 1965 a number of artists and intellectuals had pledged to boycott White House functions in protest. Cheever, however, was not among them, and so looked forward to meeting LBJ at a reception for Presidential Scholars in June. Susan was graduating from college a few days before, and that morning, as he prepared to leave for Providence, Cheever spotted a three-and-a-half-foot snapping turtle making its stately way across his lawn. Firing ten shotgun shells into its head, Cheever mused that the ancient reptile “seemed to possess the world much better than I—I with a shotgun, my hands shaking from a cocktail party.” (“The gun blasts really shattered the usual serenity of that suburban milieu,” Andrew Ziegler recalled.) As it happened, Cheever's fellow New Yorker writer S. J. Perelman was getting an honorary degree at the Brown commencement,