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By Root 4076 0

and later the two met for drinks and learned they were both attending the president's reception. They decided to “get stoned” at the Hilton and then walk over to the White House together and heckle John Updike, who was scheduled to give a reading. Cheever's resentment toward his younger colleague had only deepened. In Chicago he'd given Stern the impression that Updike was a kind of “pet hate,” and a week or so before the White House affair he'd written in his journal, “The arrogance of Updike goes back to the fact that he does not consider me a peer.” He did, however, consider Salinger a peer, or so Cheever had bitterly concluded.

“The Updikes were [at the White House] and I did everything short of kicking him in the trousers,” he wrote Litvinov afterward. The evening had begun with a buffet supper on the lawn, where Cheever had mingled with fellow luminaries such as John Glenn, Stan Musial, Marianne Moore, and John O'Hara, who joined Cheever (said he) in “banging folding chairs together” when Updike got up to speak. Years later Updike was again mortified, retrospectively, when he discovered Perelman's account (in a letter to Ogden Nash) of what followed: “[Updike] read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I couldn't personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page. But Cheever brought me tidings that all three extracts dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike's. When I asked Cheever whether Lady Bird was present, he informed me that she was seated smack in the middle of the first row. What are we coming to?” In his own correspondence, Cheever claimed to have remarked to President and Mrs. Johnson that Updike kept autographed copies of The Centaur in his underwear, and in his journal he wrote: “I am high and a little drunk and am rude, I think, to John. The result of this is that I like him better than I did. He reads three descriptive passages and I find them very bad.” Reflecting on these matters, Updike later wrote that only one of the three extracts he'd read that evening was (obliquely) about masturbation, and as for the shock of “finding [him]self discussed with such gleeful malice” by two of his greatest idols—it was “chastening, perhaps edifyingly so”: “In fact, I know now, the literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers.”

Later that summer, the Updikes came to Wellfleet and lunched with Cheever, who'd calmed down considerably after his cathartic rudeness at the White House: “I think that we will never be friends because I think we both dread the sort of self-consciousness involved but we are for this day at least amiable companions.” And then, as in Russia, the presence of Updike's wife helped sweeten Cheever's mood: “Having missed the size of her breasts in Moscow … I am curious and pleased to see, in a bathing suit, that they are splendid.”

• • •

BY AUGUST, Cheever's cafard had become so overwhelming that he feared losing his mind. For years he'd routinely taken the tranquilizer Miltown and now worried that he might become hooked; besides, the present emergency seemed to call for something stronger—something that might even discourage him from drinking, much less popping Miltown. His regular doctor, Ray Mutter, prescribed a “massive tranquilizer” that left Cheever “as collected and stagnant as the water under an old millwheel.” Indeed, he was so collected that he felt “rather glum,” yearning for his usual tendency to woolgather and take the world lightly, at least when drunk. Thus, after a week or so, he reported that he'd “kicked the pill” and resumed drinking (“jibbering slightly”).

The coming of autumn got him down: Susan and Ben would be leaving, Federico would be in school most of the day, and Mary would resume teaching. The last was an exacerbation that his marriage could ill afford at the moment, especially in the absence of buffering children. For a long time Mary had tended to retire