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he realized that it had been “motivated by unreasonable hatefulness” and its garish surrealism was such that he might be “declared mad.” He wasn't far wrong. In recent years, Cheever's fondness for the “implausible” had caused increasing dismay at The New Yorker, and this time they “threw in the sponge,” as Maxwell put it: “[Cheever] was the first person I ever saw try to do this and I just stood there with my mouth open. He tried things that people felt weren't possible in fiction. It turned out that anything was possible in fiction.” By the time Barthelme and Barth and Coover and other post-realists had become (briefly) dominant figures on the scene, Maxwell realized that he'd underestimated stories such as “Justina” and “The Swimmer”—the latter of which was not only stuck “behind the cartoons,” as Cheever would have it, but behind an Updike story too. (“This seems to me unintelligent and perhaps mean, but then one encounters much of both.”) Then and later, however, Maxwell viewed “The Geometry of Love” as positive proof that Cheever was “losing his powers” because of alcohol. Indeed, the man was so troubled that he took it upon himself to stop in Ossining and reject the story in person. “I was drinking gin and romping with the dogs,” Cheever wrote a friend. “[Bill] looked at me sadly, patted me gently, said that the story was a ghastly failure and implied that I had lost my marbles.” Legend has it that Cheever became furious, but that would appear to be an exaggeration*: “I could not, with a skinful and surrounded by so many loving animals, take him seriously and I reminded him, cruelly, of all the other stories they had rejected and of all the editorial crap I've put up with over the years.” Afterward, though, Cheever wondered whether he'd been “needlessly harsh”—if not actually “furious”—while suspecting, too, that Maxwell was right. Nevertheless, he decided to give the story to Candida Donadio, who promptly sold it to The Saturday Evening Post for three thousand dollars. “This cheered me.”

For nearly two decades, Maxwell's rejections had often been emotional and financial calamities for Cheever, but never again—and so he felt “cheered,” and cheerfully he indulged in a kind of impudence that had been hitherto absent in their friendship: “I look forward to having the book,” he wrote of Maxwell's 1966 collection, The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales, “and I am determined to write you a letter to explain that while I liked some of the pieces and was unenthusiastic about some this plainly has nothing to do with their merit.” This mocked, lightly, one of Maxwell's typical gambits, in which the editor professed, with delicate modesty, that a given work of Cheever's was (but only in his opinion) a failure. As for their less and less frequent personal meetings, Cheever tried to be sociable—he liked to make things go—but usually found it heavy sledding: Maxwell seemed more solemn than ever, and sometimes even pointedly unfriendly; if Cheever didn't labor to carry the conversation, a “massive silence” had a way of descending. “He said that he loves me,” Cheever wrote, shortly after the “Geometry” rejection, “and I have often said that he mistook power for love and the fact that he is now powerless may explain the chill.” In years to come, however, there would be many times when he missed Maxwell's insight, discretion, and generosity—and yes, even his old “power,” since it gave a diffident man the license to speak frankly, and after all (Cheever conceded) there wasn't “anyone better” as a critic.

“What disturbs me,” Maxwell said after Cheever's death, “is not that we stopped talking but that we kept on talking and never said what we thought. I never spoke out.” Apart from aesthetic differences, Cheever's fame after the Time cover had made him a different and rather distasteful man—at least to Maxwell, to whom he couldn't resist holding forth about his flirtation with Hope Lange and so forth. “B[ill] calls to say that Eddie [Newhouse] had a heart attack in a taxi cab,” Cheever noted in August 1967.

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