Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [217]
It could be anger. Perhaps, but to some extent Maxwell blamed himself: “I didn't say, ‘For Christ's sake, John, will you stop talking about actors?’—or anything that would have been decent to have said.”
IN LATE DECEMBER 1965, Cheever was invited back to Chicago, with Ellison and Norman Mailer, to address the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association; the putative topic was “the relationship of the novelist to the country's power structures.” Cheever, however, saw it as an opportunity to air (entertainingly, he hoped) certain qualms he had about Mailer and others. He'd been “pleased and excited” by The Naked and the Dead, whose ambition had left him feeling dejected over “[his] own confined talents;” but Mailer's most recent novel, An American Dream—about Stephen Rojack's lurid quest for sensation in the face of a deadening society—struck Cheever as “repetitious and fetid”: “In describing intercourse in detail [Mailer] is limited by the fact that only three orifices are involved and so is forced into repeating himself.” If American writers (as Mailer, Roth, and others suggested) were obliged to keep pace with the outrageous unreality of current events—Vietnam, race riots, rampant pornography—then it wouldn't be long, thought Cheever, before the more delicate, abiding pleasures of literature became obsolete.
Cheever had chatted with Mailer at an Academy gathering in 1960, and though the exchange was friendly enough, Cheever thought he detected a fellow “sexual impostor” in Mailer's “great affectation of bellicosity”: “I think I see a man, a touching one, in the throes of confused sexual longings, and forced into a painful pose, a painful imposture.” Affected or not, such a bellicose man would not be ridiculed with impunity, and before the MLA meeting Cheever wrote friends that he'd “trimmed [his] weight to 138 lbs.” in order to “tangle with Mailer.” When the day arrived, however, he began to have second thoughts (“Will I be able to deliver my speech? Will gin help?”), and was so late for a pre-speech luncheon that his host, Robert Lucid, phoned Mary Cheever in Ossining: “Well, you've got to find him!” she said, alarmed at the possibilities. Fortunately Cheever arrived a few minutes later, dressed for battle in a tailored suit and immaculate pearl-gray Brooks Brothers hat, which (said Lucid) “he kept glancing at during lunch to be sure it hadn't disappeared.”
The session was the most crowded in recent memory: some two thousand scholars packed a room at the Palmer House, while others listened outside on the PA system. Ellison got things started with a pompous, leaden address that “seemed to puzzle the audience,” as Richard Stern wrote in The New York Review of Books, but Cheever's speech—”The Parable of the Diligent Novelist”—left everybody (but Mailer) “ablaze with pleasure.” Cheever told of a man who quits the seminary to become a writer, until one day (“when he was busily trying to describe the sound of a winter rain”) he glances at the Times and realizes that, given the violence of his age, such an occupation is “contemptible;” thus he becomes a war correspondent in Saigon. When this begins to pall, he returns to New York and writes a pornographic novel titled Manhattan Beach Boy, but it doesn't seem convincing enough: “He saw that the sexual candor of men like Miller, Updike, Mailer and Roth was not a question of their raw material but of their mastery of the subject.” Therefore he embarks on a spree of buggery and exhibitionism, and in the course of “confronting those barriers of consciousness that should challenge a writer” he also