Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [218]
Mailer was “pissed”: “In those days I took myself very seriously,” he recalled, “and was indeed embattled.” He regarded Cheever as a lightweight—”darling of The New Yorker, Time cover boy, that sort of thing”—a lapdog of the establishment, in short, which was constantly sniping at Mailer back then. Clutching the microphone and glaring at Cheever (who gazed benignantly back), Mailer delivered “a corrosive, brilliant, hit-and-run analysis of the failure of American novelists to keep up with a whirling country,” as Stern described it. “There has been a war at the center of American letters for a long time,” Mailer declared. This began as a “class war” between realists like Dreiser who attempted to produce novels “which would ignite a nation's consciousness of itself,” and genteel entertainers who appealed to “an uppermiddleclass [looking] for a development of its taste. … That demand is still being made by a magazine called The New Yorker.“ In the end, said Mailer, both impulses had “failed,” and literature was now being superseded by movies and television.
That, anyway, was the gist of it, and when it was over the academics “thundered applause” (Stern). “I am impressed by Mailer's delivery,” Cheever wrote, “but in retrospect most of what he has to say doesn't parse.” Mailer glared at him a bit more, but finally they made amends and retired en masse to the Playboy Mansion, where they sat chatting in the Grotto Bar while swimmers fluttered past a glass wall; occasionally, said Cheever, “young women wearing nothing but artificial eyelashes” would wander into the bar “doing cross-word puzzles,” then glance at the middle-aged literati sitting there, and withdraw.
After Cheever's death, Mailer finally got around to reading his work and felt “a great sense of woe”: “Why didn't I know that man?” At the time Cheever sensed Mailer didn't like him much, but decided to like Mailer all the same—especially when Mary attacked Mailer “as the sort of common brute whose only use for women is to get them on their backs”: “It is the old plaint of the feminist and I think with terror that my love is turning into one of those tweedy women with strained faces who teach freshman English at fourth-rate colleges,” Cheever reflected, but was soon cheered by a visit from his fun-loving neighbor Sara. “Mrs. Zagreb shows up on her way to a party, decked with sparklers and a ruby as big as a fig. She is, I announce, the sort of a woman who doesn't consider lying down for a man to be a chore. I give her a drink and flirt.”
*”At the [Academy] ceremony on Wednesday,” Cheever wrote Maxwell in i960, “Irving Howe, who once described me as a Toothless Thurber with a graying prose style, appeared to have very little hair, all of it grey and seemed … to have no teeth at all.”
* This entry is misdated as “1963” on page 191 of the published Journals, no doubt because the pages are jumbled in the original journal manuscript. Internal evidence suggests it was written around January 1965.
* This he did. “He slept upstairs in a tiny room, like a boarder,” Sara Spencer (a.k.a. Mrs. Zagreb) deploringly recalled.
* Maxwell's friend Shirley Hazzard said of the incident, “At its time [it was] quite a famous story of Cheever being uncontrollably angry” and Maxwell's Times obituary also gives a version of the story (attributed to Brendan Gill), characterizing Cheever as “furious” and Maxwell as “courtly.” But one may recall that Maxwell himself said “the only time” Cheever ever really showed anger toward him was during the “Brigadier” episode in 1961, and Cheever's journal bears this out: “Spears come and suddenly Bill whom I have not seen for months. He does not like my Euclid story and I am not disturbed [my italics] as I think I am meant to be. I am a little