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By Root 3898 0

Cheever thought he was “great in the part—lithe and haggard—and the sense of an odyssey a life a man moving through space, time and water is there.” The critics, however, were almost categorically vicious. Perhaps the kindest was Vincent Canby in the Times, who professed to like the movie despite its being “uneven, patchy,” and “occasionally gross and mawkish.” More representative was Joseph Morgenstern's pan in Newsweek, which derided the movie as a ludicrous melodrama with a visual style akin to that of “a shampoo commercial.”* “I don't think the picture would ever have been great but Sam Spiegel really fucked it up,” Cheever remarked, a few months after his first, rather glowing critique. “He fired Frank and got a man named Pollock [sic] to put in the fancy dissolves … and reshoot the last ten minutes in Beverly Hills. Frank and I wanted Miles Davis for the music but instead we got a sixty-five all-girl string orchestra. Etc.”

* Model for the “Laurel Players” in Yates's Revolutionary Road—the company whose catastrophically awful production of The Petrified Forest leads to April Wheeler's decline and eventual suicide.

* He was easily reached by telephone, as his number was always listed—and is, for that matter, listed as of this writing, twenty-five years after his death.

* In the published Letters, Ben Cheever explained that the false tooth was actually lost in a swimming pool: “There was in any case no significant alteration in the tone or volume of my father's farts.”

* Though Cheever's blink-and-you-miss-it cameo is hard to follow, he appears to say to Landgard, “I'm John Estabrook,” then busses her, whereupon Lancaster takes her briskly away from him (without shaking hands), asking “How ya doin’ Kevin?” “Great, great,” Cheever drawls as the camera moves on.

* On November 25, 2001, Steve Garbarino published a piece in the New York Times Magazine (“Leave It to Cheever”) in which he made a case for rediscovering the movie as a perfect fable for the post-9/11 zeitgeist: “[I]n many ways, [Neddy] is a symbol of America now, a once presumably safe haven that has been forced to tighten its belt, put up its guard, find new footing and stay afloat while lamenting its lost innocence in a time of terrorism. Like Neddy, America can no longer rely on its charm. … And like our country, we find ourselves rooting for ‘The Swimmer’ down to the last drop.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

{1966-1967}

CHEEVER THOUGHT Bullet Park would be an improvement over The Wapshot Scandal, though it wasn't any easier to write and was badly stalled by the summer of 1966 (“Just the sight of a typewriter gives me an acute pain in the gut”). He decided to put the novel aside and work on a couple of stories he'd been considering for the past year or so: one concerned an old expatriate poet who becomes consumed with obscenity, the other was a malicious portrait of Antonio Barolini, who'd been getting on Cheever's nerves lately (“Perhaps I can write a story about him”). The bumptious aristocrat had solicited a blurb from Cheever for his first novel, A Long Madness, translated from the Italian and published by Pantheon in 1964. “Una lunga pazzia,” Cheever would say, giving the Italian title, then add, “Un lungo romanzo [A long novel]!” Cheever hated writing blurbs in any case (“The mortal boredom of reading the fourth-rate novels of my drinking companions”), but was all the more piqued when Barolini's effort sold fewer than four hundred copies, despite his endorsement. Also, the man's constant whinging about his wife struck even Cheever as unseemly, though of course he found the woman insufferable, too. One day she phoned him to say she'd gotten “stuck” writing her novel, and wondered if he had any advice: “Oh for heaven's sake, Helen, take a walk around the block!” he snapped, banging the receiver down. So, yes, he had to concede that Barolini's wife was “truly difficult,” and he also sympathized with the way the poor man had to suffer the oafish condescension of their neighbors: “Like most Italians in this country he is taken immediately for