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By Root 3903 0

a semi-comic member of the lower class; a gardener, fruit peddler a clown. They call him Tony, this nephew of a countess.” Such were the basic ingredients for an untitled story Cheever presently wrote, in which the main character is a feckless aristocrat named Marcantonio (“Boobee”) Parlapiano: “[Boobee] did not understand that men in America do not complain about their wives,” the narrator observes. By way of faint disguise, Cheever gave the fictional wife an operatic rather than literary ambition, but Helen Barolini recognized her husband at once and found the story “very objectionable.”

“[I] have written two stories just to keep my hand in,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “One of them is quite dirty and the other is quite boring and I think I won't publish either of them.” As it happened, though, Cheever needed the money—he hadn't accepted an advance yet for Bullet Park—so he mailed both stories to The New Yorker (one still untitled), “because I like to put things in the mail,” as he said in the cover letter. The magazine accepted the “boring” story, and thus Cheever gave it the most perfunctory possible title, “Another Story”*; as for the “quite dirty”—and far superior—story, “The World of Apples,” it was predictably rejected and sold instead to Esquire. “Apples” had been somewhat inspired by the “unsavory dreams and reveries” which had beset Cheever for much of his life, but especially now that he was sleeping alone. Asa Bascomb, the poet in the story, is a disaffected New Englander who lives in the Anticoli-like town of Mount Carbone; one day he happens on a couple copulating in the woods, and afterward finds himself incapable of writing anything but pornography: filthy ballads (“The Fart That Saved Athens”), limericks, or simply the word “fuck” over and over. This, for Bascomb, is a profound sickness of the soul. Like his creator, he tends to associate obscenity with self-destruction—a matter of peculiar urgency, since four other poets “with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped” have all committed suicide (“but Bascomb in his stubborn, countrified way was determined to break or ignore this link—to overthrow Marsyas and Orpheus”). At one point the old man is vaguely tempted by the charms of a repulsive male prostitute, who seems “angelic, armed with a flaming sword that might conquer banality and smash the glass of custom”—but rather than succumb to such ultimate corruption, he makes a pilgrimage to the sacred angel of Monte Giordano, to whom he prays: “God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.” Having invoked his literary idols—men whose imaginative labors had left them painfully alienated and in some cases suicidal—Bascomb completes his purification by standing beneath an icy waterfall, as his father had done before him, and then returns home to write “a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that … would grace the last months of his life.”

“Another Story” would appear in the February 25, 1967, issue of The New Yorker—more than two and a half years after Cheever's previous appearance in the magazine. One reason for the long absence was that he was simply writing fewer stories, though one could also argue that he feared rejection now that Maxwell had “written [him] off as an improvident, evil-minded, alcoholic breakdown.” While proceeds from the movie The Swimmer were still in suspense, however, Cheever grudgingly—and apprehensively—sent Maxwell the masterly first chapter of Bullet Park (“Paint me a small railroad station then …”): “I think Bill will praise it,” he wrote in his journal. “I think then that he will be very sad and will, by innuendo, suggest that I have lost my marbles and my gifts.” When Maxwell did, in fact, praise and publish the piece, Cheever had mixed feelings at best (“I was happier as an outcast”). By then he was irate over the rise of Donald Barthelme and similar writers, whose stories began to dominate the magazine's pages in the late sixties, when surrealism and black humor