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By Root 3996 0

were in favor—the sort of fiction, in other words, that had excited the editors’ dismay when Cheever had written a less blatant version of it a few years before. “[T]he stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me,” he wrote Maxwell in 1969. “One can always begin: ‘Mr. Frobisher, returning from a year in Europe, opened his trunk for the customs officer and found there, instead of his clothing and souvenirs, the mutilated and naked body of an Italian sailor.’ Blooey. It's like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago.” Privately he referred to Barthelme as “Shawn's chosen surrealist,” and in moments of particular (and more and more frequent) bitterness, he'd rail against the magazine for publishing so many of his “imitators” while neglecting him, as if it were a matter of deliberate malice: “I've done so much for them and they treat me like this!”

This wasn't simply petulance on Cheever's part—it was a legitimate aesthetic grievance. Quite apart from the evolving taste of The New Yorker, he was deeply troubled by the “cataclysmic” vogue for postmodern experimentation, which waxed in outrageousness as time went on. In later years, he would deplore the incoherence of such widely praised novels as Gaddis's JR (“less than rubbish”), lamenting the “lost sense of literature as a voice that appeals to a communal sensibility.” As for all the talk about the “death of the novel,” Cheever considered it the sort of thing “one leaves to boors”: “That the complexities of contemporary life have overwhelmed the novel would be claimed only by someone who knew nothing of the history of the novel and of the novel's dependence upon change,” he wrote indignantly to The New York Review of Books. “I think not that the novel has been overwhelmed by the complexities of contemporary life, I think the novel is the only art form we possess that has approached any mastery of this storm.” Perhaps the greatest offender, in Cheever's view, was John Barth, whose sprawling works were built around idle metafictional tricks (“The sort of Pirandellismo that is used everywhere by everyone”), to which Cheever himself had resorted, but sparingly, almost from the beginning of his career (q.v., “Of Love: A Testimony” in 1935). He liked to tell of a time when he and Jean Stafford had been at a dinner party with Barth: “Jean said, drawing me aside, but not so far that Barth couldn't hear what she was saying: ‘John, your reputation in American literature is very, very shaky. God knows what will happen to it, but if you put a knife in his back, you will be immortal.’ “

Though he opposed experimentation for its own sake, Cheever was also an innovator who applauded any approach that made some useful contribution to what he understood to be literature—that is, an attempt to make sense of our lives. He adored The Armies of the Night, Mailer's take on the so-called nonfiction novel in which he (Mailer) appears, ingloriously, as a third-person character participating in the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Such a work made nonsense of the novel's supposed obsolescence, and was damnably readable besides. “[Mailer] is so wonderfully tough, sassy and brilliant that I find him the most cheerful figure on the literary scene,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “He can also be a brute, a bore, a pig and a bluff but not in this book.” Even Mailer's “fetid” insistence on lurid sexual detail was becoming more palatable to Cheever: “The World of Apples,” after all, had been his most explicit work yet, though even in that story he wrote “F–k” with hyphens and spoke of “flaming sword[s]” rather than penises and whatnot, which were so abundant in the work of certain contemporaries. Updike, for one, had proved that writing frankly about sex could be good art as well as good business: “John's new novel (Couples) has made him a millionaire,” Cheever reported a bit sadly in 1968. “It is obsessively venereal but the descriptions of undressed women are splendid.”

Cheever would soon get on the bandwagon where sex was concerned, but writing about politics was pretty much