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By Root 4194 0

out of his ken. The only fictional use he would ever make of his Russian material, for instance, was in the (rather dirty) 1972 story, “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” where a few scenes set in Moscow serve the purpose of deploring the intrusion of politics into matters of the heart. But really it was the heart alone that interested Cheever. “Novels are about men and women and children and dogs,” he'd say, “not politics.” He could admire but not emulate Mailer's “mastery” of that particular storm, and his indifference was the same in life as in art. He was a conventional liberal who generally agreed with the Times editorial page; he was against Vietnam and racism and so forth. But when it came to making his views public—much less marching in support of them—he'd rather not: “I will not march because I am lazy, suffer from agoraphobia, will probably have a hangover, am afraid of the reactionary bullies who will hiss and boo me … am shy, timid, a born bystander, etc.”

When Susan announced—a year after Tuskegee—that she would spend the summer working for civil rights in Jackson, Mississippi, Cheever did not conceal his exasperation. “The children are home but Susie goes off to Mississippi next week to teach and be stoned,” he wrote Maxwell. “It will be miserable and dangerous.” He attributed her zeal to a “rampant” blood strain originating with such abolitionist forebears as his “great uncle Ebenezer” (Thomas Butler rather, who may or may not have been persecuted by copperheads in Newbury-port). In fact, his feelings on this point were even more tortured than usual. At night he lay awake sensing Susan was in danger, and wondering whether he should brave a trip south (“with my numerous phobias”) and charm the local peckerwoods while absconding with his daughter—who soon phoned, in any case, asking for $350 in emergency funds, which Cheever promptly wired from White Plains. Likewise, when Ben went off to Antioch College in 1967, and did a few de rigueur days in the Cincinnati jail because of his part in an antiwar protest, Cheever was “proud of him” and managed to persuade the Western Union office to stay open late while he raised nine hundred dollars in cash for bail. Later, he claimed to have refused an invitation to give a speech in Cincinnati (“I told them I would not make a potholder in the city that had arrested my eldest son”), but more often than not he found his children's posturing a bit much: “As for Ben he was reclassified i-A on Friday,” he wrote, shortly after the Cincinnati incident. “Susie was particularly incensed and wanted to send him to Stockholm on the next plane. … I went to the draft board on Monday where the reclassification was declared a clerical error. Ben goes his feckless way.”

The times were changing at such a rapid rate, though, that even Cheever's sixty-one-year-old brother was becoming part of the Scene. After two years of sobriety, Fred moved to Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 1966 to be with his estranged wife and three of their children, who'd originally gone west to get away from him, but now found him delightful. Ann had scarcely known her father as a sober man, and was struck by how “knowledgeable and compassionate” he was: he liked to “rap” (his word) about the thriving counterculture in Boulder, and meanwhile he bought a motorcycle and dumped his wizened, chainsmoking wife for a thirty-five-year-old physicist named Sabine, for whose benefit he got monkey-gland injections.

But the more things changed the more they stayed the same, at least in one respect: “Dear Joey,” Fred wrote, not long after his arrival in Boulder. “For no explainable reason except perhaps over-exertion in moving, my bad ankle has become a problem and for the past three weeks I haven't been able to walk on it.” He'd managed to keep his PR job at a local radio station, he said, but his salary had been halved until he could return to work, and therefore he wondered if John could “underwrite [his] next two months to the tune of $1,500 or $2,000,” which would allow him to feed himself and go on paying Ann's tuition.