Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [239]
But for now he was still in the doldrums, both physically and creatively. Encountering “The Country Husband” in an anthology, Cheever had to admit that his recent efforts in the genre were vastly inferior. The story he was writing at the time, for instance—”Percy”—was little more than straight memoir about his aunt Florence Liley, the painter, whose story he'd considered writing as long as twenty-five years ago: “Thinking idly of Liley on the trainride,” he'd written in his journal at the time, “it seemed that to convert a biography into an anecdote is a kind of terrible perfidy or betrayal for which you should be made to descend into hell.” Amid his present illness, however, he found the reminiscence easy and oddly comforting to write (“It served me as a kind of bedtime story”), and besides he suspected—correctly—that it was the sort of thing The New Yorker would buy. Also, he needed to pause again and regroup in his work on Bullet Park, which he worried was turning into a facile “indictment” of the suburbs: “The admissions committee at the club does not scandalize me. Neither does the fact that D. has sold a bond issue for Franco.” On the other hand, if he wasn't writing an “indictment”—and surely some of the satire (however muddled by irony) was directed against modern suburbia—then what exactly was he writing? Faced with a number of hard-to-solve ambiguities, Cheever steadied himself with the idea that his novel was, at bottom, “an uncomplicated story about a man who loved his son”—a kind of updated William Tell, in other words.
With this in mind, Cheever spent the rest of the year working on a long sequence in which the protagonist's son, Tony Nailles, is stricken with sadness and takes to his bed. “Tony's melancholy is not a symbol of the spiritual bankruptcy of Bullet Park,” Cheever reminded himself. “Melancholy is some part of the human condition and he is its chance victim.” When he'd finished the section, Cheever could finally envision the novel all the way through to the end; in fact, he thought these pages were the best he'd ever written, and his confidence was boosted further when Maxwell bought the entire excerpt and proposed to publish it as “Tony in Bed.” Presently, though, he infuriated Cheever by asking him to cut at least two galley pages: “A short story is as precise as a poem and it cannot be slashed,” Cheever brooded in his journal, while betraying (as usual) only a hint of peevishness to Maxwell and agreeing to make the cuts. When his Swimmer money came through in April, however, Cheever abruptly canceled the story and gleefully returned the $4,147.50 payment to the magazine. In the meantime another excerpt, “The Yellow Room”—previously rejected by Maxwell (“the narrator isn't a man of very much particularity”)—had appeared in the January 1968 Playboy, the first of several appearances Cheever would make in the magazine: “They pay well and they are hospitable,” he wrote a friend, “and the tits aren't any more distracting than the girdle advertisements in the New Yorker.” As for the latter, it would not publish another Cheever story for seven years.
CHEEVER FINISHED A DRAFT of Bullet Park in mid-July, though he kept the news to himself until his agent called and pronounced the work “magnificent,” whereupon he and Mary went out to celebrate and ended up (“for reasons that I can't recall”) quarreling bitterly. Matters escalated, and it began to look as if this time, surely, divorce was imminent, until the two were found in the library giddily poring over travel brochures. Less than a week later, they departed for Ireland with Federico. In the parking lot of Shannon