Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [242]
Actually, his role in removing Ames was the result of long, sober deliberation. Several years earlier she'd finally acceded to one of Cheever's pet proposals—the building of a swimming pool—only to change her mind at the last instant, again, fearing her guests would behave dreadfully in and around water. Cheever was furious: “I believe we have voted for the swimming pool seven times now,” he wrote Cowley, “and to have the vote of any representative body disregarded this many times seems to me to reflect seriously on its usefulness. … [I]f the pool is overlooked again I would like to resign.”* And this, of course, was part of a larger grievance. Ames's conduct as director had always been a bit on the peremptory side, and now that she was all but totally deaf and a little demented, too, she'd become a tyrant. “No!” she shouted into the telephone when an eminent critic called (during working hours) and asked to speak with a resident artist. At the time, the critic in question was visiting the ladylike Anne Palamountain, wife of the Skidmore president, who vividly remembers her own first visit to Yaddo. It was late at night, and her new friend Cheever had proposed that she and her husband follow him (amid a lot of antic shushing, lest the despot be roused) to a back door of the Trask mansion; making their furtive way into the main hall, they encountered an equally apprehensive Philip Roth creeping down the stairs. “Ames had everyone terrified,” said Palamountain. It got so bad that Cheever himself had begun to dread the place—”the demesne of a powerful and weary old lady,” whom he blamed, moreover, for cultivating “the company of emasculated men” and hence leaving him at the mercy of Rorem and the like: “There are never any attractive or available women and in my desperation for company I find myself drinking with homosexuals.” Still, a part of him would always be fond of Mrs. Ames, and he took care to relate his decision to her in the most gracious possible terms: “This, of course, has nothing to do with our long and affectionate friendship, or with the fact that you have been my most intimate confident [sic]. Without Yaddo, as you've managed it, it would have been impossible for me to be a writer. … [But] I am convinced that a change is in order and I know you have the strength and intelligence to assess such an opinion.” At the subsequent board meeting, when Ames conceded her resignation, Cheever spoke movingly of her “imperturbable, humorous and fair” treatment of the (very) odd assortment of artists she'd hosted over the years: “This is a life and a triumph.”
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AS 1968 CAME TO AN END, Cheever summed up his recent life as follows: “I've written nothing since the novel was completed and have spent a lot of time posing for photographers and mouthing crap about the essential prophetic nature of literature.” Knopf had paid dearly for Bullet Park and insisted the author do his part in promoting the book, always a dreary prospect for Cheever and even more so in this case. He thought he liked the novel all right, but he didn't want to talk about it—certainly not in terms of its deeper meaning, or (God forbid) its autobiographical elements, though he knew these were precisely the sort of questions he'd be asked. As he worried in his journal, “I don't know whether to admit to Sheed that I suffer from melancholy and that the incantations were invented to get me, not Tony [Nailles] out of bed.” Sheed was Wilfrid Sheed, an estimable novelist in his own right, who would soon be interviewing Cheever for a big feature in Life. Cheever knew what to expect when the magazine called beforehand and asked him to give a cocktail party and play a game of touch football for the photographer.