Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [243]
What the writer was, in fact, was lonely and depressed and desperately alcoholic, and no amount of wealth or fame seemed to help much. The good news kept pouring in: the Book-of-the-Month Club had paid fifty thousand dollars to feature Bullet Park as an alternate selection; Bantam had offered seventy-five thousand for paperback rights (though Knopf was holding out for twice that much); the first printing had been bumped to fifty-five thousand. “Celebrate!” said Gottlieb, but Cheever didn't quite know where to begin. His dogs were gone at the moment (Mary had taken them for a long walk), and it occurred to him that he “[didn't] seem to have any chums”—or chums he cared to see, at any rate. Toward Christmas, his publisher put him up for two days at the St. Regis Hotel so he could give more interviews, and so he did—gleefully ordering bottles of gin up to his room (“Guess what the bill is? Twenty-nine dollars! Wait until Alfred Knopf sees that!”) as well as bottles of whatever the interviewers were having, and meanwhile nobody seemed to find anything amiss about this witty, boyish man who appeared to be drinking himself to death. “In fighting the hootch I seem to be fighting something much stronger than my own character,” Cheever reflected as the new year began; “I am overwhelmed by the spirits in the gin bottle. What, under the circumstances, does one do. Pray. Join AA.”
Then, too, he began to wonder whether his book was really worth all the fuss: “Sometimes I recall a chapter that seems competent. Sometimes the book returns to me as sloppy, trifling and worthless.” As his paranoia began to swell, he projected these doubts onto his editor, Gottlieb, whom he suspected of deliberately “cut[ting]” him at the Century Club, as well as “exploiting] every possibility for anxiety and self-doubt”—this despite all the money and attention Knopf had lavished on the book, and never mind Gottlieb's constant reassurance and enthusiasm. Indeed, the editor had expressed only a single significant qualm: “Perhaps you remember that when we first talked,” he wrote Cheever, “I said that the only thing that I didn't love about the book was that it stopped—I wish it had gone on longer. … [T]here is an abruptness there.” Cheever said he would try to “enlarge the last chapter,” but didn't—either because he was too blocked by then to write any further, or perhaps because he simply decided that he preferred the ambiguity of his original ending. Whatever the case, Gottlieb continued to make encouraging noises and even mentioned that Cheever's old nemesis, Bennett Cerf, was “very impressed and moved” by the novel.
In more temperate moments, Cheever reminded himself that Bullet Park was, if nothing else, “better than the Scandal,” and that he'd basically fulfilled his own aims, to wit: “a cast of three characters, a simple and resonant prose style and a scene where a man saves his beloved son from death by fire.” Let the reviewers do their worst, then, though Cheever hardly expected as much; on the contrary, his friend Lehmann-Haupt had brought good tidings on that score, or so it seemed. Lehmann-Haupt, then an editor at the Times Book Review, had asked Cheever whom he would choose to review Bullet Park if the choice were his. “Ben DeMott,