Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [245]
Such a range of opinion (and general puzzlement) indicated obtuseness on the part of certain reviewers, but also the possibility that Cheever's own intentions were so intuitive, and subtle, that in some respects they were obscure even to himself. In the novel's formative stages, he'd noted: “I count on my experience with Fred [his brother] and the division in my own spirit but I haven't made much progress.” He seems to have begun, then, with his old obsession over the duality of human nature and his own nature in particular: dark and light, flesh and spirit, grossness and aspiration. However, when readers later interpreted Bullet Park along these lines—suggesting, for instance, that Hammer and Nailles were opposite sides of the same person—Cheever balked: “Neither Hammer nor Nailles were meant to be either psychiatric or social metaphors; they were meant to be two men with their own risks. I think the book was misunderstood on those terms.” It bears repeating that Cheever had a horror of simplistic allegory, and would naturally prefer to regard his own creations as somewhat rounded, distinct personages—but obviously Hammer and Nailles also serve a metaphorical purpose, underlined by their almost flippantly suggestive nomenclature: “Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper …” And lest we miss the point, the narrator also observes that their doubleness extends to a rather exact physical resemblance: “They were about the same weight, height and age, and they both wore a size-eight shoe.”
Whether or not the two characters were originally conceived as complementary opposites—that is, as an easy metaphor for a divided personality—Cheever ultimately developed the idea into something more complex (and even, at times, opaque). Some critics have made the point that Hammer and Nailles are actually quite similar, and the novelist John Gardner suggested that the main difference is merely a matter of luck: “Nailles's blessing is that he is married to a good woman and has a son, whereas Hammer is married to a bitch and is childless.” But while it's true that Nailles's marriage is happier than Hammer's, one should bear in mind that Mrs. Nailles's devotion to her husband is something of an imposture: on at least three occasions, she has nearly succumbed to extramarital temptation, only to be saved each time by some happy accident (“a fire, a runny nose and some spoiled sturgeon eggs”); accidental or not, though, she regards “her virtue as a jewel—an emblem—of character, discipline and intelligence.” So it goes, then, to some extent, with Hammer and Nailles: it's not that one is good and the other evil, but that Nailles's failings are bridled by a rather naïve reverence for social convention, and also perhaps (as Gardner would have it) by his relative happiness and luck; in actual fact, though, his failings differ from Hammer's mostly in terms of degree. For example, both Hammer and Nailles are homophobic, for the common reason that they fear homosexuality in themselves. “I wish it didn't exist,” Nailles admits to his son, explaining that the only reason he joined the Chemists Club was so he could have a place to “pump ship” in midtown other than the Grand Central toilets, where he feared “getting into a moral crisis” every time he was accosted by a homosexual. For his part, Hammer escapes the attention of a “faggot” on the beach by helping a family fly their kite—an act of conspicuous wholesomeness—though afterward he's enraged by the unnerving potentialities of his own nature: “The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length