Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [263]
Cheever gave two reasons for his creative funk: “1. I drink too much. 2. I've written too much. … When, walking in the woods these days, I am struck by an idea, a metaphor or a phrase it takes me several minutes to realize that I've already used it.” Actually, this was only half true: Cheever's gift (and curse) was an imagination that went on working no matter how drowned in alcohol; it was the follow-through that bored him nowadays. Tipsily oracular one night, he lectured Mary on the subject of artistic bouleversement (upheaval), and became excited in spite of himself as he began to consider the bouleversement of time, morals, and perhaps his own work. His mind “swelling like a cabbage in the rain,” Cheever remembered a convoluted story about some Wollaston neighbors—”a novel in fact”—which he'd tried writing when he was fifteen or so. One of his childhood girlfriends had been a descendant of the great Puritan William Bradford, though she was one of the “wrong” South Shore Bradfords (resembling Cheever in that respect). The girl's family had a sordid destiny: her mother was something of a shrew, and her father had taken up with a disreputable widow and sired a bastard son (years later, at summer camp, Fax warned Cheever not to be seen with the boy); meanwhile Mrs. Bradford had invested most of their modest fortune in four diamond rings, which her older daughter stole out of spite, hoping to hock them in Boston so she could abscond to Paris. At any rate, the fifty-eight-year-old Cheever was now eager to apply his thoughts about bouleversement to this childhood memory (changing the name Bradford to Cabot), though his enthusiasm waned as soon as he sat down to write: “Who cares about the wrong Cabots this morning. Not I … I cannot feel that the world will be any better for their story or any worse without it. I will make some notes.”
That was in January 1971, shortly after finishing “Artemis;” months later, he was still poking away, though not entirely without result. For years now Cheever had wanted to make momentous changes in his work (“I want a new cadence, a new perspective, a new vocabulary”), and he found that his story about the Cabots lent itself to an experiment in “digression,” as he put it. One of the favorite novels of his youth had been Gide's The Counterfeiters (which of course Cheever always referred to, socially, as Les Faux-monnayeurs), what with its intriguing metafictional narrator accosting the reader with constant reflections—digressions—on his story and characters. Returning to Gide's novel some two years after he'd finished “The Jewels of the Cabots,” Cheever experienced an almost unsettling shock of recognition: “I was either influenced unconsciously by the Counterfeiters when I first read it or there is an extraordinary coincidence here. The ambiguity of Gide, if that is the word, seems to be what I've been driving at for years.” And it wasn't simply a matter of Gide's narrative approach, but also a particularly congenial theme, which Cheever expressed as follows: “[T]he sense that what we part from forcibly and with deep regret is what we love and know best and our departure is impetuous, visionary and dangerous.” Thus Olivier runs away from home in The Counterfeiters, and thus any number of Cheever's characters (Geneva Cabot, Moses and Coverly, Ezekiel Farragut, to name a few) say goodbye to their homes, their haunted pasts, in order to forge identities in the greater world, as Cheever himself had done.
His hope was to “change key” in writing “The Jewels of the Cabots”—to take nonlinear narrative to another level, jarring the reader out of