Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [265]
The valedictory note is apt. In Falconer, Cheever would attain the kind of synthesis hinted at in “The Jewels of the Cabots”: he would describe the squalor of prison, a living hell, without any trace of squeamishness, and yet ultimately manage to transcend the mere “facts” and bring “gladness to the hearts of men” (“Rejoice, he thought, rejoice”). Until then, however, he was pretty much done as a writer, and never again would he complete another ambitious, first-rate short story.* “The Jewels of the Cabots” appeared in Playboy, naturally, and was included in both the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories for 1973. Reviewing the latter for the Times, Anatole Broyard reckoned that Cheever had cast “a very wide net, but it may be too heavy for the craft”—a fair point. Despite its relative lack of focus, though, the story remains an impressive achievement, especially considering what a wreck the author was when he wrote it. And it's poignant to consider, too, that he persevered largely in the hope of winning back the approval of Maxwell and The New Yorker; that failure in particular seemed to break his spirit to some extent, at least as a short-story writer. “My friendship with The New Yorker seems over,” he reported after the “Cabots” rejection. “Playboy seems to be all that is left, alas.” Somewhere in the abstract, though, he knew he'd eventually prevail over his detractors. As he noted in his journal that following spring, “I will write a story beginning: Noone reads the fiction in the New Yorker anymore.”
“I DIDN'T GO TO SING SING to gather material any more than I got married and had children to gather material,” Cheever would remark, post-Falconer, when asked about the two years he spent teaching inmates at Sing Sing. In a way, this is true. When he first volunteered in the summer of 1971, he was just finishing “The Jewels of the Cabots” and had little idea what to write next. With no meaningful work to do, no outlet for his imagination, he was liable to go mad. Indeed, the process seemed well on its way. Often alone and drinking all day, Cheever found that his legitimate anxieties about life—money woes, marriage, health, work—had a way of inflating into rampant paranoia, until by nightfall he'd drunkenly imagine that snakes or stray dogs or burglars (doing poor bobwhite imitations) were about to infiltrate his house. Sometimes he slept with a shotgun at his side. One night Ben dropped by, thinking his parents were away: “I was in the dining room when my father appeared at the top of the stairs. He was bare-assed and had the shotgun clutched in both hands. I don't believe it was loaded. He invited me to stay for a drink, but I declined.”
Getting out of the house, then, was a good idea, but it also seems fair to say that Cheever went to Sing Sing in the hope of finding new material. He felt as though he'd “exhausted his old landscapes.” The previous year, for instance, while walking along Union Avenue in Saratoga, he'd seen “exactly twenty-seven details that [he] had used in stories—a wooden tower, old parimutuel tickets, a three legged dog, an iron deer, a dying elm, etc.” If anything it was worse with respect to New York, Rome, greater Boston, and the suburbs. Years later (a few months after finishing Falconer), Cheever would speak of the “stamina and courage” that Chekhov had shown in attempting to “vary his magic,” late in his career, by traveling thousands of miles to the penal colony in Sakhalin. Cheever could achieve much the same thing without leaving town, and doubtless something of the sort came to mind when the Sing Sing chaplain, George Kandle, approached him that spring after a reading. There were some two thousand inmates, said Kandle, and only six instructors. “Tomorrow I go to Sing-Sing to talk with the warden about giving a course in the short story to convicted drug-pushers, etc.,” Cheever wrote Ben. “If you don't hear from me you'll know what happened. Clang.”
Thirty or so curious felons showed up for the first class, where