Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [27]
By far the worst of it was Cheever's heartless treatment of his mentor, Harriet Gemmel, the woman he'd slurred as a balding Galsworthy connoisseur. “[T]ragic indeed,” said Southworth, who knew only too well how wounded the woman had been. Thayer staff and students, the citizens of Braintree and beyond—almost everyone was aware of the pains Miss Gemmel had taken with the obnoxious youth, and was equally up in arms.* So they remained. “Personally, had I the choice, I should not invite John to visit or to speak at the Academy,” protested his old teacher Grace Osgood when Thayer invited its most famous alumnus to give the commencement address in 1980 (the year his grandniece Sally Carr graduated). Cheever, said Osgood, had made too many “inaccurate” and “cruelly unkind” statements “about gentle, gracious, bright people who were truly trying to help him.”
As it happened, Cheever had no interest in accepting the invitation. In fact he'd been asked before, in 1968, when Headmaster Peter Benelli had paid a personal visit to Ossining in hope of persuading him. As ever, Cheever presented his guest with a whacking martini and then grew solemn. His memories of Quincy, he said, were “very painful,” and he would never return to the area for any reason.† As for Benelli's eminent predecessor—well, the very name put Cheever in a pious mood. “Without Stacy Baxter Southworth,” he liked to say, “I would have ended up pumping gas in some place like Walpole.” Such piety depended somewhat on his audience, however. To a fellow disgruntled alumnus, Cheever mentioned an old photograph he'd seen of Uncle Stacy: “[He was] wandering under some Elm trees in a light rain performing some traditional and foolish ceremony,” Cheever wrote. “God have mercy on his soul.”
* Her first shop was opened at 9 Granite Street in 1926 and later moved a block or so away, to 1247 Hancock Street, where it remained for many years.
* John Cheever's wife thinks Frederick may well have written such a letter—not as an impudent gesture but rather because (like both his children) he became a great writer of eccentric letters in later life. Also, he was drunk a lot: “Perhaps he was depressed that day,” she opined, “and thought, this is one thing I can do—give my body to science.”
* Thayer tuition was $i80 a year. Frederick made the first payment of sixty dollars on November 6, 1926, after which all payments were made by his wife.
* One of Cheever's friends was Francis Steegmuller, arguably Flaubert's greatest translator into English. Asked in 1956 why he was working on a new Bovary translation, Steegmuller explained that the current Modern Library edition (translated by Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling) was a “really poor job with awful mistakes”: “My friend, John Cheever, loves it, though,” said Steegmuller. “He's read it so many times in that way that he doesn't want it changed or improved on. It's his idea of ‘Bovary’ though he knows it's absurd. Well, that's my goal, to convert John Cheever.”
† Tanya Litvinov, Cheever's Russian translator and intimate correspondent, remembers a curious impression on meeting Cheever for the first time in 1964: “I thought at the moment he was a Charlus for some reason.” The oddity of the thought came back to her many years later, when Cheever's bisexuality was revealed after his death.
* When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949, Cheever showed he could still channel Hemingway