• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4161 0

wife, Tina, had gone to the trouble of birthing a lamb, feeding it only the best grass, assisting in its slaughter, and roasting it to perfection in a pastry crust for their distinguished guest—in return for which she received a bit of muttering condescension. As she remembered with lingering pique, “[Cheever] sat on his pompous ass at the dinner table saying ‘Imagine eating d'agneau en croute in Iowa!’ He probably never tasted a finer one unless he had eaten at the four star restaurant out in the wilderness of Southern France where they gave me the recipe.” Likewise, when Exley tried to talk him out of reading a story as lengthy as “Justina”—with worsening laryngitis yet—”John drew himself up to his full five-feet-five and in his insufferable tones proclaimed something like, ‘Ah've read “The Death of Justina” in Moscow, Leningrad, Stockholm [etc.] … and if it's good enough for those places it's damn well good enough for Iowa City.’” Sure enough, his voice began to fail around the middle of his reading at the Clapp Recital Hall (“Hoarseness is not, thank God, a symptom of Clapp,” he remarked), and afterward he complained to Exley about the size of the audience: “I thought you said Styron packed the place!” In the company of students, however (especially Exley's twenty-one-year-old girlfriend), Cheever was at his funny, self-effacing best, and in hindsight he viewed the visit as an almost unqualified triumph. “That was great fun although I do worry about all the tabs you picked up,” he wrote Exley. “We seem to have something basically in common, something more lambent, I hope, than hootch and cunt.”

Indeed, Cheever had found Iowa City so “serene” that he considered teaching there the following year, when Bourjaily was planning to take a sabbatical. Jack Leggett, the workshop director, was all for it, and everything seemed in order except a few “imponderables,” as Cheever put it: “I don't know what to do about this house, [and] my marriage is in the annual dumps …” Mary, to be sure, was not keen on the idea of going to Iowa with her drunken husband, who moreover was likely to kill himself if allowed to go alone. The discussion escalated into mutual threats of divorce, until finally it was decided that they would all go their separate ways in the fall of 1973: Mary would remain in Ossining, while Cheever went to Iowa and Federico to boarding school (Andover). “Who cares?” Cheever said when friends wondered how he'd manage alone in the sticks. “Feed me to the pigs.”

APART FROM THE USUAL DOMESTIC CRISES, nothing much happened to Cheever between his Iowa trip in November 1972 and the publication, in May, of The World of Apples, which coincided almost exactly with a long-overdue brush with death. One episode in the interim seems exemplary. That spring he was invited to give a reading in Provincetown, where he'd spent many happy days in his youth. “It's easier to get to Egypt,” he replied by postcard to Molly Cook, chairman of the Fine Arts Work Center, who replied that she and writer Roger Skillings would be happy to retrieve him in Ossining. What ensued, as Skillings wrote the poet Stanley Kunitz, was “a kind of nightmare.” Following directions provided by Cheever, they arrived at the house of a “large florid whitehaired man” who appeared to be in the process of repairing TV sets. “Who do you think I am?” he finally asked, having served them jelly jars of vodka. They told him. “Oh no,” he said, “I'm Johnny Curtains, Cheever lives up the road.” They found Cheever in high dudgeon and drunk, as he'd gulped a great deal of gin while waiting for them to arrive. He soon calmed down, however, and insisted on reading them a story from his advance copy of The World of Apples; with Mary and Federico in bemused attendance, Skillings lit a joint and settled back to listen. “I can tell it better than I can read it,” Cheever said after an “interminable” attempt to negotiate the text, and so he did while his wife devised a map to the Watergate Inn in Croton, where Cook and Skillings were to spend that Friday night.

Cheever had been drunk