• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4067 0

admirers seeming to realize that the time was ripe to rally support for such a superlative (and evidently discouraged) writer, especially after the beating he'd taken over Bullet Park. “Yes, this collection may give comfort to Mr. Cheever's detractors,” wrote his old friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily Times. “But it also gives aid to those of us who have always thought of him as our foremost writer of short fiction, as our most telling explorer of the geography of the heart.” Both the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World featured extravagant front-page encomiums, by Larry Woiwode and D. Keith Mano respectively: “Cheever is as much a master of the short form as Chekhov, and should be recognized as such,” said Woiwode; Mano likened the author to Proust. Cheever was naturally gratified: “Apples seems to have done much better than Bullet Park,” he wrote a friend. “I got a spate of reviews yesterday in which I am praised, all across the country, for my sophistication, my insouciance, my elegance and charm.”

The moral support came at a good time. For several months now, along with the usual dizziness and chest pains, Cheever had found it harder and harder to breathe; it was especially bad in the morning, though he'd conveniently discovered that whiskey alleviated the problem somewhat. On the morning of May 12, however, he seemed to be suffocating: coughing uncontrollably, he lay abed quaffing Scotch and smoking cigarettes in hope of some relief, until his family persuaded him to go to the Phelps emergency room. As his doctor, Ray Mutter, remembered, “All the cardiologists and internists and everybody were swarming all over him to try to get him out of [heart] failure.” Cheever was found to be suffering from “dilated cardiomyopathy,” an often alcohol-related condition in which the left ventricle fails to eject blood at a proper rate, drowning the lungs and causing the heart to enlarge. Had he waited a little longer to go to the hospital—another drink, another cigarette—he would almost certainly have died.

For three days he lay calmly recovering in the Intensive Care Unit, and then (“like clockwork,” said Mutter) he lapsed into delirium tremens, which had killed his unfortunate grandfather Aaron. Because Cheever's heart was too weak to withstand heavy doses of tranquilizers, he was in for a long bout—almost five days—during which his foremost hallucination was that he was in a Soviet prison somewhere in Moscow. He thought the intercom speaker above his bed was a Bible they wouldn't let him read, that the rumbling food carts were prisoners being trucked from one place to another. In a panic, he yanked tubes out of his arms and lashed out, physically and otherwise, at anyone who came near him. Susan brought him a copy of the Times Book Review with the Woiwode rave on the cover, which Cheever thought was a confession he was supposed to sign; he cursed her and threw it on the floor. Meanwhile Federico patiently explained, over and over, that they weren't in a Moscow prison (“if you've ever been to Phelps Memorial Hospital,” he later remarked, “you'd know that's not the most implausible hallucination you could come up with”), and when his father demanded proof, he retrieved a sign written in English: “Oxygen: No Smoking.”

However in extremis, Cheever did not forget his own importance* and was very high-handed toward the hospital staff (or Soviet jailers, as it were). Susan worried that he'd be treated roughly if left unattended, and insisted that at least one family member stay by his bed whenever possible. Even the estranged Ben was pressed into service (over his wife's objection): at one point he noticed his father groping about the sheets for a cigarette; then the latter espied what he thought were the lights of a tavern (actually a nurses’ station), and asked his son to trot over and get him a pack of Marlboros and a martini. As Ben wrote in the Letters, his father's voice became “haughty and crisp” when Ben tried to explain where they were:

“Are you completely without imagination and initiative?