Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [280]
* As an example of the latter, the collection's most recent story consisted of three trite, unrelated anecdotes that Cheever had dumped on Playboy under the title “Triad” (reprinted in The World of Apples and The Stories of John Cheever as “Three Stories”). The first sketch is narrated by a middle-aged man's stomach, and—except for the elegant prose—reads like a funny story swapped among Rotarians.
* Along with the rave reviews for The World of Apples, that same week he was also nominated to become one of the elite fifty in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
*”The doctor tells me that I cannot drink for the rest of my life,” Cheever wrote that summer. “I have a cardiomyopathy and a drop of alcohol in my bloodstream would be dangerous. I can always go to another doctor.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
{1973}
CHEEVER WOULD LATER INDULGE in a certain amount of gloating over what a great time he'd had in Iowa, but the first weeks were grim. He was installed in Room 436 of the nondescript Iowa House, where the rooms were precisely those of a smalltown Midwestern hotel—the stark gumwood furniture, the beige walls, the black and white TV bolted to the dresser. Cheever was so lonely he wrote letters to almost everybody he knew, including the Dirkses and Tom Glazer; he'd sit in taverns wistfully observing the tables full of lively undergraduates, none of whom seemed inclined to accept his company.
Knowing hardly a soul, he spent those first days traipsing around town—pausing every so often to catch his breath and worry about his heart—en route to the movies: Last Tango in Paris was a lot of pretentious “rubbish,” he thought, so he crossed the street to watch a Western and presently Godspell (“a highly estimable piece of work”). Afterward he'd sometimes visit an Irish tailor over a Chinese restaurant to check the progress of a navy three-piece he'd ordered (his “best suit” for many years); then, as evening fell, he'd either take an Italian lesson or go to the odd social engagement—the latter a dreary ordeal for a shy man who was trying to curb his drinking. Ron Hansen, who'd signed up for Cheever's workshop, became acquainted with his teacher at the writer John Irving's house (where Hansen lived in the basement and babysat Irving's children). Cheever had come to dinner wearing his new bespoke suit with an Academy badge in the lapel, and Hansen politely asked what the badge signified. “He explained the American Academy of Arts and Letters to me,” Hansen recalled, “as if he were prepared to be patient about anything now that he'd accepted a visiting professorship.”
Life improved once he actually began teaching, and no wonder: all the best graduate students had assigned themselves to Cheever's workshop, and if a missile had hit the class, at least three of the leading lights of that generation would have been eliminated—Hansen, T. (Tom) Coraghessan Boyle, and Allan Gurganus. Once he settled in, Cheever would find such a concentration of talent invigorating (“when we bring off a seminar it takes three men to get me off the ceiling”), but at first it was a lot more daunting than teaching convicts. “We were a bunch of ragtag hippies,” said Boyle, “and he had no experience with such people”—or so it seemed. Cheever, wearing his tidy new suit and badge, would look dismayed at the “critical brawls” that took place during a typical workshop session, and by way of imposing a level of civility, he'd bring his accent and elegant manners to the fore. Gurganus remembered that Cheever was initially “very nervous, and the more nervous he got the more hauteur he affected and the more gargly and Katharine Hepburn-y his talk became.” Gurganus, a worldly young man in his mid-twenties, was able to put his teacher somewhat at ease: while in the navy, he'd discovered a copy of The Brigadier and the Golf Widow aboard the USS Yorktown (“because of the military title