Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [281]
Because Gurganus had an enlightened reverence for his teacher, he was willing to put forth his best effort in completing the menial “drills” Cheever saw fit to assign: “Write me a love letter in a burning building,” he'd say, or “Give me seven or eight disparate objects or incidents that are superficially alien and yet profoundly allied.” This was nothing less than the sort of thing Flaubert had taxed the young Maupassant with, but Iowa students found it annoying: they were working on their own novels and stories, and didn't like being treated as if they were rank amateurs. Gurganus, however, submitted homework that was good enough to publish: “Seven Details the Major Critic of the Show Felt to Be Overexplicit” would later appear in The Atlantic Monthly, as would another story about an incestuous brother and sister seeking Aztec funeral urns in a burning building. As for Cheever, his constrained manner soon dissolved under the force of his enthusiasm. “Marvelous! Marvelous!“ he'd gush. “Oh gosh that's invigorating …” Nor was it simply a matter of soigné former sailors. “You're wonderful,“ he told the shaggy Tom Boyle. “We're equals!”
It was different when he didn't like a story. Gurganus later worked with Stanley Elkin—a “genius teacher” who provided a study in contrast: “[Elkin] was like an architect looking at a building and telling you exactly where the stresses were,” said Gurganus. “John would either say yes or no. Either it would do or it wouldn't do. He said yes to me more often than he said no, but it was frustrating when he said no, because it was hard to get him to tell you what could be changed.” The most disheartening part was that he tended to be right, though it often required a lot of painful labor in the dark to discover why this should be so. Gurganus admitted that his own no stories were, in fact, buried at last in files somewhere (“with all the Christian rites and honors”), and even Cheever's formidable contemporary Hortense Calisher conceded the “ruthless” accuracy of his literary judgments: “Come now, Hortense, that's a fudge,” he'd say when she'd protest that she was still reading a book and hence uncertain as to its merit. “You can read a page and tell if it's alive or dead.” In workshop, Cheever would express rejection with a vaguely grim poker-face, perhaps a slight shrug, which was tantamount to a loud and insulting harangue. And if a student made the mistake of pressing him as to why a story didn't work, or (worse) how it might be improved, Cheever would respond with a sort of pensive sarcasm: “If that character is supposed to be gay” he might say, feigning careful deliberation, “maybe you could show as much by having him lick his fingers and wipe his eyebrows …” As Hansen explained, “He meant to suggest that the story was such a mess that even a detail like that wouldn't help.”
Whether or not Cheever liked a student's work also seemed to depend on whether he found the person attractive in the comprehensive sense intended by his mother-in-law, Polly, or the “metaphysical” sense, as Gurganus would have it: “Just as you either got a story the first time or you didn't, people were either attractive or unattractive.” Cheever ran the workshop like a “very nice cocktail party,” and he liked people to amuse him. One woman, however, was definitely unamusing to Cheever. She was fortyish, had two children, and was overweight and dowdy and wore funny glasses. Once, when Cheever was reading a story to the class, she apologetically remembered that she had to go pick up her children at school. Cheever lowered his book and gave her a hard stare. “I am not going to stop reading this story for you.” There were