Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [282]
Mostly, though, Cheever was the soul of kindness and tact, and was even prepared to forgive his students’ dislike or (more often) total ignorance of his own work. “I'm terribly out of mode,” he said again and again. “Nobody reads me anymore.” The young Tom Boyle agreed: like so many of his peers, he worshipped at the feet of “experimental” writers such as Barthelme and Barth, and particularly liked to invoke the latter's Sot-Weed Factor. Finally—diffidently—Cheever allowed that he didn't much care for Barth, and even had the temerity to suggest that he himself was experimental. “All writing is ‘experimental,’ Tom,” he said. “Don't get caught up in fads.” Boyle inwardly scoffed and continued to regard Cheever as “an old stick in the mud”—until he finally got around to rereading Cheever's work with care. To this day he's still reading it, though it's been a long time since he's read any Barthelme or Barth. “Anyone can write a Barthelme story,” said Boyle. “No one can write a Cheever story.”
It was all the same to Cheever—most of the time. “Look in my closet,” he'd say (wearing his bespoke suit). “Two shirts and two pairs of wash pants.” Then he'd shake his head with a sad little chuckle. As for all the patronizing young geniuses at Iowa, well, let them have their fun. “Ah yes, I loved your book,” he told the poet Michael Ryan, who'd recently won a prize. As Ryan wrote many years later in “Meeting Cheever”:
And you, inconsolable bell-bottomed cliché of wounded-by-the-world angry young poet who became me as strangely as years become today, replied, “The book's not published yet.”
And so the poem ends:
… Where was the future with its bloody claws? Brilliant John Cheever is a handful of ash. I would be finished with what I was.
• • •
CHEEVER SOON GAVE UP his occasional sobriety. Jack Leggett liked to tell of the time he'd been called to the phone at a party where Cheever had already drunk “twelve or thirteen martinis;” the caller proved to be none other than Cheever's doctor: “Whatever you do,” the man said, “don't let him drink. He could drop dead at any moment!” After less than a month on campus, Cheever was visited by his old Signal Corps buddy John Weaver, who was stopping in Iowa on his way home from a research trip. Weaver was under the impression that his ailing friend had gotten sober at last, but the morning after his arrival Cheever insisted they go to a bar, and when Weaver left to catch his plane a few hours later, Cheever was “stoned”: “I left Iowa never expecting to see him again,” Weaver remembered.
Cheever knew he was killing himself, but he claimed to be too depressed not to drink. Over and over, to whosoever would listen, he spoke of how “inadequate” he felt as a husband and father, laying the blame on himself with mawkish insistence, as if it might ease the shame. (Rather like the tippler in The Little Prince, he drank because he was ashamed, and was ashamed because he drank.) On the other hand, he didn't really want to die either. Once, overcome by dizziness, he staggered to the grassy bank of the Iowa River and sat down. It was a crystalline autumn day, and he watched the students walk by as through an impenetrable pane of glass. The “tangible world” was receding, he couldn't even cry out, and this “vision of youth”—so coveted by the helpless observer—would be the last thing he'd ever see. “If