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By Root 4050 0

students that any writer who lowered himself to teaching “wasn't capable of teaching them anything.” When Irving introduced Cheever, the Irishman ignored them both and resumed chatting with his wife about her headache; Cheever tried a few conversational sallies, then said, “Do you know, Mr. Donleavy, that no major writer of fiction was ever a shit to another writer, except Hemingway—and he was crazy?” Donleavy looked blank (Who is this bloke?), and nothing further was said. “Surely you're not going in to see that man read?” Cheever called to Ron Hansen, as the latter queued up on the sidewalk with an SRO crowd. For his part, Cheever repaired to a bar, but later showed up at a party in Donleavy's honor. Disgusted to a find the man surrounded by acolytes, Cheever beckoned Hansen and Irwin into another room: “Let's get people to come to our party,” he said, and began booming “Ho ho ho!” as provocatively as possible.

Finally, in November, largely at Cheever's behest, the Romanian writer Petru Popescu arrived—a man who lived, or so Cheever delighted in saying, on “Julius Fuck Street” in Bucharest (actually Fucik Street). The two had met three years before, in Egypt, on a plane from Cairo to Luxor. Popescu was wearing a “drab commie suit,” and Cheever—very drunk, of course, but farsighted too—paused in the aisle and gazed at him owlishly “Yevgeny!” he said at last. “How are you?” Popescu replied, “I am not Yevgeny Yevtushenko, although you are John Cheever.” The latter, underestimating his popularity in the Soviet bloc, became alarmed: here at last was the secret agent sent to kidnap him for some mysterious transgression against the State. In fact, Popescu was far more anti-Soviet than Cheever. During a long night of drinking in Luxor, he spoke of his longing to defect, though he worried about the difficulty of reinventing himself, Nabokov-like, as a writer of English. Cheever listened sympathetically (“I've rarely seen an individual who was more delicate and more respectful of other people,” said Popescu), and later arranged for the young man to come to Iowa under the auspices of the university's International Writing Program. Popescu made the most of it—smoking pot with students, drinking with Cheever, generally relishing “all the experiences of the West”—and was so impressed that he defected four years later and became a prolific American novelist.

When Cheever went home for Thanksgiving, he was pardonably pleased with how well he, a dying man, had managed for months on his own. He took Federico and Rob Cowley to lunch with the Friday Club, and exuberantly held forth about the “earthly paradise” he'd found in the Midwest: The country was absolutely gorgeous, and he adored the students and faculty and vice versa. His wife agreed to visit him a week or two later, and Cheever did his best to be a good host. Leggett gave a dinner party for the Cheevers and other dignitaries, while Cheever himself arranged an elaborate, well-attended reception at the Triangle Club on campus: “Mary was a very handsome woman and he loved showing her off,” said Gurganus. “Nobody really knew why he was there and not at home.”

“Again I have no idea of where the fault lies,” Cheever wrote after his wife's departure. “I have to ask for a goodbye kiss and that is fleeting.” Perhaps it had something to do with his drinking, which had gotten so bad that he could scarcely conceal it to any seemly degree. His young consort Elaine remembered that she was “looking at [her] watch” by then—that is, counting the hours until she could drive him to Cedar Rapids and put him on a plane. The witty, modest gentleman who'd chuckled at his two pairs of “wash pants” and deferred to the promptings of “Miss Moody” had all but vanished, replaced by a drunken bully whose main topic of conversation was his own unappreciated greatness. For Elaine it was bad enough having to bear the brunt of these rants alone, much less to observe his mortifying rudeness to others. One night he agreed to meet a group of Christian Scientists for dinner, before which he'd spent several hours