Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [290]
Apart from Cheever's drunkenness, snobbery, and age (almost fifteen years older than Gurganus's father), the young man had other qualms. Cheever, he sensed, longed to play Pygmalion—to introduce him to people who mattered, take him places, nurse his talent—but, as Gurganus put it, “I was much too vain to be Mrs. anybody, even Mrs. Cheever.” And finally, of course, he'd picked up on Cheever's hints about hockey and so on, the odd jaundiced look at his hips, and could well imagine what it would be like to wake up with such a man. “The only men I know who live together as lovers I cannot take seriously,” Cheever wrote two years later (while determinedly looking for a male lover). “It is one thing to tear off a merry piece behind the barn with the goatherd but one wouldn't, once your lump is blown, want to take it any further.”
CHEEVER'S NEED TO RATIONALIZE his homosexual impulses—and explain them to the world, if possible, in some acceptable form—led to one of his most incoherent stories, “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear.” Almost three years earlier, he'd made a note in his journal about “the vast and sternly concealed abyss of unrequition in my relationships to my brother, my father and my friends.” The abyss that separated Cheever from the “legislated world” seemed a reasonable premise for a story about the transcendence of one's secret fears, beginning with the image of a literal abyss: the continental shelf around Curaçao, a “submarine cliff” that drops thousands of feet into blackness—“a metaphor for something mysterious in [the narrator's] own nature.” What follows are five vignettes that are likely to strike even the most sympathetic reader as haphazard—and no wonder, since Cheever mostly patched them together out of various passages in his journal. The second vignette, a distasteful encounter between the narrator and his brother Eben, would later be used in Falconer. However, the vignette that mattered most in terms of Cheever's purpose—where he finally comes to the point, as it were—concerns a homosexual encounter between a traveling salesman and a hitchhiker, both eminently “normal” men under normal circumstances: “The ungainliness of two grown, drunken, naked men in one another's arms was manifest, but Estabrook felt that he looked onto some revelation of how lonely and unnatural man is and how bitter, deep, and well concealed are his disappointments.” The abyss resides in us all, then, and such means of bridging it are only seemly. The story ends with a coda in which a feisty old lady recovers an antique chamber pot from two thieves after a high-speed chase—the point being that people are capable of great things once their fears have been conquered, or something to that effect.
There was no question of showing the story to The New Yorker, and it was possible that even Playboy might balk for once. Only two weeks before, however, as luck would have it, Gordon Lish at Esquire had offered “three thousand for anything, sight unseen;” for “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear” he was willing to pay twenty-five hundred, which Cheever was presumably happy to get. When he reread the story two years later, he found it “disjointed and not very good”—though he reversed himself in 1980, offering it to a publisher of expensive vanity editions, Stathis Orphanos. Then at the height of his fame, Cheever had decided the story succeeded, as few before it, in making homosexuality “understandable and valid in the realm of everyday life,” as he explained to a friend. The story was therefore “quite important” to him, and he was “delighted” to have it reprinted in