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By Root 3938 0

He repeatedly asked that the situation be remedied, but found the administration “quite mysterious” at best: the head of the English department wasn't returning his calls (he finally met the man by accident, standing at an adjoining urinal), and George Starbuck of the writing program seemed alarmed at the very sight of him. “I did not rise to the occasion of John's troubles,” Starbuck later admitted, “did not effectively love or help him, floundered stupidly between catering to him … [and] pursuing some coherent plan of stern-but-supportive intervention.” And yet his wariness was at least somewhat understandable, since Cheever—quite apart from his disastrous alcoholism—had given signs of being very high-maintenance indeed. First he'd demanded that Starbuck find him suitable lodgings, then he let it be known that Iowa had “provided” him with a graduate student who served as a kind of secretary-cum-mistress-cum-nurse, and he expected BU to do the same. As Starbuck recalled, “There was (carefully) plenty of twinkle in his voice … as he urged this. Pixie mischief. But he did urge it, and tell me he needed just that to keep him on an even keel.” Starbuck, however, balked at “playing procurer” even for so distinguished a colleague, whose invidious comparisons between Iowa and Boston usually ended with “ … and every night [in Iowa] there was someone to suck my cock!”

For the first month or two, Cheever was able to function as a teacher. Precisely because he drank before classes (vodka mostly, since it was relatively odorless), he remained fairly alert and often held forth in an engaging way. His remarks tended to be incisive, and sometimes led to worthwhile tangents about his own writing and what seemed to work for him. He found his students “responsive and contentious”—if not especially talented—and made a point of learning their names quickly and finding out what sort of books they liked (Gravity's Rainbow was the rage, and Cheever also professed to like it—or rather he liked it better than Vonnegut's work, which was almost always the other favorite). He assigned “drills” as ever, though these were received with even less enthusiasm than at Iowa. As an exercise in “describing the indescribable,” one of his students—a semi-famous novelist's son, who fancied himself experimental—read an endless list of synonyms for “Death” from Roget's Thesaurus. A long silence followed. “It's a found object,” the young man explained. Cheever threw his head back and studied the ceiling. “From now on,” he said at length (“sound[ing] like Alfred Hitchcock after a pint of gin,” one student observed), “all found objects shall be designated ‘FOs.’ “

Not surprisingly, Cheever couldn't be bothered to read his students’ work outside of class, seeming to think it was more than sufficient that he had to listen to it. Asked about a large manuscript on his coffee table—a novel, as it happened, by the semi-famous novelist's son—Cheever closed his eyes and shook his head; when, however, he returned the manuscript (exactly one week after the epigone had given it to him), he declared it “perfect”: “Submit it to a New York publisher and they'll publish it right away!” (“I never got it published,” the author reported thirty years later.) All graduate students, in fact, were required to get two professors to read and sign off on their thesis work, and whenever they managed to run Cheever to ground and ask for his signature, he was always happy to give it. “Oh yes very good,” he'd mutter, when they asked if he liked the work in question.

Whatever remained of Cheever's willpower was entirely reserved for showing up; outside the classroom, he barely functioned at all. His most constant companion (at least that first semester) was a graduate student named Laurens Schwartz, who'd been one of Red Warren's protégés at Yale; perhaps because of this connection (and/or the manuscript he purported to have read), Cheever had recommended the young man for a full scholarship at BU. Schwartz endeavored to return the favor. Since Cheever “had a tendency to walk out of his apartment