Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [297]
The family member who deserved most of the credit for keeping Cheever alive was his brother, Fred, who called every day and met John for lunch at least once a week. At the age of sixty-nine, Fred had begun to mellow somewhat after many fitful years of trying to find himself—to carve out a niche worthy of the name Cheever. A few years before, he'd left idyllic Boulder after his children had taken up their lives elsewhere, and now he was back on the South Shore, selling ad space for various radio stations and weekly newspapers—one job after another, each ending with the inevitable clash between Fred and his employers, than whom he always knew better. “Your [job] title and year in which you assumed it,” the Dartmouth Alumni Department benignly inquired in 1971, to which Fred snapped, “Communications Time-peddler, 1970—don't be silly.” Nor was it only station managers and newspaper editors and alma maters who had to be straightened out, but also the president of the United States and his benighted minions. “Dear Mr. Nixon (sic),” read a typically opprobrious salutation to a 1970 letter in which Fred demanded to receive a refund for overpayment of his income tax, lest he withhold future taxes in protest against the war in Vietnam. Two years later, he also berated John Ehrlichman about an “inept” comparison the man's boss had made between modern America and Disraeli's England: “This, to my mind, is the heart of Mr. Nixon's own problem. He has no sense of continuing world history, no weltgeist, no historical perspective as it really is and not as he wishes it to be.”
Fred's own Weltgeist (he remained something of a Germanophile) was much affected by the campus protests of the time—or rather vice versa, as he saw it, since he regarded himself as a kind of proto-hippie who was “a college drop-out way back in 1926;” in the years following, to be sure, he'd lost his way amid the “corporate chairs” at Pepperell (albeit as “one of the young centaurs … [who had] introduced many of the current advertising and marketing methods of the industry”), but eventually he'd “walked out” because he was “stultified” (as opposed to being fired for drunkenness), and now was living life on his terms: a free man. Thus Fred explained the background of a book he completed in 1970, Who Are the Revolutionaries? The Coming Revolt Against the Middle Class, which he envisaged as essential reading for “the 18-25 college guy and doll who wants … some justification for his or her protests.” The agent Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown decided to “encourage” Fred on the basis of a lukewarm report from one of their readers, who'd found Revolutionaries “potentially an excellent manuscript,” though it didn't quite hold together (“I don't catch the connection between the discourse on Henry Adams … [and] the diatribe against the middle-class”).
Duly encouraged, Fred concluded it was only a matter of time before he was climbing the best-seller lists. A few weeks after he received that encouraging report, he wrote his son in Hawaii, “If the book delivers the money I expect, Honolulu is on my itinerary.” Such was his confidence that he began planning other books and articles, rather than revising his previous book as suggested. Of a piece titled “Quo Vadis Advertising,” Fred advised Knowlton to sell it to The New Yorker since, after all, his name was Cheever (“Perhaps I've delineated in non-fiction what my brother has been writing about all these years”); he