Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [300]
* Speaking here in a 1994 BBC documentary, Updike was doubtless paraphrasing Cheever's remark about him in a 1965 letter to Exley (quoted on page 350), which Updike had posthumously discovered on page 245 of the Letters: “[Updike's] work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.”
* Much of an early draft of Falconer was written on Cheever's “Bay State Road” stationery which doesn't necessarily mean he wrote it in Boston; probably he used the stationery simply because he had a lot left over. Be that as it may the draft affords a fascinating glimpse of how Cheever worked when inspired. Page after page is virtually unpunctuated, unparagraphed, unrevised in any way, yet the actual words are almost identical to the published version.
*If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: Putnam, 1974).
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
{1975}
THOUGH HE'D ALMOST DIED over the holidays, Cheever returned to Boston for the spring semester and the situation duly deteriorated. Sadly he reported to the Friday Club that the place was “straight asshole” and his students had become “sluggish.” He'd persuaded Updike to visit his combined classes for a two-hour Q&A session that Cheever abruptly terminated after less than an hour (evidently startling Updike), because his overawed students had proved unresponsive. “You had an opportunity to ask John Updike questions,” he subsequently told them in a seething voice, “and nobody said a damn thing.” After that, he seemed to give up. He went through the motions, more or less, but didn't bother to disguise his drunkenness or do much in the way of teaching. He also kept a rather flexible schedule. “Should we go looking for him?” his worried students murmured one day when he was fifteen minutes late for class. An expedition was forming when they spotted their teacher shuffling past the door. “Mr. Cheever?” they called. “Mr. Cheever?“ An elegant voice floated down the hall: “Ye-esss …?” “We sort of talked him back into the room,” one student recalled. “He returned with this big grin and went around the table kissing all the women and shaking hands with the men.” That was a relatively good day. More and more Cheever seemed utterly unprepared, and would either read one of his own stories or just sit there looking depressed until his students gradually drifted away. One youth expressed his contempt by removing his shirt, climbing on top of the circled desks, and stalking around the room while Cheever gazed at him in quiet puzzlement.
On bitter-cold days he could be seen walking bleary-eyed along Commonwealth, wearing only a tweed jacket with the collar turned up. When hailed by acquaintances or well-wishers, he'd start violently, as though awakened from a nightmare, which usually served to discourage further intercourse. Peter Benelli—the Thayer headmaster who'd invited Cheever to give the commencement address in 1968—was stopped at a red light when he noticed the school's most famous alumnus standing at the corner, unmoving, his haggard face vacant and staring. Benelli worried that he'd be picked up by the police, which almost certainly happened once or twice, though it appears Cheever went to Massachusetts General under his own steam. Dr. Robert Johnson, a heart specialist, remembered the way Cheever bridled at being treated like a common drunk: not only was he a reputable novelist, he informed Dr. Johnson (and later Elliot Brown, the hospital's chief of social services), but he also enjoyed considerable stature among the families of Boston. The latter illusion seemed to gain importance as a sense of his own literary distinction waned. While lunching in February with a colleague, Dean Doner, he mentioned that The New Yorker was giving its fiftieth-anniversary party that day. “You're not going?” asked Doner, with suitable amazement, whereupon Cheever bitterly admitted he hadn't been invited: “I've written more goddamn words for them than anyone