Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [310]
CHAPTER FORTY
{1975-1976}
ALONG WITH HIS OTHER SORROWS, Cheever was pretty much broke. “I am so deeply in debt that even if the novel at hand is completed and successful I will remain poor,” he reflected in his journal. “I am close to tears; I mean this.” It got so bad that he even had to give up his coveted membership in the Century Club. A club official had written him an admonishing note in regard to (as Cheever put it) “[his] sordid deliquesence [sic] as a dues payer,” and Cheever drafted a reply accepting his fate as persona non grata, at least for the time being: “However I shall pay my back dues when I've finished the book at hand and—if the book succeeds—apply for re-admission.” Such matters reminded him, all over again, that Falconer would have to be a best seller to justify its advance and cover his debts, and never mind sending Federico to college and keeping his own body and soul together while trying to get his work done. Fortunately, at the darkest hour, Candida Donadio managed to negotiate a forty-thousand-dollar movie option from Paramount on the strength of a single published chapter in Playboy.
It was now more imperative than ever that he finish Falconer, which remained at a rather formative stage after almost five years of occasional contemplation. “I still claim that my muse is around but there isn't much evidence,” he wrote, two months after Smithers. While he was looking in old journals for “situations that might be connected,” it occurred to Cheever to confect another hodgepodge (à la “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear”) that could be sold for ready cash. The result was “The Folding-Chair Set,” which Cheever explained to one befuddled reader as “the story of [his] life told by innuendo”—a pompous way of saying that it was a collage of random anecdotes about his family loosely sutured by the recurring phrase “we were the kind of people.” Among the material incorporated into the story (much of it also used in Falconer) was an account of the time his drunken father had pretended to ponder suicide while riding a roller coaster, as well as several derisive glimpses of his brother—portrayed as a boorish oaf who insists on summoning waiters by clapping his hands, who springs to his feet and doffs his Tyrolean hat when a band in Kitzbühel plays “Home on the Range” (which he mistakes for the Austrian national anthem): “I mention this only to illustrate the fact that we were the sort of people who endeavor to be versatile at every level,” the narrator dryly remarks.
William Maxwell was planning to retire from The New Yorker at the beginning of 1976, and Cheever would later claim that “The Folding-Chair Set” had been meant as a “finger-exercise” to commemorate the occasion. It seems rather doubtful, however, that he intended any such tribute when he first submitted the story, or that Maxwell would have accepted it even if he had. Happily, Maxwell was out of the office for a few weeks, and so the story fell in the hands of one of his successors, the twenty-eight-year-old Charles (“Chip”) McGrath, who idolized Cheever and recognized his prose immediately despite the protective (or tongue-in-cheek) pseudonym he'd used for such a “trifling piece”: Mrs. Louisa Spingarn.* Though McGrath realized the story would have been rejected if it were by almost any other writer, at the time he and others were simply thrilled to have an actual submission from Cheever, to whom the magazine had been paying an annual “first-look” fee for many years without any real expectation of receiving further work.
Cheever was almost giddily pleased that the young man had recognized his style and bought the story, though his pleasure turned to anxiety when he arrived on the nineteenth floor to meet McGrath for lunch. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded of the receptionist, who plainly didn't, causing Cheever to throw a “minor fit” until he spotted a mentally impaired messenger from the old regime: “There's a familiar face!” During lunch, McGrath was struck by how hard Cheever