Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [313]
By then Cheever had pretty much forgotten the thing. Falconer was going so well that he'd treated himself to another vacation in late January, heading to Stanford for a reading while Federico (soon to graduate from Andover) toured the campus. Cheever's minder was Dana Gioia, a graduate student and lifelong fan*; in a curious coincidence, he'd been at Harvard the year before, when he'd arranged for Cheever to read at a “weekly literary table” for undergraduates. Unfortunately, the well-attended event coincided with Anne Sexton's suicide, and Cheever decided to stay home that night (as he might have done in any case). “Intoxicated by the news of Cheever's [Stanford] visit,” Gioia remembered, “I mentioned it to some undergraduates, but soon learned that none of them knew who he was. Undismayed, I decided I would show them and went off to the university bookstore only to discover that all but one of his books were out of print.”
Cheever behaved, in the best possible sense, like a man who realized his books were out of print. “Absolutely perfect,” he declared, when Gioia showed him his “tiny concrete-block cubicle” at the Florence Moore dormitory (Federico was staying elsewhere with Andover friends). Cheever had nothing much to do until his reading, and each day Gioia would find him sitting alone in the common room, reading and smoking, happy to go for a walk or a drive or whatever else Gioia had in mind. Such were his radiant good spirits (“the joy of having been resurrected from the dead,” as Gioia put it) that freshmen in the dorm actually enjoyed having their meals with Cheever: “His conversation never excluded them,” said Gioia. “It was intelligent without being intellectual, informed but not pedantic. And he was very funny. After all, as he once said, ‘You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.’ “
What little star-treatment Cheever might have expected was further precluded by the unexpected arrival of Saul Bellow, whose wife, Alexandra, was considering a position in the math department; Bellow's presence implied that he might be interested in a package deal, though Cheever intimated to Gioia that what Saul really wanted was to get away from his previous wife in Chicago. The two writers had rarely been further apart in stature: Cheever was virtually forgotten, whereas Bellow had just published Humboldt's Gift and would presently win the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. Also, Cheever could hardly have been more gracious and charming, while Bellow seemed to suffer whosoever had the temerity to approach him. “Literature is not a competitive sport,” he snapped (quoting a friend) when Gioia asked him what contemporary fiction writers he admired; having put the youth in his place, Bellow abruptly continued: “Wright Morris, J. F. Powers, and a man standing in this room … John Cheever.“ The latter was doubtless flattered, but hardly awed. As Bellow prepared to give an impromptu reading, Cheever conspicuously relinquished his front-row seat to an old lady; then, sitting on the floor, he whispered to Gioia, “I can hear Saul, but all I see are a shiny pair of reading glasses peeking over the microphones.”
When it came time for Cheever's own reading, he was introduced by the head of the writing program, Richard Scowcroft, whose “elegiac tone” confirmed the general impression that Cheever was washed up. And yet he seemed to enjoy himself all the same. His duties at Stanford discharged, he flew to Los Angeles and spent a few days sitting around the Weavers’ heated pool, where the old friends took turns delivering mock eulogies of each other. He also had a pleasant lunch with Hope Lange: “That her voice may be shrill,” he wrote in his journal, “that her looks may be passing, that there is very little correspondence in our tastes are things I know and don't care about at all.” He could hardly wait to get home and tell family and friends all about it: