Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [314]
THAT SPRING (1976), Cheever was so busy with Falconer that he could hardly bother to write letters, and what few he wrote tended to be on the same subject. “All writers suffer terribly from delusions of omnipotence and I am in the throes of this,” he wrote Litvinov, who'd since defected to Hove, England, near Brighton. “I feel, at the moment, that if I wanted to go to Hove I would simply have to stand on the sunny terrace, flap my arms and ascend. I would, of course, break my neck.” Standing on that sunny terrace with his daughter one day, Cheever happily announced, “He gets out. Farragut gets out.” The discovery that his fictional alter ego would soon be free—from prison, from addiction, from various kinds of fear—made Cheever himself feel, perhaps for the first time in his life, that everything was going to be absolutely all right:
I think the work is successful and that I may be rich and famous. I claim not to care. I can always scythe my fields and walk in the streets. It is the strangeness of this excitement that I must examine. Why should it seem so strange to succeed? I do not mean pride or hubris. I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials.
After finishing the novel on Good Friday, he went to Trinity Church in Ossining “to say [his] prayers,” and was “nearly run over by Donald Lang” as he departed. Somehow it seemed a good augury.
Once the manuscript was out of his hands, however, Cheever began to fret: “Around four I think that Falconer is a poor fantasy, that it will interest only a few cranks with corresponding fantasies.” He was even sensitive to the response of his typist, who failed to express a proper regard for the work at hand (“I am accustomed to tears and declarations of love”) when asking Cheever where to send the bill. His mood continued to darken as he awaited the publisher's verdict. He wrote Coates that he “[didn't] really give a shit for what anyone else thinks”—yet wrote in his journal of a recurrent daydream in which Gottlieb came to Ossining to kiss him on the mouth (or, conversely, called to say that he and Donadio “feel that there is a great deal of work to be done …”). After a long week of silence, Gottlieb's actual reaction was, if anything, an anticlimax. According to Cheever, the editor quipped that Falconer might be “too noble to sell,” and though he was moved to say the usual tactful things, too, on the whole he seemed neither overwhelmed nor terribly disappointed. “I want a friend, an enthusiast, a lover,” Cheever reflected, “and he is none of these.”
By the end of the summer, Cheever's sense of omnipotence had decidedly waned. Charles McGrath had found nothing in Falconer that could be used as a New Yorker story, though he considered the novel “a miracle” and was nothing but generous in his note to Donadio: “It's not very often that we get a story from a novel, and I sometimes worry that when we do it must be because there's something wrong with the novel. In any case, there's not a thing wrong with The FALCONER [sic]; it's splendid, and I think it will be a great success.” It was one of the kindest rejections Cheever ever received, and would help cushion the blows that followed. Gordon Lish at Esquire (still riding high after publishing excerpts from Capote's notorious work-in-progress, Answered Prayers) returned a heavily blue-penciled manuscript to Cheever, then rejected the novel altogether. But the big money, of course, was in movies, and Cheever was particularly anxious to hear from Paramount via his new Hollywood agent, an associate of Dona-dio (“[he] screams a lot, says blah blah blah and seems to take it up the ass,” Cheever observed); he soon learned, however, that Paramount had not renewed its option on Falconer—this without any apparent negotiation on the part of Cheever's agents, who'd quarreled