Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [316]
A POSTSCRIPT OF SORTS: In the midst of mourning his brother—on June 1, to be exact—Cheever received a phone call around 4:00 a.m. “This is CBC,” the man said. “John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?” Cheever burst into tears. “Oh, was it personal?” the man asked. “He was,” Cheever sobbed, “a colleague.“
One of the signs that Cheever was mellowing with age and sobriety was his ever more gracious, even tender, attitude toward Updike, especially after his rival's kindnesses in Boston. Cheever had recently nominated him to the Academy (“He is forty-three but one might put excellence above age”), and after Cheever received the tragic news that night, he couldn't get back to sleep. “He was a prince,” he wrote in his journal, and began drafting what appear to be formal remarks for the press: “I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition.” The eulogy proceeded (“John, quite alone in the field of aesthetics, remained shrewd,” etc.) until it began to get light outside and Cheever left off to feed the dogs. Finally he called his daughter at Newsweek and asked her to check the story with the CBC and the Boston and Ipswich police. Updike, it turned out, was home in bed. The call was a fraud.*
For the rest of Cheever's life, he felt more and more easily reconciled to the fact that he and Updike were conjoined in the public imagination, for better or worse; he even rather enjoyed (“without presuming any familiarity”) the idea that they'd been “chosen to play out the roles of a father and son.” In 1977, Cheever attended the wedding of Updike's daughter Elizabeth and always made a point of dropping warm little notes to his colleague on the occasion of a new book, or to make some deprecating comparison to his own work or reputation: “In yesterday's mail I was cordially invited to Notre Dame on the strength and mastery of the Maple stories,” he wrote Updike in 1979. “I think you don't know me well enough to know how vile I can be but in this case I was retiring and pious.” He also repeatedly told the press that Updike was the “most interesting writer of his generation”—the last three words being perhaps the crucial nuance, bringing us nicely back to Cheever's ambivalence, which never did quite fade. When Updike's novel Marry Me was published shortly before Falconer, Cheever all but prayed on his knees for its failure, and two years later he was furious to learn that “Updike's fourth-rate novel [The Coup]” had a larger first printing than his own Stories.
* Also the name of the benefactress in Falconer who (“IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON PETER“) pays for the inmates to be photographed next to a Christmas tree.
* Gioia went on to a distinguished literary career, becoming chairman of the NEA in 2002.
* A quite reputable novelist (who'd been drunk that night, and who will remain nameless here) later confessed to making the call—or rather calls plural: he'd also phoned Updike's first wife and perhaps certain others.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
{1976-1977}
SHORTLY AFTER FINISHING Falconer, Cheever arranged a summer vacation in Romania, courtesy of Travel & Leisure. He gave various reasons for this: his Romanian friend Petru Popescu, he said, was “such a striking example of egocentricity that I have wanted to check on his origins;” also, he had a lot of time on his hands before the publication of his novel in February 1977, and little appetite for writing in the meantime, or wrangling with editors over how to make Falconer “more readily appreciated by a larger readership.” But the main reason was simpler than all that, and applied just as well to the other travels Cheever would undertake in the months ahead: he was lonely. Days passed without his wife's saying a word to him, and when