Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [320]
Still, he looked forward to a packed auditorium at his reading, for which he'd gone to the trouble of writing a long meditation on Chekhov titled “The Melancholy of Distance.” As he reminded his audience, “I am, after all, one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov; but then I have been described as the Budd Schulberg of New England.” Cheever made light of the vogue among New Journalists and the like to claim that modern reality “outstrips the inventiveness of the imagination”: under Alexander III, he pointed out, there had been “bands of whooping Cossacks riding on the ghettos to murder men, women, children and infants”—and yet Chekhov had not been discouraged, even amid “the darkness of a censored press,” since, after all, his subject was the “deep giving and taking” between human beings of any historical moment. Cheever concluded with a splendid instance of Chekhovian obliquity from Uncle Vanya—the one time in this very personal, anecdotal lecture that he bothered to quote the master at all (evidently from memory)*: “The [final] scene is one of sadness and despair. Then Astrov goes to the map on the wall and exclaims: How hot it must be in Africa. … Here is a new and thrilling element brought to the universality of loneliness, here is Chekhov's mastery of the melancholy of distance. The line is written for an actor and it can be laughed or wept or dropped like a stone: its force remains unchanged. How hot, etc.”
Cheever knew whereof he spoke, and once again he ended such an evening alone in his room: “I meet no destroyer,” he forlornly recorded; “I may never. … What I remember most vividly, most usefully is leaving the reception in my honor. I would like to pluck someone from the gathering for my pleasure but I will not, I cannot. … No liquor, no sex, no love, no friendship, nothing but a cigaret and The New York Times.” As it happened, the graduate student who was most admiring of Cheever's work (the only one, indeed, who knew much about him at all) was a married woman named Frederica Kaven, and hence the two were thrown together for much of the weekend. Cheever tried to be a lively companion, but when Kaven remarked how “funny” his stories were, she noticed a definite flicker of sadness in his eyes—as though he was thinking that people remembered him, if at all, as funny.
Kaven, at any rate, was elected to drive him to the airport, where he was informed that his flight had been delayed because of engine trouble. “I'm taking the bus!” he cried in alarm. That left some three hours to kill. For a while they chatted over coffee at Kaven's house, and finally Cheever was standing in a tavern across from the bus station, trying (unsuccessfully) to get a sandwich; Kaven never forgot how a dusty ray of sunlight seemed to be pointing at Cheever—a frail, tweedy figure among the afternoon drinkers (“a person who never had a chance,” she thought for some reason). After he kissed her goodbye on the cheek, Kaven paused on her way to the parking lot: “I'll be looking for your next book!” she called back to him. “What's it called again … ?” “Falconer!” he shouted vigorously.
ON THE FIRST DAY of 1977, Cheever predicted (with greater accuracy than he might have imagined) that the new year would prove to have “some true newness to it.” There was Falconer, of course, as well as a week at the University of Utah in late January—a prospect that struck Cheever as “deliciously promising”: as he'd been reminded over the past few months, illustrious writers are hardly novelties at prestigious eastern colleges, but out in the desert of Utah he seemed more likely to find a student aching for his patronage. And yet, again, he was almost startled by his own hideous excitement: