Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [321]
The head of the writing program at Utah, Dave Smith, had encouraged the more promising students to submit work in advance of Cheever's visit, since their famous guest had agreed to spend a few hours a day in individual conferences. Perhaps the best writer in the program, however—a Ph.D. candidate in his early thirties named Max Zimmer—wasn't interested: he'd satisfied his curiosity by reading a couple of Cheever's stories and hadn't found them congenial; besides, he'd begun work on a vast, Pynchonesque novel about the West that had recently caught the eye of E. L. Doctorow, no less, so he figured he didn't need Cheever's help. But Smith insisted he arrange a conference, and finally took it upon himself to submit one of Zimmer's stories, “Utah Died for Your Sins,” which Cheever did, in fact, find “very exciting.” Thus Zimmer was presented with a fait accompli: “Cheever's getting out of a seminar at two o'clock,” said Smith, “and I want you to be there to meet him.” Reluctantly he complied, appearing before Cheever at the appointed hour—a shaggy, bespectacled young man wearing cowboy boots and accompanied by a small Airedale on a leash. But what enchanted Cheever most, perhaps, was that Zimmer “had none of the attributes of a sexual irregular;” what he'd always wanted, after all—as Gurganus put it—was “somebody who was literary, intelligent, attractive and manly, but gay on a technicality in a way.”
Arguably Zimmer was not gay in even a technical sense—but then, as Dave Smith pointed out, “there was some difficulty in knowing who the real Max was.” Already he'd gone through a number of curious changes in his life. His parents were devout Mormons who'd emigrated from Switzerland when Zimmer was a boy. At age nineteen, he'd gone back to Europe as a missionary and discovered a love of writing while editing (irreverently) the mission's newsletter. He soon returned to Utah, however, having been excommunicated for a sexual indiscretion—a fact he was compelled to confess (“gruesome”) to his congregation back home. Then, a year or so later, he endured the ordeal of reinstatement so he could marry a Mormon woman and, not incidentally, win back the affection of his father and namesake, to whom “nothing mattered more than [having] good Mormon kids.” For a while Zimmer was able to play that role, until almost the day of his college graduation with a degree in engineering: “The sixties were breaking open,” he remembered, “and engineers were getting jobs building toasters for Motorola in Arizona, stuff like that, and that's not my life.” So once again he turned his life upside down: “I left the church, divorced a perfectly good woman, and went full-hog into English and writing.”
The story that Cheever had claimed to find exciting, “Utah Died for Your Sins,” would later be included in The Pushcart Prize III: Best of the Small Presses, but otherwise seems hardly in line with Cheever's tastes, given that it is frankly experimental and lacks what Cheever was apt to call velocity. It opens with a disquisition on a deer-killing method that involves embedding a razor in a block of salt, so that the animal obliviously bleeds to death without injury to its internal organs. Next is a long description of a man customizing a car, then using the car to romance a woman until the affair goes vaguely wrong. At last we encounter a character named Seymour Utah, who may or may not be the bereft mechanic: Utah has thief-proofed his motorcycle helmet by sticking razors in the padding, but apparently forgets and claps the helmet on his own head—whereupon, like a deer or a Christ figure, he slowly bleeds to death from this crown of thorns while riding into the desert. What does it mean? “It is a story about a man who allies the mysteriousness of women to the mysteries of machinery,” Cheever conjectured.
With a momentous air, Cheever invited the author back to his room at the Lake City Motel, an uncommonly grungy place