Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [324]
Max was perhaps relieved to know as much, though it hardly mattered by then. The die was cast. Everybody knew he was bound for the fabled East: Sponsored by John Cheever to spend three months at Yaddo! Hero of the Utah writing program! And even if he were to have second thoughts—and he had them—what possible reason could he give for staying? The only thing that remained to be done for his Ph.D. was a dissertation—his novel—and he could write that anywhere. He was thirty-two. It was time to leave home and hope for the best.
“How cruel, unnatural and black is my love for Z[immer],” Cheever wrote that spring. “I seem to mean to prey on Z's youth, to drive Z into a tragic isolation, to deny Z any life at all. Love is to instruct, to show our beloved what we know of the sources of light, and this may be the declaration of a crafty and lecherous old man. I can only hope not.”
IT WOULD BE HARD to overstate how important the success of Falconer was to Cheever. It wasn't simply another Bullet Park-like critical debacle he feared, but also the awful prospect that his novel would be perceived as even remotely confessional. Meanwhile some of his most well-meaning colleagues had mixed feelings. Malamud had congratulated Cheever on the “extraordinarily good detail” of the whole prison experience, while alluding to the curious resemblance between Farragut and the author, and admitting, worse, that he didn't “deeply feel [Farragut's] suffering or growth of compassion.” (Graciously—and rather tellingly—Cheever agreed: “There is some spiritual ungainliness about the man that makes him barely worth saving.”) Cowley's response was similar: he thought individual aspects of the novel were “extraordinary,” but Farragut didn't “seem to [him] all of a piece.” Both writers apparently had a hard time believing that such an otherwise civilized—not to say familiar—personage as Farragut could also be a bisexual, incarcerated, fratricidal drug addict. What Cheever clung to, in moments of terrible doubt, was the wholehearted endorsement of the present Nobel laureate: “Well, I expected the best and that's exactly what I got in Falconer,” Bellow wrote. “It's splendid. … You should sell hundreds of thousands of copies, unless the country is farther gone in depravity than I think.”
Bellow wasn't wide of the mark, oddly enough, though this wasn't entirely due to the country's discerning readership. Rather, Susan Cheever's influence at Newsweek—coupled with the ecstatic enthusiasm of their reviewer, Walter Clemons—had moved the editors to consider putting a writer on their cover, something they permitted only once every two years or so.* Cheever had been summoned to lunch at the Newsweek Building, where he was careful to eat no more than a single lamb chop (“I didn't want them to think I was a rube or hungry”) while the editors asked him a lot of questions and eyed him rather doubtfully. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Then one of them said that with my face on the cover there would be a drastic drop of newsstand sales but then another man said this was true of all serious writers. After this I went out on a local and called Knopf to tell them the news and the PR man said, ‘I've been successful.’ “
The Newsweek feature would include an interview between the subject and his daughter (“A Duet of Cheevers”), for which Susan came to Cedar Lane on a cold, rainy afternoon in February. For five hours the two sat in front of the fireplace, and Susan, in her introduction, evoked the Cheeverian ambience of the scene