Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [325]
Q: Did you ever fall in love with another man? I mean, because of the homosexuality in Falconer, people are certainly going to ask you that.
A: The possibility of falling in love with a man seems to me to exist. Such a thing could happen. That it has not happened is just chance. But I would think twice about giving up the robustness and merriment I have known in the heterosexual world.
Q: Well, have you ever had a homosexual experience?
A: My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of 9 and 11.
Thus Cheever seemed to brush the matter aside with an easy quip. In fact, as Susan recalled, the moment was quite a bit more fraught than the text suggests. “I have had many, Susie,” said Cheever—then, marking the startled look on her face, he added with the usual tremor of laughter, “all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of 9 and 11.”
The Newsweek cover was scheduled for the March 14 issue, and in the meantime the early reviews of Falconer seemed to indicate that critics were either staunchly in favor or staunchly opposed. A few days after Susan's interview, Cheever was contacted by the Saturday Review: John Gardner's piece was so enthusiastic that they were sending a photographer to Ossining. “John Cheever is one of the few living American novelists who might qualify as true artists,” Gardner raved. “His work ranges from competent to awesome on all the grounds that I would count: formal and technical mastery; educated intelligence; what I call ‘artistic sincerity,’ which implies, among other things, an indifference to aesthetic fashion … and last, validity, or what Tolstoi called … the artist's correct moral relation to his material;” as for Falconer, it was “an extraordinary work of art.” Cheever wrote in his journal that Maxwell had taken credit for this coup (“Bill calls then to say that this was his doing”), and it was also Maxwell who gently alerted him to the “noncommittal” Time review. Cheever rushed into town looking for the February 28 issue, until he found one in a drugstore. The photograph, he thought, was “ghastly,” and the review wasn't much better. “Falconer is strong on feelings,” wrote R. Z. Sheppard, “even though they often overflow the novel's loose structure.” Not only was the structure loose, but the strong feelings tended to be expressed in terms of “sententious observations” about the suffering of prisoners and so on: “Another sententious observation would be equally true,” Sheppard sternly pointed out (as if the book in question were a sociological tract): “crime's victims are no strangers to grief.” Absorbing this, Cheever had a “bad few hours,” but finally was able to persuade himself that Time had “shit on [the book]” by way of undermining the imminent Newsweek feature.
For the crucial daily Times review, Cheever had petitioned Lehmann-Haupt to ensure the services of John Leonard, lest the job fall to another Times reviewer, Anatole Broyard: “[Leonard] is sympathetic and I can't forget what I've been told about Anatole's review of Bullet Park.” Cheever presumed to ask such a rare political favor in exchange for having agreed—at Lehmann-Haupt's urgent request—to write a Thanksgiving piece for the Living section, “Thanks, Too, for Memories.” Unhappily for Cheever, Harper's had already commissioned a review from Leonard, and the review was bad: “Whatever happened to suburbia?” Leonard wrote, proceeding to take Cheever to task for deserting his proper subject in favor of distasteful, sensational material. “It is as if our Chekhov … had ducked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing the cape and leotard of Dostoevsky's Underground Man.”* Since Leonard wasn't available for the Times review, and Broyard