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letters, in the hope of receiving even more. “I think of myself as a fat boy,” he wrote in his journal, “who answers all his fan mail with loving letters with the unseemly ambition, it seems, of gathering to himself more friends than his competitor enjoys.” Nor were readings and book-signings the sort of morbid chore they'd been in the past; on the contrary, Cheever was avidly curious to see what kind of readership a book like Falconer attracted. “I'd be honored,” he said, when the proprietor of a local bookstore—who'd hitherto found Cheever “unapproachable”—diffidently offered to host a signing the week of the Newsweek cover. (“They expect hundreds,” Cheever gleefully wrote Weaver. “Mary plans to appear, towards the end of the afternoon, frightfully drunk, disheveled and with a torn dress that shows one breast. ‘A Star is born,’ she is going to scream, ‘but only I know that the prick has toe-jam.’ Confusion. TV cameras.”) A year later, when he was more famous still, Cheever hired a limousine to take him to Caldor's, a vast department store where he signed books near a woman “demonstrating a food-chopper”: “The customers and I are utter strangers,” he mused. “We laugh. We blush. I sign a book. Here is that experience of intimacy we try so hard to explain. We are, in short, not alone.”

He even consented to a modest book tour, which included a stop at the Greater Boston Book and Author Luncheon. Boston, he decided, was not such a bad place when viewed from a high window at the Ritz (“That the struggles of my late adolescence were battled out on the streets is impossible to recall”), and the various TV, radio, and print interviewers treated him like a favorite son. At the book luncheon he sat on the dais with the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge and Garson Kanin, each of whom stood to give a little speech plugging his book. “My name is John Cheever,” said he when his turn came, “I was born in Wollaston.” Then he sat down. During the autograph session that followed, Falconer was the only book that sold out, and among the mob around Cheever's table was a group of Thayer students brought by Headmaster Benelli, who'd last seen Cheever, two years before, standing on Commonwealth in a drunken stupor. This time Cheever was “cordial but shy,” chatting briefly with students and signing a copy of Falconer for the Thayer library. When the school librarian wrote to thank him, she alluded to his local legend by urging him to return to Thayer and “snatch a smoke” on the grounds. “I am very happy to think of my novel in the library at Thayer and when I next come to Boston I shall certainly visit my old school,” Cheever replied, with gracious insincerity.

By far the most controversial item on his agenda was an appearance at the International Conference of Writers at Sofia, Bulgaria, in early June 1977. A few months before (the day after his return from Utah and points west, in fact), Cheever had received “a delegation of Bulgarians who came down the icy driveway carrying wine, brandy and red roses,” he wrote Litvinov. “They were like the jolliest of my friends in Moscow.” Cheever would always be susceptible to such jollity: it heartened him to reflect on his high reputation in the Soviet bloc—where he was known as “the naive optimist”—and, especially in later years, he was so keen on returning that his family joked he would be “the first western writer to defect to the East.” Not everyone was amused, however. That year the Bulgarian president, Todor Zhivkov, had brutally cracked down on social unrest in his country: some forty thousand party members had been purged, and a number of dissident writers hauled off to jail. Amnesty International called for a boycott of cultural activities in the country, while Soviet poet Vladimir Kornilov had appealed directly to Cheever, Updike, and Erskine Caldwell to renounce their participation in the writers’ conference. “Bulgaria seems quite dark,” Cheever wrote a friend. “The Russians called yesterday to ask exactly what my position will be. I keep saying that Mr. and Mrs. Cheever have accepted with pleasure