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By Root 3913 0

the cordial invitation of the Bulgarian government and look forward very much to meeting the charming people of this friendly country and to admiring their celebrated landscapes.” Tanya Litvinov was especially grieved by Cheever's attitude, and told him so in no uncertain terms. “You may have forgotten what I am like,” he benignly replied. “Last summer the Romanians scornfully described the people of Bulgaria as possessing nothing but fresh vegetables and new, crusty bread. That's what I'm looking for, that and some escape from the fact that Falconer is an enormous success here and that it is not in my disposition to be famous.” But Litvinov was far from the only friend who found such “innocence” appalling; at home, Eleanor Clark and Red Warren thought Cheever had “succumbed to [the] flattery” of a despicable regime, and regarded his conduct as “ignorance to the point of real evil, almost.”

The truth was somewhat less dire. One is bound to repeat that Cheever was not a politically minded man, and he really did adore the warm, demonstrative people of Russia and Eastern Europe (“we embrace and shout in unison ‘La grande poésie de la vie’ “)—the whole “agrarian unspoiled literary culture” that had embraced the universal themes in his work. Cheever wished to show his solidarity with such people—and bask in their adulation—without alienating political leaders with principled gestures one way or the other, which in any case had proved worse than futile. In 1969, when Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, Cheever had found the “stupidity and clumsiness and brutality, in fact, of the Russians” so egregious that he'd agreed to sign an international letter of protest with fifteen other cultural figures (chosen for their popularity in the Soviet Union), including Sartre, Updike, Arthur Miller, Stravinsky, Vonnegut, and Günter Grass. “And that was absolutely the end,” he remembered. For years, all letters from Litvinov and others were stopped, and various Russian artists vanished from the public eye with scarcely a trace (“I guess the most conspicuous proof of their loss of freedom of speech is the fact that Yevtushenko, who has the biggest mouth I've ever seen in my long life on the planet, has been silenced,” Cheever observed in 1976).

Besides, the Bulgarians really had been extravagantly flattering. Theirs was the only Soviet-bloc country publishing Falconer in translation—the Russians had banned the book because of its “perversions”—and moreover the Bulgarian ambassador, Lyubomir Popov, had paid a personal visit to Cedar Lane for Easter dinner. After a game of football (Susan and Philip Schultz versus Ben and the ambassador's chauffeur), Popov was conducted upstairs to the library, where he “unbuttoned his vest and cut a fart,” according to Cheever. Tipsy with bourbon, the man bragged about how adroitly he'd dealt with LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and so on, until Schultz said something mildly deflating (“Oh, so American presidents come and go, but you outlast them all?”) that infuriated His Excellency. Mary, Ben, and Susan tittered, but Cheever looked grim and later admonished Schultz for speaking out of turn.

On his return from Bulgaria, Cheever promptly reported to Litvinov that the trip had been “thrilling”: “What political or social significance can one attach to swimming in the Black Sea? The English-speaking group consisted of Lord Snow, Gore Vidal and Anthony Powell [but not Updike or Caldwell]. I am, of course, a sentimental man, but it truly seemed to be a display of our capacity to enjoy one another. No more.” No more for Cheever, anyway, who was particularly delighted to be reunited with Yevtushenko—not a whit worse for wear after his recent disgrace with Soviet officialdom. The flamboyant poet danced with Mary Cheever on a Black Sea beach, and dazzled his admirers wherever he went—rather to the disgruntlement of Gore Vidal, or so it seemed to Cheever, who liked to tell the following story:

We kissed the mayor [of Sofia] and headed for the mountains in the limousine. This was Gore, Zhenya [Yevtushenko],