Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [335]
As for patronage, Cheever continued to hold up his end of the bargain, more or less, though he believed (as he wrote Max) that “to engage one's interest in the welfare and destiny of a younger writer is to eclipse and constrict one's own gifts.” The easy part was using his influence to get Max in the door: he gladly wrote recommendations for jobs and fellowships and so forth, and, more important, arranged for Max to have lunch that summer with Chip McGrath—who had, in fact, found “Utah Died for Your Sins” to be “quite promising” (“a mess, but a promising mess”). McGrath felt genuinely hopeful that it was only a matter of time before Max managed to “crack The New Yorker,” especially with the guidance of John Cheever, no less.
But that guidance proved to be rather grudging and vague. “When I would bring him a piece of writing,” Max remembered, “I was expecting him to actually sit down with me, the way I did with my students, and go through a story line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Details and stuff like that. But he only spoke in the broadest generalities.” Reading one of Max's manuscripts that summer, Cheever commended his protégé's “voice” (“something I first got off a page in Salt Lake”), but was otherwise dismayed by what appeared to be “a catalogue of alienations”—which was pretty much the gist of his criticism, right up to the end. “The contempt you bring to this cast is very unlike you,” he remarked of another effort. “Fiction is very like love in that there is something lost and something gained.” Max didn't quite know how to apply such aphorisms to his work (“I'd turn them over and over in my head for days”)—nor was vagueness per se the most daunting part of their arrangement. For much of his adult life, Cheever sincerely believed that sexual stimulation improved his eyesight and overall concentration; while driving late at night, for example, he used to ask Mary “to fondle [his penis] to a bone” lest he have an accident. As he put it, “With a stiff prick I can read the small print in prayer books but with a limp prick I can barely read newspaper headlines.” And so with critiquing fiction. Whenever Max submitted a manuscript, Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a hand-job; then (as Max noted in his journal) “you [Cheever] take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on your face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion.” Perhaps needless to say, this would eventually lead to a rather formidable case of writer's block.
But most of this was still in the future. That summer, after returning from Saratoga, Cheever began to get the impression that Max was avoiding him—a bit of a blow, because he'd hoped the two of them would spend that fall in Bennington, where Malamud had offered Cheever a three-month teaching appointment: “We would rent a quaint Vermont farmhouse and sleep in one another's arms,” Cheever had proposed. “In the mornings we would work. In the afternoons I would teach and you would ski the down-hill trails.” When Max didn't get back to him about that or much else, Cheever had to scrap the idea, and meanwhile he asked his old friend Rudnik (also at Yaddo) for news of Max. Rudnik replied that Max was getting “the wretch treatment” from his girlfriend Marilyn, and was thinking of paying her a visit in Baltimore, where—after dumping Max—she'd gone to work on her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. (Max had further intimated to Rudnik that his relationship with Cheever had taken a curious turn: “Max had the ability to talk about himself as if he were someone else,” Rudnik observed. “A kind of detached acceptance.”) Nor was Baltimore the only evasive action Max was considering. While at Yaddo he'd met Lewis Turco, director of the SUNY-Oswego writing program, who offered him a job. As Max recalled, “The first thing I thought was ‘Where is Oswego?’ And I looked it up on a map and saw that it was hundreds of miles from Ossining, and I thought, ‘Good. Good. I can get away from him without having