Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [339]
So Max went back to Oswego, while Cheever lingered in Saratoga for a few weeks, brooding about things (“And so what I seem to be afraid of is the voice of the world. … ‘Have you heard? Old Cheever, crowding seventy, has gone Gay. Old Cheever has come out of the closet. Old Cheever has run off to Bessarabia with a hairy youth half his age’ “). Every afternoon, he and Anne Palamountain—the Skid-more president's wife—would go skiing at the state park, and on Sunday they attended early services at Bethesda Episcopal and then had breakfast at the Gideon Putnam. “Every woman needs a man who's a friend she can tell anything to,” said Palamountain, and Cheever was such a friend to her. This, however, did not work both ways. Once, when Cheever suggested that two of her other men friends—a dance critic and his athletic companion—were a couple, she answered as follows (so he reported to Max): “ ‘That,’ Anne said sternly, ‘is a purely platonic friendship. If it were anything else I would not entertain them.’ “ Therefore Cheever told the woman funny stories and kept his brooding to himself. Later she learned of his bisexuality and felt “terribly guilty” when she remembered how “troubled” he'd often seemed: “But we never discussed it, or else I was too obtuse to pick up on his hints.”
CHEEVER WAS AT LOOSE ENDS in his work, too. The only matter that seemed “urgent” enough to write about was his own bewildering alienation, so he clipped newspaper articles about the possibility of life on other planets (“WATER DETECTED OUTSIDE EARTH'S GALAXY”) and vaguely considered writing a novel about “cosmic loneliness.” But his main project was a teleplay titled, tentatively, The Hounds of Shady Hill. In December he'd had lunch with Jac Venza, an executive producer at New York's public TV station WNET, who wanted Cheever to adapt three of his stories for television; Cheever had no objection to other writers’ adapting his stories, but the only project that he personally wanted to pursue “as a lark” (larky as opposed to lucrative, since he'd only be paid Writers Guild minimum) was an original teleplay As luck would have it, Venza thought this perfect for their projected series, American Playhouse, which would feature original works by American writers—a riposte to those who thought public television “[spoke] only with a British accent.” Cheever had long toyed with the genre, from his Signal Corps days to his abortive work on Life with Father and even The Rules of the Game, and now there was a rather compelling personal reason as well: he wanted to collaborate with Hope Lange, which just might add a spark to their tired affair and reinvigorate his interest in the “procreative world.” “I'm really working on the WNET show in which you play all the parts,” he wrote Hope in April. “I really want to write a smashing show within the confines of traditional TV and I also want to work with you.” So that, at least, was something to look forward to.
Meanwhile his literary life seemed disproportionately concerned with applauding the successes of Saul Bellow. On his return from Saratoga in late February, Cheever presented Bellow with the Gold Medal of Honor from the National Arts Club—only nine months after he'd presented Bellow with the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Bellow, of course, was the living author Cheever most admired (as he'd recently reiterated in the Times), all the more so since Humboldt's Gift: “Saul's genius is inestimable,” Cheever had reflected while reading the novel. “With Saul on the team the game is real and the stakes are not self-aggrandizement … fame and wealth.” So naturally it was a pleasure to see genius rewarded, especially