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By Root 3936 0

given Cheever's personal fondness for the genius in question, though the Nobel Prize was perhaps too much of a good thing. On the bleak autumn day when Bellow was named the winner, Cheever took a dejected walk with Gurganus through Central Park, starting a little when they came to the statue of the nineteenth-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt: “Oh my God!” he said. “They're already putting up statues!” But once his initial dismay had passed, he gladly conceded the “exemplary and tireless grace” Bellow had shown as laureate*—this while presenting that first gold medal in 1977, an occasion he remembered when presenting the second in 1978: “Saul was in Jerusalem and the medal was accepted by Tom Guinzburg, his publisher, and was, I like to think, the first time in the history of literature in which a writer has enthusiastically given a publisher a piece of negotiable gold.”

That same year—that same month, in fact (February 1978)—Cheever had been passed over for the Academy's Gold Medal in the Short Story, a decision that Cowley protested as “outrageous”: Cheever was the “best short-story writer” in the country, he wrote the committee, whereas, of the three writers nominated—Updike, Peter Taylor (the eventual winner), and Mary McCarthy—the last wasn't even “essentially a short-story writer.” Cowley was subsequently informed that, as a matter of fact, Cheever had been suggested by every member of the committee; however, since he'd already received the Howells Medal, it “was mentioned” (passive voice) that perhaps they should “spread the honors around.” Cowley was emphatically unpersuaded, pointing out that at least three previous Gold Medal winners—Faulkner, Cather, and Welty—had also received the Howells Medal. Finally it fell to Cheever himself to enlighten his old friend:

The difficulty may be with Bill Maxwell who, having put me above Updike for years, now feels that I have had more than my share of everything and should be rebuked. It doesn't matter to me at all. … I gave a reading last night that included THE SWIMMER and I would much sooner have written that story—without a gold medal—than anything that has so far been accomplished by my dear friend Updike.

The difficulty had indeed been with Maxwell, and the motive was rather dubious, as he later admitted (“This has remained somewhat on my conscience”). He explained the matter as follows: While vacationing on Cape Cod during the summer of 1977—that is, a few months before he met with the nominating committee—Maxwell had been contacted by a Times reporter, Jesse Kornbluth, who was writing an article on Cheever. “I put [Kornbluth] off until I had called John to find out how he felt,” Maxwell remembered. Cheever professed to take a dim view, and therefore Maxwell declined to be interviewed. When the article appeared, however, Maxwell was furious to learn that Cheever himself had cooperated fully with Kornbluth—telling the infamous Telephone Story (about which more below) in the bargain, and making Maxwell (as he later put it) “look like a heel”: “I thought, Why should I go on furthering John's career when he tells these whoppers about me?”

One can well imagine Maxwell's anger over the Telephone Story. After all, it was primarily Maxwell who had first seen to it, forty years earlier, that Cheever's work appeared regularly in The New Yorker; it was Maxwell who had insisted that The Wapshot Chronicle receive the National Book Award; it was Maxwell who had brought yellow roses to Cheever's bedside when he was ill, who had rarely failed to give heartening advice and encouragement when it was most crucially needed, and who did believe, incidentally, that Cheever was the best American short-story writer. All that said, however: the invidious Kornbluth article (“The Cheever Chronicle”) did not appear in the Times Magazine until October 21, 1979—almost two years after Maxwell suggested that the Gold Medal nominating committee “spread the honors around.” In other words, it is more accurate to say that Cheever's Telephone Story was in reprisal for the Gold Medal imbroglio