Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [341]
At any rate, herewith the Telephone Story, which was based—very loosely—on the occasion when Cheever had asked Maxwell for a raise in December 1963.* As Cheever related to Kornbluth (my own comments appear in brackets):
“I recall … that at the time of my first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle [actually a few months after he completed the Scandal], I had no money, I had holes in my shoes, it was raining [snowing?], and I was coming down with a cold. I had published nine stories in The New Yorker that year [circa the Chronicle, Cheever published five New Yorker stories in 1956, one in 1957; he published five in 1963, when the incident actually took place], and they had won every prize you can get [?]. … So I went to The New Yorker and said, “What will you give me for a piece of the book?” [By the “book” he presumably means the Chronicle—several installments of which Maxwell enthusiastically accepted for the magazine—but in any case that wasn't the vital issue in 1963.] … Bill Maxwell said, “I can't tell you.” I said, “I can't work that way.” He said, “All right, I'll tell you,” and he made me an offer of, I think, $2,000. And I said, “Bill, I can get more.” “There's the phone,” he said [well-meaningly, as Maxwell would have it]. “Try.” I said, “How uncivil,” and I went downstairs and called my agent.
“She phoned me in the morning [she phoned him a few minutes later, via a pay phone on the street] and said, “I've tried one magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and they've offered $25,000 [$24,000 for a first-look agreement and a minimum of four stories a year, not for a “piece” of The Wapshot Chronicle]. Should I try somebody else?” And I said, “No, let's rest on that.” It was terribly funny because The New Yorker called and asked if, by chance, anyone had offered more money [actually Cheever had promptly returned to Maxwell's office and informed him of the Post offer, whereupon Shawn and Hawley Truax were summoned to remonstrate with him]. I said someone had, so they gave their counteroffer, which was a key to the men's room and all the bread and cheese I could eat [not exactly]. And I said, “Well, what the hell, I'll stay with The New Yorker [true].”
Apart from the vindictive element, it's possible Cheever had gotten on a raconteurish roll and simply told the story for laughs, the way he usually told stories—for the sake of entertainment rather than posterity—and, for what it's worth, Cheever himself was furious about the Kornbluth article. But anyway the damage was done: Maxwell and he stopped talking, and a number of mutual friends took Maxwell's side (Newhouse, for instance [rather happily for Cheever, perhaps], no longer made himself available for lunch). And yet it bears repeating that Maxwell had blocked his friend's Gold Medal some two years before the Telephone Story—and really, taken altogether, it was neither man's finest hour.
TO A REMARKABLE DEGREE for a writer of his reputation, Cheever was still ignored by academia, and so he'd been rather excited to learn that Dennis Coates had returned to the States, at last, to defend his dissertation—the first book-length study focusing exclusively on Cheever's novels. Coates's approach had changed drastically, however, as a direct result of that episode in the woods four years earlier, which had led to an epiphany of sorts: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I've got to go back and reread all the books and really get it this time’ … and there it was! It was all there. So that really allowed me to put the thing in perspective for the dissertation.” The “thing” was Cheever's bisexuality, which for Coates had become a sort of skeleton key unlocking the real meaning of Cheever's work. “My life has always been an open book,” the latter calmly replied, perhaps failing to consider the full implications when Coates mentioned his discovery. In any event, after receiving his Ph.D. from Duke that spring, Coates eagerly mailed his subject a copy of the dissertation