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friends, Denny had betrayed him, and Max had carefully distanced himself since that meeting in Saratoga. “Your letter was so circumspect and humorless that I haven't known how to reply,” Cheever wrote Max in March, taken aback by what might have seemed a rather sudden lack of warmth. As for Hope Lange—never one for deep intimacies (“I don't really know you at all,” Cheever had recently remarked)—she too was gone for the time being. One day that spring, she casually announced that she'd sublet her apartment and was leaving for the Coast in the morning. “What are you doing tonight?” Cheever had asked, concealing his slight chagrin. She was having dinner, she said, with the playwright Robert Anderson. “Robert Anderson wrote Tea and Sympathy years ago,” said Cheever, “and has no other distinction.”

* Cheever is alluding here to the observations (circa 1966) of David C. Hays, which evidently continued to rankle. The “carapace” or “social veneer” that Hays attributed to Cheever (quite insightfully) was, said Hays, primarily meant to “dissemble” Cheever's “basic hostility and alienation,” though perhaps Hays had also suggested that it dissembled his impotence, what with Cheever's constant talk about Hope Lange and the like.

* That is, by harming Max's writing career in some way, though it seems doubtful Cheever would have done anything worse than decline to help Max further.

* Bellow's grace was such that he'd mentioned a number of other American writers who were also “acceptable” candidates: Mailer, Ellison, Wright Morris, and Cheever.

* See pages 318-21.

* Three years later, another scholar (R. G. Collins) happened to mention Coates's dissertation during a visit to Cedar Lane, whereupon his amiable host “flared up”: “Oh he's totally discredited, he's not to be trusted at all! He went to see Fred, found him down and out, and got him to say a lot of lies …”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

{1978-1979}

WITH THE SUCCESS of Falconer, many in the press wondered how it was possible that the short stories of (arguably) our finest living practitioner in the genre could be almost entirely out of print.* Newsweek called it “a scandal of American publishing,” though Cheever himself was undismayed. He prided himself on not looking back, and when Gottlieb suggested they publish an omnibus collection, Cheever seemed puzzled. “Why do you want to do that?” he asked. “All those stories have already been published.” But Gottlieb was certain the book would be a great success, and he was happy to take care of the whole thing: “I'll read every story you ever wrote,” he said, “and I'll make a selection and show it to you, and any way you want to amend it will be fine with me.” Cheever agreed, without much enthusiasm, though he expressly forbade the inclusion of anything from his despised first collection, The Way Some People Live, or, for that matter, anything previous to the stories collected in The Enormous Radio.†

Cheever's reluctance to live in the past—to save letters, to speak of painful memories except in the privacy of his journal, and so on—included a profound reluctance to revisit his own work, an impulse he compared to “some intensely unhappy relationship with a mirror”: “The work is done and to return to it seems idle in the strongest sense of the word—a demeaning sense of time squandered.” Sometimes he claimed that he hadn't even bothered to read over Gottlieb's selection (“I would read three lines, and if they were all right …”), though in Time magazine he admitted that he had, in fact, overcome his usual aversion out of sheer curiosity: given the hundreds of stories he'd written in the past fifty years, he'd “totally forgotten some of them” and found reading them again a surprisingly pleasant experience. Indeed (as he wrote in his journal), he was occasionally “bewildered” by his own enthusiasm; while reading “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” for example, he laughed out loud and finally began to cry (“I miss being interested in my work”).

Gottlieb had suggested he write a preface, which proved a small masterpiece of shrewdness