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or, as the case may be, how reality persists in the midst of a dream. “The Country Husband” and “O Youth and Beauty!” both adhere to the conventions of realism, more or less, though they involve a highly intrusive, lyrical narrator (“it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains;” “Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues!”), and slightly off-kilter details (a pilot singing “jolly sixpence” as his plane goes down; a man shot dead by his wife while he hurdles the furniture). No wonder the critic Robert Towers—who had remembered Cheever's work as “surrealistic and bizarrely plotted”—was startled to find that relatively few of his stories (the novels are another matter) could properly be classified as nonrealistic. “The Enormous Radio” and “Torch Song” are anomalous among the early stories, followed by a long period of essentially realistic work, until “The Death of Justina” and the increasingly bizarre stories of the mid-sixties—”The Swimmer,” “The Ocean,” “The Geometry of Love”—which began to disconcert The New Yorker until (as Cheever would have it) Barthelme found acceptance as “Shawn's chosen surrealist.” But wait: “Although [Cheever] employs all manner of literary devices,” said Richard Locke in the Times Book Review, “he writes for the most part as if Borges, Barth and Barthelme had never been born. He is a realist with the longings of a lyric poet and a wish for allegorical revelations.” Perhaps, though one can't help wondering how Barth and Barthelme would have written if Cheever had never been born; at any rate, such a generalization suggests the bedeviling impulse on the part of critics (particularly academics) to find a writer's proper niche in the canon or “stream”—easily done in the case of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald (never mind Barth and Barthelme), but not so much in Cheever's. Which may explain why posterity would eventually abandon his cause, at least for the present.

For the rest of his life, though, Cheever had the satisfaction of being duly canonized: he was “the dean of the contemporary American short story,” after all, and had written a few beguiling (if problematic) novels as well. Moreover he was a best seller—a “money player,” at last. “At the risk of sounding pious this is the first time a collection of short stories has been successful,” he observed to a journalist. “I'm hoping the editors of periodicals will begin to regard the short story as a legitimate form of expression.”

UP TO A POINT, Cheever seemed to enjoy the acclaim and keep it somewhat in perspective. “There are a few PR demands on my time,” he wrote Weaver. “Yesterday afternoon Mrs. Vincent Astor sucked my cock in Caldors window for the benefit of the New York Women's Infirmary and afterwards I autographed copies of the collection.” While The Stories of John Cheever was dominating best-seller lists (its striking red cover and giant signature “C” an almost ubiquitous sight among the reasonably literate), Gottlieb gave the author a gala dinner at Lutèce, where Cheever found himself sitting between Lauren Bacall and Maria Tucci (Gottlieb's wife)—”bask[ing],” as he wrote Max, “in that fragrance of beaver we both so enjoy” (“I sit between two lovely women,” he wrote in his journal, “[and] think about my chum”). Bacall had kept an office at Knopf while working on her memoirs, and one day Cheever came in and flirted with her for half an hour or so. “He had an easy time talking to women and was good at it,” Bacall remembered, though any sort of sexual charge was, for her, somewhat vitiated by his “debutante accent.” Still, he was under the impression that the actress was “madly in love with him,” according to Mary Cheever, whom he left at home when Bacall invited him to a party at her Manhattan apartment. “I think Betty [Bacall] has got me mixed up with the late Adlai Stevenson,” he wrote his daughter afterward. “Why else would she keep sticking her tongue in my ear?” (Privately, he observed that Bacall had a “fourth-rate Bonnard over the sofa and—you guessed it—a large and ghastly Picasso