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over the mantlepiece.”) Bacall was also on hand to celebrate when Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award in January 1979 (beating out Irving's The World According to Garp and, better yet, Updike's The Coup)—one of a multitude, said Cheever, who'd vied for his favors that day: “I was kissed by both Mary Gordon [another nominee for Final Payments] and John Irving and John Updike telephoned from Georgetown,” he wrote Susan. “Your mother, of course, thought that GARP should have won. My humble remarks were greeted with an affectionate standing ovation and after having been kissed by about three hundred women and autographing things like deposit slips and shirt-tails your mother and I made our way, by spacious limousine, to 21 where there was a dinner for sixty in The Hunt Room, served by about eighty waiters. … Betty Bacall ate my right ear.”

Cheever was more active than ever in public duties, becoming vice president of Yaddo and secretary of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (as it was now called), for which he also served a third term as chairman of the grants committee. It may have been the whole noblesse aspect of Academy work that appealed most, since for many years he'd been bored by his aging colleagues (a “death watch”) and had skipped the various dinners and luncheons whenever possible. Formal meetings were an even more terrible crucible, during which Cheever would chain-smoke and suppress groans of impatience (“He might go into the men's room and jerk off. He just might”). Worst of all were the hundred or more novels he was supposed to read as chairman of the grants committee—autobiographical first works, mostly, in which the characters occupy themselves (as Cheever put it) with “wiping the steam off a windowpane and wondering what is the meaning of it all.” Had he lived longer, anyway, it seems safe to say he would never again have served on the grants committee. “I suspect that my tastes, with old age, have become parochial and cranky,” he wrote his colleagues that year. “I have, for example, just completed a book called BIRDY. This is about a demented man who would like to fly. My passion for gravity seems to have increased with age and I am constitutionally disinterested in a weightless life. … Considering the general mediocrity of the year I suppose we should honor John Irving for GARP.“ But despite his weariness with middling fiction (with, more and more, fiction in general), Cheever valued the good opinion of his peers and was mindful of their common predicament—so much so, indeed, that he could scarcely read an acquaintance's book without pausing every so often to “try and compose an observation that will be truthful and encouraging.” After finishing The Professor of Desire (1977), for example, he wrote Philip Roth as follows: “[In 1959] I first read a paragraph or two of yours and came into the house shouting to Mary that Roth—whoever he was—had the most compelling voice I had encountered in years. I don't mean style; I mean voice—something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head …” Roth was so impressed with the compliment that he attributed it, almost word for word, to E. I. Lonoff—the revered mentor of Nathan Zuckerman—in his subsequent novel The Ghost Writer (1979).

As one might have guessed, Cheever's celebrity did not have an ameliorative effect on his marriage. Some thought Mary got tired of (among other things) the frequent press attention—the photographers coming out to Ossining to take pictures of her husband splitting wood or sitting on top of a (rented) horse, the better to bolster his image as a Westchester squire. Then, too, Cheever was hardly averse to reminding her that the world, at least, seemed to love him. Even academics were beginning to churn out the odd monograph. As Cheever recorded, “A book comes, of which I'm the subject, and Mary says, ‘People write those books for practically nothing.’ “ She also seemed rather deflating on the subject of Cheever's relative wealth. When he mentioned that he would bank half a million