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By Root 4156 0

cafard, and—given so many happy things in his life—he couldn't help wondering whether his constant smoking had something to do with it. Since adolescence he'd smoked two or three packs of Marlboros a day, and before that he'd smoked cedar bark rolled in toilet paper (“smoking meant joining the company of robust men”). The first thing he did at his desk each day was light a cigarette, and indeed it was almost impossible to imagine working except in a cloud of smoke. Past efforts to quit had been unavailing. Twenty years before, he'd recorded holding off until noon or so, but, as he put it, his head kept “leaving [his] neck” and floating away (“I always catch it before it goes off towards the railroad tracks but it is disconcerting”). Such was his intense craving that Cheever wondered whether he was “requit[ing]” some erotic need, a notion that once led to his writing a story about a man who gives up smoking and goes mad, attacking a woman he mistakes for a Lucky Strike.*

In March, Cheever began attending SmokEnder meetings with a lot of frumpy matrons (“Helen Hokinson ladies”) in White Plains: “[S]itting on a folding chair,” he wrote, “a woman of little intelligence, charm or information says: Reward yourself. Make a trip to the five and dime. Reserve a best-seller at the public library. Buy yourself a rose.” Cheever persevered withal: as instructed, he counted the butts in his ashtray each day, and tried distracting himself with long walks and train rides. It took about a month or so, but a few days after winning the Pulitzer (and two weeks after celebrating his fourth year of sobriety), Cheever was smoke-free. “[T]his has involved some serious redistribution of energies,” he wrote Max. “It is very difficult to work, I have a hardon all the time and I keep losing my temper.”

His cafard persisted as well, which he supposed had more to do with loneliness than nicotine after all. Back in November he'd finally wangled a trip to Oswego as a visiting writer (“Everybody at college was amazed that I was able to score a writer of Cheever's caliber,” Max ruefully recalled), after which Max had written him a pointed letter about “the thrills of his wedding anniversary”: “I am, quite plainly, the supplicant and I find the role self-destructive,” Cheever brooded in his journal (where he'd begun referring to Max as “Rip Procrustes,” by way of suggesting the latter's adaptability). In his own letters Cheever insinuated that he himself was hardly chopped liver: his was the world of “acclaim and substance,” he was desired by famous actresses (plural), and yet for all that he remained enamored of some ex-Mormon nobody in Oswego. “On Friday I did an ABC tape on the American Male,” he reported to Max in January. “ ‘In my long life,’ I said, ‘I have seen nothing more beautiful, splendid and mysterious than demure-ness in a woman.’ The script girl blushed and asked if I was busy for lunch. I was. I bought Hope a $55 lunch and when she said goodbye to me, on her doorstep, I remembered how splendidly you grasp my loneliness.” The key phrase was on her doorstep, as Hope failed to grasp his loneliness the way Max did. These days, when lunch was over, she always had to rush off somewhere—to exercise class, a rehearsal, the airport, anything to avoid grasping his loneliness. And while eating at those tony restaurants, Cheever wondered if other diners guessed at the sterility of their affair: “I am not ardent and I think I might appear to someone at another table as an aging homosexual, dedicated to some wayward asshole, but determined to appear straight,” he noted after that fifty-five-dollar lunch. “I am lonely and lost.”

A few days later, he phoned Ned Rorem and said he needed to see him as soon as possible, since Rorem was the “only homosexual” he knew in New York. Rorem invited him to lunch, but also cautiously asked his longtime partner—a thirty-nine-year-old musician named Jim Holmes—to be present. Cheever arrived early, stepped inside the door and dropped his pants, protesting his loneliness as he chased Rorem around the apartment. “Please