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By Root 4147 0

—anything to get published in The New Yorker—one result of which was a novella titled “The China Doll,” which Max would later describe as “[his] ‘Reunion.’ “ The original “Reunion” is the shortest story in the big red book, a masterpiece of compression. The first and last phrases are “the last time I saw my father,” and in between we are told not a syllable more than we need to know, to wit: Father and son haven't seen each other in three years; the man's secretary replies to the boy's letter; the boy realizes that, whatever happens, he is doomed to resemble his father somewhat. The rest is the reunion itself—a broad, virtuosic rendering of the father's swinishness and the son's quiet, presumably appalled, observation. “It reads like a streak,” Maxwell wrote Cheever in 1962, “and is perfection at every point.” But Max's “Reunion,” alas, is a bloated, derivative mess. In fifty pages or so, the narrator describes a meeting with his disaffected Mormon father, and amid endless exposition about the man's religious scruples (and a lot of stuff about the mother, too) one hears constant, tinny echoes of the master.*

Whenever Max finished a story—less and less frequently—it would be forwarded to McGrath at The New Yorker, who was quite aware that Cheever was using him “as a reward for Max.” And nobody, of course, was more painfully aware than Max himself: “Poor Chip. I would bring him these stories that I didn't even understand and he'd suggest revisions and I'd make the revisions still not understanding the story or knowing exactly where the revisions went. And then I'd bring them back to him, and the guy would try to get the stories accepted and then have to tell me no.” By then McGrath would have liked few things better than to accept one of Max's stories—he was fond of Max, and never mind getting Cheever off his back—but that required the approval of more than one editor, and the others were less invested. Yet McGrath tried to stay upbeat, at least for Cheever's benefit: “I hope Max Zimmer hasn't been overly discouraged by this series of revisions. My belief in his work remains unaltered, and I think he's getting better and better.” Sustained (if bewildered) by such encouragement, Max decided to get out of Dobbs Ferry and take a cheap winter rental in Southampton—to hole up and write, by God—coaxing a couple of his more devoted students from Oswego to take a year off and join him.

Two days after Max's departure in early September, his bereft mentor flew to New Hampshire to accept the Edward MacDowell Medal for “outstanding contribution to the arts,” an award that was annually rotated among writers, visual artists, and composers. After a long and eloquent introduction from Elizabeth Hardwick, Cheever produced some “notes scribbled on the back of a shopping list” (so the Times observed), which mostly had to do with his present sorrow:

The day before yesterday I was saying goodbye to a very dear friend and as I watched him go away it was only, I think, through my grasp of fiction, through narrative and through invention that I could first reproach myself for loving him excessively and then attack psychiatry for having added the element of prudence to love—and then to have concluded that imprudence is a synonym for love, a conclusion I could not have reached were I not an author of fiction.

A rather imprudent confession, or so it looks on paper, though doubtless Cheever's mandarin persona had a beguiling effect on his listeners; in any event, nobody seemed to read much into it. But Cheever was not quite done confessing. The chairman of the award committee was his great admirer John Leonard, who spotted the guest of honor “slipp[ing] away” from a dance that night; he found the man sitting alone in his room, sipping some instant coffee he'd packed for the trip. At first Cheever tried to be charming, but he couldn't conceal his melancholy. “Sex is very important to me,” he said, “and there is no sex in my marriage.” Perhaps Leonard could find him an apartment in New York? Something in the East Sixties? His loneliness at home was