Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [360]
*”You ask if I have ever wavered in my vocation,” Cheever wrote Kaplan on July 23, 1978. “I can think of nothing that I have undertaken—my marriage, my ascent of the Grande Sora, my romances, my parenthood, my citizenship—in which I have not wavered continuously. That's what makes it so thrilling.”
* The whole strange saga was related in the New York Times (November 30, 1980, page WC3). The identity of the victim was unknown at the time.
* As I mention in the footnote on page 290, when Cheever refers to intercourse (in whatever terms) with a man, he does not mean anal intercourse but rather any activity resulting in orgasm.
* Random examples: “the last time I saw my father” is the last line of Max's first paragraph; the father's aroma is evoked as his “sour and ambrosial odor as a male” (“the rankness of a mature male” in Cheever); the son calls his father a “son of a bitch”—twice, triumphantly—the same way Mrs. Henlein, the babysitter, ticks off Mr. Lawton in “The Sorrows of Gin.” Max would concede this and more—indeed, this was his point in showing me the story in the first place: “It was written by a guy out fishing for his voice by trying on everyone else's,” he wrote me. “The first line, in fact, is a direct steal from Updike.” Updike, after all, was another successful New Yorker writer.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
{1979-1980}
CHEEVER'S FAME continued to grow in ways that might otherwise have been gratifying. In October, three adaptations of his stories were broadcast on consecutive Wednesdays as part of the PBS series Great Performances. Over the past year, Cheever had completed a problematic draft of his teleplay—now called Kidnapping in Shady Hill—but the project was in limbo while WNET sought financing; in the meantime Cheever had dreaded the adaptations (“God have mercy on us all”), a dread he conveyed in the press as a kind of lofty skepticism (“Any confrontation between the camera and the word is unhappy”). Such was Cheever's prestige, however, that the underfunded project had attracted a first-rate pool of talent: Wendy Wasserstein adapted “The Sorrows of Gin,” starring Edward Herrmann and Sigourney Weaver; “O Youth and Beauty!” was adapted by A. R. Gurney, and starred Michael Murphy; and “The Five-Forty-Eight”—arguably the most successful of the three—was adapted by Terence McNally, directed by James Ivory, and starred Laurence Luckinbill and Mary Beth Hurt. Cheever was rather impressed in spite of himself (though he deplored the “scored music”), and even agreed to give publicity interviews in New York.
The programs might have served as a further reminder that Cheever owed much of his present distinction to stories he'd written many years ago, and whether he was still capable of working at that level was more than a little in doubt. He had almost nothing to show for the three and a half years since finishing Falconer, though he always told interviewers he was hard at work on “another bulky book.” There was no book. “I seem unable to approach a frame of mind in which I can work,” he'd mused around the time of his Pulitzer, and now work had gotten even harder, he claimed, without cigarettes. But finally he managed to write his first story in four years, “The Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat,” quite possibly the worst thing he ever published. “That was the year everybody went to China if they hadn't already been there,” the story opens with deliberate self-parody (rather like his preceding story, “The President of the Argentine,” and perhaps in the same mood of pre-emptive apology). “All the women wore black, ankle-length mink coats and the men wore massive gold wrist-watches with golden bands.” The ensuing anecdote was based on an actual