Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [365]
Sometime that summer, at any rate, he got to work on what would become Oh What a Paradise It Seems, but the work went slowly or not at all; the ecstatic high he'd felt while writing Falconer was gone—quite gone—and he often wondered if he was losing not only his creative powers, but his sanity. He'd continued to experience the odd hallucination of Ginny Kahn and a drunken Exley, the latter singing a “forlorn jingle” that Cheever had taken to calling the “Ain't Got Nothing” song; when he tried to pursue the scene further, he'd suffer a memory lapse so profound that he felt utterly lost in time and space (“I [do] not, for a moment, know my wife's name or the name of my dogs”). Along with alcoholic brain damage, he suspected he was suffering from “[what] psychiatrists would call a traumatic rejection”—that is, a kind of hysterical amnesia, cued by the hallucination, at the bottom of which was some “cruelty in [his] youth” so ghastly he couldn't bear to face it. Whatever was happening to him, chemical or otherwise, left him so drained and alienated that he could hardly speak or even smile. “I seem in a contemptible frame of mind and am perhaps ill,” he noted toward the end of September.
Despite his increasing malaise, he decided to go to Yaddo in October—a trip he viewed “with genuine dread,” though the thought of staying home with a silent, scornful wife was even more intolerable. It would be his last visit. The handful of guests included a sculptor Cheever knew slightly from previous visits, Mary Ann Unger, as well as the novelist Joan Silber and the composer Lee Hyla—all of them relatively young and respectful toward the legend in their midst. Everyone noticed, however, that Cheever was a little off: he kept losing his train of thought, and took a vicious dislike to one of the guests, a fifty-two-year-old surgeon and writer named Richard Selzer, who (one learns from the journal) had struck Cheever as effeminate. When, at dinner that first night, Cheever learned that the surgeon was married, and moreover had children, he became implacably hostile (“I find him repulsive because he performs the same sexual acrobatics that I, as a terribly old man, am beginning to enjoy”). Affecting to break the ice, Cheever turned to Selzer and asked, “Richard, have you ever plagiarized?” Selzer struggled to keep his dignity: it was his first trip to Yaddo and he was excited about it, all the more so because Cheever, no less, was there. “I let it be known to him that I certainly wanted to be his friend, but no,” the man recalled. “He began an attack in his little bitchy way. And he was good at being a bitch.” When he wasn't putting Selzer in his place, Cheever entertained the table with old Yaddo stories that tended to stress his reputation as a cocksman, what with the many women he'd conquered on the couch in the Great Hall. The next day he was visited by Max (“we watch a ballgame, screw, have dinner, watch another game, and part, at my wish”), who everyone assumed was his lover, said Silber, despite his past exploits in the Great Hall.
“I'm working like a streak but I don't seem able to end the unreality blues when I leave the typewriter,” Cheever wrote Max on October 12. Two days later, he tauntingly challenged Selzer (a heavy smoker) to join him for a twenty-two-mile bicycle ride around Saratoga Lake; Selzer declined, and Cheever (pleased) departed alone. Exhausted on his return, he nonetheless went to an AA meeting after dinner, then returned to his studio at Hillside Cottage to watch the World Series with Hyla, Silber, and Unger. During the seventh inning, he was chatting with Silber when suddenly he crushed the plastic cup of ginger ale in his hand. “At first I thought it was a joke about how crappy the plastic was,” Silber remembered. “I started to laugh, then I realized something was wrong.