Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [367]
There was also the fact that he'd accepted a sizable portion of his half-million-dollar advance, though he wasn't at all sure he could satisfy the contract, whether he felt like it or not. One day he read a novel in one sitting, and was horrified to find that the next day he couldn't remember a single detail. Indeed, the whole world seemed increasingly strange to Cheever, and vice versa. When Litvinov came to the States and visited Cedar Lane, she felt as though she were communicating with her friend “through a veil”: “He hardly talked. Every now and then he'd go somewhere and come and bring some book and put it on the table, then bring another book, like an automaton, rather.” Litvinov related the incident to Maxwell, who sadly observed that she was “describing a deeply disturbed man;” on the lighter side, he mentioned that Newhouse thought Cheever was secretly pleased by his seizures, since he could now liken himself to Dostoevski—not a bad aperçu, as it happened. “Did you know that I suffer from Grand Mal?” Cheever wrote a prospective biographer, James Valhouli. “I think this important since the seizures I've suffered, this late in life, seem allied to some of the insights in the stories.” But privately he wondered, too, whether his condition was meant to reveal the “error in [his] ways”:
That fucking Max is punishable by death is the censoriousness of my childhood, Freud's revelation in Vienna, Dostoievsky's vision in Leningrad and the expounding of this by a school of sexual misfits. … I have prayed for sexual discretion and reasonableness a thousand times. I have prayed to be able to join the erotic glee that is so truly my sense of being alive with the spiritual guidance that has been my salvation.
By then he'd suffered a second seizure, on November 30, while playing backgammon with a friend and sometime Friday Clubber, Roger Willson. This time he was in the hospital for two days, and emerged feeling almost desperately weary—”quite old”—even more so now that he was taking the anticonvulsant Dilantin (“It's knocked the shit out of my childlike sense of wonder”). Happily, though, his marriage had shown a vast, practically overnight improvement. Always at her best as a caretaker, Mary found it easier to be loving now that her husband needed her so badly, while he in turn forced himself to be patient whenever she disagreed with him in some tacit or accidental way—by speaking kindly, say, of someone he despised. As he mused with laudable self-awareness, “I am inclined to consider any diversion from my thinking to be quarrelsome and perverse.”
Thanks to their renewed amity, Cheever was able to face with composure and even pleasure the publication (in December) of The Need for Chocolate and Other Poems, a collection of Mary's work, which of course included what the author considered her finest poem, “Gorgon,” with its lines about “life-denying husbandry” and (which Cheever never did quite forgive) “nicker[ing] at my breasts.” A few months earlier, while the marriage was still on the rocks, Mary had suspected her husband of being mischievous when he presented her with a framed copy of the book jacket: “It was like, ‘Look what she did!’ It wasn't an entirely pure-hearted gesture.” However, when the book was finally published, he was nothing but supportive. He went out of his way to praise her in the press, attended her signing at a local bookstore (“a triumph for her as a poet, a neighbor, a mother, a wife”), and on Valentine's Day presented her with a gold necklace and a little poem: “The need for chocolet is much finer / than the need for gold, / and I have hoped to find you / some of both, /