Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [368]
* Actually, of course, quite a number of Cheever's students went on to impressive careers—Gurganus, Boyle, Hansen, some Barnard students—though arguably the more notable cases had little to do with Cheever's influence.
* Getting the math wrong: he was sixty-eight at the time.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
{1980-1981}
THE WORLD SEEMED IN A RUSH to honor Cheever. On his return from Yaddo in late October, he'd gone to New York with Ben to receive the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award from the Union League Club. The occasion called for a speech, which Cheever saw as a nice opportunity to declare his place among aesthetic traditionalists (“[I'm] rather like the old Hudson River painters”), while deploring the incoherence and abstraction of so much contemporary art. “I will tell them that our two most conspicuous innovators—Pablo Picasso and James Joyce—never for a moment lost sight of the fact that our bewilderment in this world in which we find ourselves, is finite,” he wrote Max (perhaps pointedly). The speech was a success, though afterward Cheever was confronted by a drunk who'd been offended by Falconer (“You used to be good, but then you started writing smut!”), until Ben stepped between them.
The laurels continued in spring. That April of 1981, Cheever received the American Book Award for the paperback Stories, and the following month he returned to Saratoga for an honorary degree from Skidmore. Standing on the dais, accepting the congratulations of his old friends the Palamountains, Cheever couldn't help but wonder at “the abyss between [his] public and [his] otherwise person.” The abyss was more on his mind than ever, now that people were writing books about him. He'd kept warmly in touch with James Valhouli ever since 1971, when the young man had begun researching his dissertation on Cheever at the University of Wisconsin. But now that Valhouli had proposed a biography, he found Cheever's manner a little “offish”: there were days when Cheever seemed inclined to let Valhouli see a journal or two, other days when he thought not; sometimes he'd answer a question with candor and precision, other times he'd feign deafness and tell some irrelevant story. Finally Valhouli committed the fatal blunder: “He speaks of Coates’ paper in which I am a tubercular, effeminate, solitary lover of men,” Cheever wrote. “This story seems not worth telling.” And yet the story would be told, in some form or another, and Cheever did his best to defuse the matter with evasion, bluster, or (especially) charm. When George Hunt—a sympathetic Jesuit from Le Moyne College in Syracuse—began writing a work of criticism that would touch, here and there, on the subject's life, Cheever lost no time addressing the issue of his “erotic adventures” with an affable note: “These seem never to have enjoyed any perspective in the dissertations I have read. I would not dream of challenging the authority of Venus but I have always felt that the tenderness and ardor that men and women often feel for their own kind is quite blameless.”
His longing to escape meanwhile—from the responsibilities of work, the consequences of fame, and sometimes life itself—informed his last contribution to The New Yorker, a one-page set piece titled “The Island,” which evoked a final, paradisal destination for bygone personages of every sort: “Here they all were—the greatest trombonist, the movie queen, the ballplayers, trapeze artists, and sexual virtuosos of yesterday—leading happy and simple lives … trapping shellfish, weaving baskets, and reading the classics.” And with them, in spirit anyway, was one of the greatest writers: Prospero putting his wand away. Almost fifty years ago, Cheever had broken into the magazine with a modest sketch, and he was leaving that way, too, having descended, as it were, to the foot of a mountain. The editors realized they were getting “the last squeezings from the press,” as McGrath put it, but were simply happy that