Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [39]
THOUGH HIS FIRST VISIT to Yaddo wasn't especially productive—he wrote nothing publishable—Cheever did meet a soulmate of sorts, or so he thought at the time. Fresh out of Dartmouth, Reuel Denney was a poet whose first collection, The Connecticut River, would win the Yale Younger Poets Award five years later. But what eventually earned Denney at least “a footnote to scholarship history”—as his Times obituary noted—was his contribution to the sociological classic The Lonely Crowd (1950), which he co-wrote with David Riesman and Nathan Glazer. Denney was perhaps Cheever's first real friend since Fax Ogden, and it was more than a little significant that he bore “a startling resemblance” to Fred. Having left the one and found the other, Cheever came to associate both with a sense of youthful communion. “A fleeting longing for some kind of once-enjoyed tenderness,” he wrote twenty years later—”Fred or Reuel.”
Based on his later writings, it seems fair to say that Denney was largely unaware of the impact he'd had on Cheever, though Denney's memories of that summer were also “dominated” by their friendship: “I was one of the first to recognize [Cheever's] great talent,” he wrote shortly before his death in 1995, “and I remember well the shock of admiration and envy with which I first heard his unpremeditated outpouring of conversational wit, criticism, and well-turned narrative.” Cheever felt an almost pathetic gratitude for having found an intelligent, talented, and withal regular-guyish contemporary who responded to his personality and work: “Sympathy and patience, let alone understanding for my or our interests is rare,” he wrote Denney. “[A]nd once found it can be stimulating and helpful as hell. Which it has been.” For the previous five years—and most of the years before—Cheever had been close to only one human being; such profound alienation in his “formative years” (the telling phrase that had sprung to his lips as he helped his drunken father off the roller coaster) would arguably leave him with a blurred sense of identity the rest of his life. He tried to articulate the trauma to Denney in various ways. When, for instance, the latter mentioned his time at Fred's alma mater, Cheever replied that he'd gone to a Dartmouth football game the year before and ended up “feeling lousy”:
[S]eeing the importance you give those four years and their associations I naturally feel that I have missed something. … I cannot, as you can, at a point of loss or discovery, identify myself with a generation, a college, a class or industry. At the most it amounts to a handful of men and women of various ages and nationalities that I know because I like. … The thing I miss most is an ability to identify myself with a group. When you are lost you are completely lost. This resulted during the first winter in a confused, defensive idea of myself* But that's all over now. I know who I am.
Cheever had formed his latest sense of who he was in direct opposition to who he'd been—that is, rather than a radical bohemian who cultivated burlesque stars and Beacon Street aesthetes, he was now a cynical traditionalist who regarded his leftist contemporaries with a majestic (if peevish) detachment. “Being likened to a decadent intellectual makes me sore,” he wrote Denney. “I accept no interpretation of history, read no direction in the past, have no brief for progress. I fail to see why the thirteenth century should be any blacker than the nineteenth.