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By Root 4166 0

and Cheever had dominated his life for the past few years. He began banging his head against the wall. “He had died without ever letting me know if he actually respected me, actually thought I was a talented writer, actually cared about me, actually saw me as something more than a hand-job,” said Max. (“If I declare the depth of the love I feel for [Max] I am afraid that he may exploit this,” Cheever had noted a year before his death.) “I remember standing there howling because I hurt so much and felt so empty.” Then, one night in a bar, he told two of his ex-students what had happened—quite certain their friendship would end as a result. “But they said, ‘Jesus Christ, that's what you've been going through … ?’” Max recalled. “So that's how I started to come back. And finally I told [my girlfriend], just sobbing my eyes out. And I expected her to walk out the door, but she put her arms around me.”

Max stayed in the East and picked up the pieces. Falling back on his engineering degree, he supported himself as a freelance technical writer and eventually started his own business. Remarried now, with a family of his own, he lives in a pleasant lake community in New Jersey, and for the most part manages not to dwell on the past. “If there's someone who never loved himself, it was John,” Max said twenty-five years ago. Now he says this:

He was extraordinarily blessed by anyone's standards—fame, wealth, a wonderful wife, great kids who did him proud and loved him, a long and highly successful career, talent, friends, on and on—but he liked to say that all he had in life was an old dog. There was his despair. And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others. He changed the course of my life. I took it from there. Today I look at my own two sons—close in age to my age then—and I can't imagine anyone wanting anything of them except to see that they keep moving forward.

• • •

AS STYRON GORGEOUSLY DECLAIMED at the medal ceremony, “John Cheever's position in literary history is as immovably fixed as one of those huge granite outcroppings which loom over the green lawns and sunlit terraces in the land of his own magic devising.” Doubtless Cheever seemed a safe bet in 1982. Three years before, around the time of his Pulitzer, he was ranked third—behind only his eulogists, Bellow and Updike—in a Philadelphia Inquirer survey of the living American writers whose work was expected to “endure and be read by future generations.”* If Cheever were eligible for such a survey today, some three decades later, it's unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top twenty. One can only hazard a few guesses as to why. It bears repeating that it's hard to determine Cheever's niche in our national literature, and academic canon-makers are fond of niches; in other words, the very fact that he was a “self-transformer,” as Bellow put it (speaking only of the quarter-century of Cheever's career contained in the Stories), would seem to have worked against him. The scholar Robert Morace covered the spectrum nicely: “Groping about for ways to understand, i.e., pigeonhole, Cheever, reviewers and critics have called him a satirist, a transcendentalist, an existentialist, a social critic, a religious writer, a trenchant moralist, an Enlightened Puritan, an Episcopalian anarch, a suburban surrealist, Ovid in Ossining, the American Chekhov, the American Trollope for an age of angst, a toothless Thurber.” Who are Cheever's influences? Arguably too many (and too well assimilated) to say. Whom did he influence? Ditto, and the manner of his influence (again, for the very reason of his versatility) is hard to trace. At any rate, academics tend to throw up their hands: Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated, and dissertations featuring his work have trickled almost to nothing. Odder still: though The Wapshot Chronicle appears on the Modern Library's vaunted list of the 100 Best [English-language] Novels [of the Twentieth Century], and Falconer appears on the even more recent