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pithy, and pointed quote” from his favorite author. Thus Coyne was emboldened to write a note to Cheever, who naturally replied: “I can't imagine what has kept us apart all these years. I gather you are Irish. The Cheevers claim not to be. ‘Don't ever wear an overcoat,’ my father often said, ‘you might be taken for an Irishman.’ Only a true Irishman would make such a remark. … However, I never wear an overcoat. … I would hit any man—or woman—in the nose who called me ‘short, pithy, and pointed.’ “ Well! Coyne was all the more charmed, and on Cheever's death he wrote a letter to the widow about how “characters, out of Cheever, step into [his] cab”—the famous Disco Sally, for instance, “a wizened monkey-skinned woman in her eighties who, in the company of young effetes, made the round of late night discos. Disco Sally died this year. John would have understood the fear that drove her relentlessly from disco to disco.” John would have understood, all right … but still Ben feels a slight impulse to argue with people like Coyne: “I want to ask them where they were when he was drinking, when he needed his eyeglasses found or to be driven to the hospital. This is foolishness. He was at his best on the page.”

He was at his best, and worst, on the page—he was himself, in short, and hence that massive journal: a monument of tragicomic solipsism, or (to paraphrase one of Cheever's favorite pensées) a history of one man's struggle to be illustrious. “No one, absolutely no one, shared his life with him,” said Federico. “There was no one from whom he could get honest advice. Of course, this state of affairs was very much his own doing, but it must have been hard sometimes.”

And yet! What of the man who was moved to thank God for the “party” of being alive? The delightful writer who longed, above all, to impart “glad tidings”? He might have chosen to end this story with some happy time in his life—Thanksgiving 1955, say, when his imagination was afire with a joyous first novel, and he'd recently been confirmed in the church, and he'd begun to suspect that he might escape the fate of his “accursed” family after all. That night, Cheever dreamed of sifting among fragments for a clue, perhaps, to the future:

And at 3 am I seem to be walking through Grand Central and the latch on my suitcase gives, spilling out onto the floor the contents of my life and what do we find here? A pint of gin and some contraceptives; the score for Handels Watermusic and a football; the plays of Shakespere, The Brothers Karamazov and Madame Bovary; a sweater, a jockstrap and an old maddar necktie; but also to signify times of irresolution and loss about which I know plenty a daisey for counting and a candle for impotence; but also a hairbrush and a love poem and a photograph of happy times on the deck of the tern and a confirmation certificate and a psychiatrists bill and a yellow leaf or somesuch—the stone from a beach to signify times of solid high spirits.

* It might as well be noted here that Cheever's reputation in the UK never really caught on. Gottlieb mentioned how he'd often try to press Cheever's work on English writers, who tended to say things like “What a discovery! Why isn't he better known?” Part of the answer may be found in the (brief) London Times obituary which sniffishly dismissed Cheever as “a typical graduate of the ‘New Yorker’ school of writers”—a school the Times evidently held in low regard, though the obituarist did see fit to concede that Cheever had written a few “inimitably funny short stories,” and proposed that “the best of these are to be found in his earlier collections, notably The Way Some People Live.“ That final observation, all alone, would have soured Cheever's mood for a month.

* When I reminded Max of this, his voice choked up with emotion. “I was moved by that gesture,” he said. “Because at the time I thought they felt, you know, ‘Now that he's dead, we no longer have to put up with [Max].’ I thought they wanted to write me off.”

* I spent the last day of my last research trip to the Boston area at Brandeis,