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mostly examining the typescripts of Cheever's New Yorker stories. With about fifteen minutes to go before the library closed, I glanced at the journal pages Cheever had donated—though there was no need to do this, really, since I had my own copy of the journal. But right away I noticed something amiss: The Brandeis pages were too neatly typed, with a brand-new ribbon, no less. I found a passage on my laptop that I'd transcribed from the original—this about Cheever's meeting with Sophia Loren in the summer of 1967—and compared it with the Brandeis version: Sure enough, they were different! “She seems sincere, magnanimous, lucky and matteroffact,” Cheever had (sloppily) typed in the original, followed by a bit of dialogue between the two. “She seems sincere, magnanimous, lucky and intelligent,” reads the (immaculate) Brandeis version, and the subsequent dialogue has been deleted. Was it possible that Cheever had not only retyped but substantially rewritten many journal pages for the sake of a little academic posterity? I was about to check further when the nice librarian stuck her head in the room and whispered that it was time to go.

† ”I'm unable to read the journals,” said Mary, “so I didn't have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can't read them. Snatches of them I've read, but I can't sit down and read that stuff. It isn't my life at all. It's him, it's all him. It's all inside him.”

* Larry David seemed a little dismayed by my question, given what we'd discussed a few years earlier in regard to my Richard Yates biography. Back then he'd explained that the Seinfeld episode titled “The Jacket” was based on his disastrous, real-life encounter with Yates, whose daughter Monica he'd been dating at the time. When I mentioned that Cheever had a daughter named Susan, and pointed out that George's girlfriend in “The Cheever Letters” is also named Susan, David hastened to deny any real-life connection: “Just one of those things!”

* Susan has been sober since 1992.

* The rest of the top ten: E. B. White, John Gardner, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Michener, and J. D. Salinger. To be ranked so well ahead of Salinger must have pleased Cheever.

* One is reminded of Cheever's vast readership in Russia and Eastern Europe, where the trappings of American suburbia—or postwar Manhattan, or anachronistic New England—are somewhat alien. He might have become the next big thing in China, too: the novelist Wang Meng, minister of culture in the late eighties, spoke of Cheever as his “favorite” Western writer and looked forward to sharing his enthusiasm with the people—but then he was driven from office, post-Tiananmen Square, as a proponent of “bourgeois liberalization.”

Acknowledgments

A FEW YEARS AGO, Ben Cheever wrote me a kind note about my biography of Richard Yates, which ultimately led to this book. Technically, I guess, this is an authorized biography, but the usual compromises of authorization don't apply. I was given material—all the material—and left alone with it, period. Ben sent letters, clippings, manuscripts, whatever he could find, and during one of my visits to Westchester he drove me and a copy of his father's massive journal to the UPS store. He and Susan also showed me around the Vanderlip estate in Scarborough, the better for me to visualize, say, how the Vanderlip Mansion might have inspired “Clear Haven” in The Wapshot Chronicle (think of the naked Moses scampering across the ghastly, sprawling roofs to Melissa's boudoir). Another day, Susan gave me the run of her apartment in Manhattan, refilling my coffee cup while I stood on chairs and rifled boxes in her closets. And I relished my chats with Federico so much that I felt a little bereft once I'd run out of questions to ask. As for Mary Cheever, she submitted to my grinding curiosity with a nice mixture of gaiety and frankness, and was always a gracious hostess during my visits to Cedar Lane—willing to keep me company if necessary, or leave me alone (rather with an old, wheezy black