Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [421]
311 “The initials are intended to represent”: JC to WM, Aug. 28, 1963, Berg.
311 “[I]n The Wapshot Scandal he began”: BBC int. WM, April 20, 1993, CFP.
313 “The death of a child seems to be idle”: JJC, 113.
314 “side-stepping the Educated woman”: Litvinov to JC, Feb. 9, 1965, CFP.
314 “I did go to one or two meetings”: Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 72.
315 “Maybe he was wicked”: TT, 164.
315 intention to “rewrite Bulfinch”: SD int. Calisher, Sept. 17, 1984, Swem.
316 “He lived as a child would live”: LJC, 23.
316 “You can draw a line”: JJC, 236.
316 “about the irreversibility of human conduct”: Joanna Stang, “Lancaster Swims in Deeper Waters,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 1966, 101.
316 “a perfectly good” novel: Jesse Kornbluth, “The Cheever Chronicle,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 1979, 102.
316 “It was growing cold and quiet”: CJC, 136.
318 “ ‘The Swimmer’ is a masterpiece of mystery”: Michael Chabon, “Personal Best,” Salon (www.salon.com/weekly/cheever960930).
318 “teach fiction … veterinary medicine”: CJC, 69.
318 the magazine was wildly prosperous: J. H. Rutledge and P. B. Bart, “Urbanity, Inc.: How the New Yorker Wins Business Success Despite Air of Disdain,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 1958, 1.
319 Maxwell “seemed the gentlest of men”: quoted in Paris Review 85 (Fall 1982), 109.
319 “[H]e often set it on Christmas Eve”: HBD, 138.
320 “The New Yorker … didn't like agents”: author int. Lynn Nesbit, April 27, 2005.
320 “I am accused of improvidence”: JJC, 189.
321 “Cheever didn't realize how low this was”: Ben Yagoda, About Town (New York: Scribner, 2000), 290.
321 “Whoever was editor of a particular writer”: author int. Yagoda, March 4, 2005.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR {1964}
322 “That riot of the housewives”: Cowley to JC, Oct. 22, 1963, Newberry.
322 Reviews of The Wapshot Scandal: Elizabeth Janeway, in New York Times Book Review, Jan. 5, 1964, 1, 28; Charles Poore, in New York Times, Jan. 7, 1964, 31; Joan Didion, in National Review, March 24, 1964, 237–40; Glenway Wescott, in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, Jan. 5, 1964, 1, 9; Hilary Corke, in New Republic, Jan. 25, 1964, 19–21; Stanley Edgar Hyman, in New Leader, Feb. 3, 1964, 23–24; Robert R. Kirsch, in Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1964, IV, 6.
323 “[N]ow and then, as it were by chance”: Wescott to JC [c. Jan. 1964], Yale.
323 “[H]e forced some perfect stories”: Wescott's demurral to Cheever's nomination for the Howells Medal may be found among the Ralph Ellison Papers, LC.
325 most “outstanding” features: George Garrett, reprinted in Critical Essays on John Cheever, ed. R. G. Collins (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), 51–62.
326 “the lonely and erotic nature of man”: notes on WS, Brandeis.
328 redeemed at last by “booming” sales: JC to Bracher, Jan. 12, 1964, Bancroft.
328 “They seemed so terribly disappointed”: GT, 164.
328–329 Lee “had a unique reputation”: Paul Moor to SD, Nov. 20, 1984, Swem.
329 “I came home from school”: LJC, 237.
329 “[Alwyn] had a series of ardent”: JC to McLoone, July 29 [1970], Georgetown University Library.
329 “because they seemed … to symbolize”: “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, March 27, 1964.
330 “it's better this way than hiding”: LJC, 238.
330 “Sally Ziegler, a small-town Georgian”: ibid., 239.
331 “John Cheever, almost alone in the field”: Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 72.
331 “I'm frightfully sorry”: JC to McLoone, July 29 [1970], Georgetown University Library.
332 his old “boy chum” Fax: JC to WM [c. June 1964], Berg.
332 “two conspicuous lacks”: New York Times, Dec. 1, 1976, 54.
332 literature … a vast impersonal “stream”: CJC, 185.
333 “serious and likable person”: JJC, 191.
333 “What are they going to do with it”: ibid., 196.
333 “I am a Wasp”: Peter Costa, “A Wasp Author Discusses Wasps,” Boston Herald American, May 4, 1977, 15.
334 “more like an upper-class New Yorker”: SD int. Philip Roth, July 18, 1984, Swem.
334 “like Thurston Howell III”: author int. James Kaplan, Sept. 2, 2004.
334 “I knew