Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [436]
645 “The stories are safe”: WM to JC, n.d., CFP.
646 “It was Tad who suggested”: LJC, 370.
647 choice of wife was “highly mature”: JJC, 389.
647 “You have been a splendid son”: LJC, 373.
CHAPTER FIFTY {1982}
648 “ecological romance”: CJC, 226–28.
651 Reviews of Oh What a Paradise It Seems: John Leonard, in New York Times Book Review, March 7, 1982, 1; Anatole Broyard, in New York Times, March 3, 1982, C28; JU, in New Yorker, April 5, 1982, 189; Geoffrey Stokes, in Village Voice, March 16, 1982, 93.
653 “You were bald as billiard ball”: FLC Sr. to JC and family, Oct. 17, 1943, CFP.
653 “[I] am determined”: JC to McConkey, March 31, 1982, Swem.
653 “a pollution that is distilled from the Adriatic”: LJC, 378.
653 “Gaunt, limping”: Geoff Walden, “Illness Aside, Cheever Full of Surprises,” Ossining Citizen Register, April 25, 1982.
654 “[T]here's never a word”: SC to Spencer, April 6 [1982], Canada.
654 “anything we do … palliative”: LJC, 380.
654 “What I am going to write”: JJC, 393.
655 “It was more than fifty years”: Malcolm Cowley, “John Cheever: The Novelist's Life as a Drama,” Sewanee Review 91, no. 1 (1983), 16.
656 “He [Tom] is a pleasant young man”: JJC, 394.
656 “I have never known anything like this fatigue”: ibid., 394–95.
657 “The conversation was brief “: LJC, 359.
658 “To see that vital, brilliant, charming”: “John Cheever and Family,” TV documentary, BBC Bookmark (1994).
658 “[Cheever] was struggling”: Susan Merrill, “The Everyday Ossining Haunts of John Cheever,” Patent Trader (Mount Kisco), March 19, 1986, B34.
658 “I just saw him on the Cavett show”: Howard Kissell, “Susan Cheever: Crossing a Frail Bridge,” W, Jan. 25–Feb. 1, 1985, 26.
EPILOGUE
661 “Greater authors there are than Cheever”: editorial, Boston Globe, June 22, 1982, 18.
662 “John Cheever's death Friday at 70”: editorial, Patriot Ledger, June 22, 1982, 18.
662 “a typical graduate of the ‘New Yorker’ school”: Times (London), June 21, 1982, 12.
664 “And I wonder whether you saw”: John Hersey to MC, June 23, 1982, Swem.
664 “Ossining's most prominent treasure”: “Ossining Loses Literary Treasure,” Ossining Citizen Register, June 22, 1982.
665 “I never really had a ‘hair-down’ talk”: SD int. Burton Benjamin, June 19, 1984, Swem.
665 “He was marvelous … full-of-life John”: Paul L. Montgomery, “Friends and Colleagues Recall Cheever at a Memorial Service,” New York Times, June 24, 1982, D23.
666 “a book that would make people love my father”: Gioia Diliberto, “A new Cheever Chronicle—by John's Daughter, Susan—Reveals His Tormented Life,” People, Nov. 5, 1984, 46.
666 “john cheever a fag”: GT, 18.
666 “a sexual omnivore”: Nathan Cobb, “Mixed Reviews from Family and Friends,” Boston Globe, Oct. 23, 1984, 29–30.
667 “dropped John like a hot rock”: author int. Barrett Clark, July 14, 2004.
667 “Oh, that's just Susie!”: author int. Pamela Spear Goff, March 26, 2005.
667 “a quality Walt Whitman once described”: Justin Kaplan, in New York Times Book Review, Oct. 21, 1984, 7.
668 “My usual feeling about mail”: JC to Litvinov, March 15 [1965].
668 “I thought with some bitterness”: quoted in Charles Baxter, Michael Collier, and Edward Hirsch, eds., A William Maxwell Portrait (New York: Norton, 2004), 113.
668 “his joy and the talent he had”: LJC, 17.
668 “Nailles is too good to be anyone you ever met”: ibid., 268.
669 “give [his] papers to Harvard”: Francis Bosha, “The John Cheever Manuscript Collection at Harvard,” Resources for American Literary Study 22, no. 1 (1996), 104.
669 “almost gleeful about the prospects”: JJC, ix.
670 “The image of Cheever”: Ted Solotaroff, in The Nation, Nov. 18, 1991, 616–20.
670 “What a good man he is!”: JJC, 240.
670 Reviews of The Journals of John Cheever: Mary Gordon, in New York Times Book Review, Oct. 6, 1991, 1; Jonathan Yardley, in Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1991, X3; JU, in New Republic, reprinted in More Matter (New York: Knopf, 1999), 279–86.
671 “Cheever spent an hour”: New York Times Book Review, Nov. 24, 1991, 37.