Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [92]
Meanwhile Irwin Shaw's first novel, The Young Lions, was a big hit; moreover Shaw's wife had remarked to Cheever that, in the novel's home stretch, her husband had written at the inspired pace of seventeen pages a day! “This seems to me seriously lacking,” Cheever noted, after a long and mostly sober night of reading. “Knowing the fierceness of competition among writers I sometimes feel that my knowledge of Irwin, my love of Irwin may have buried some malevolence deep in my judgement but it is my judgement that this is not much of a book.” Be that as it may, his friend was now a bona-fide celebrity, and while lunching at the Algonquin, Cheever found himself smiling and nodding at the news that Irwin had just returned from Cap d'Antibes and was getting a big welcome-home party from Frank Capra, etc. “I keep telling myself that this cannot go on,” Cheever wrote, “no, no, no, that this is all wrong.”
CHEEVER HAD NOT REVISITED Yaddo since his raucous stays in the summer of 1940. Around that time he wrote a friend, “Elizabeth [Ames] has closed the door of Yaddo in my face remarking that my interests in Saratoga seem to center on the skiing, the riding club, and the Worden Bar & Grill.” The two remained fond of each other, though, and continued to write and promise to get together at some point.
A reunion of sorts was hastened by a peculiar series of events in the spring of 1949. On February 11, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff had identified Agnes Smedley, author of several books on Red China, as a Russian agent. Smedley was ill and destitute by then, and had lived for almost six years (1943 to 1948) at Yaddo as, essentially, one of Mrs. Ames's charity cases. The War Department presently withdrew its charges, citing lack of evidence, though not before a couple of FBI agents came to Yaddo to interview Mrs. Ames, her guests, and her secretary—the last of whom, it so happened, had been acting as an informer for the past five years: “[W]henever I heard people talking very brilliantly red,” she said, “I have written down their name and address and dropped it off … for forwarding to the FBI.” This, of course, was not altogether surprising, since Mrs. Ames had in fact demonstrated a partiality toward radical authors: there was her longtime lover, Leonard Ehrlich, as well as a list including Josie Herbst, Eleanor Clark, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others. Amid the furor of the Alger Hiss case, and the McCarthy era soon to come, this was considered a very dubious state of affairs.
At the time there were only four guests in residence: Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, Edward Maisel, and Elizabeth Hardwick. When FBI agents told Lowell that Yaddo was “permeated with Communists” and suggested that Mrs. Ames had been protecting a Russian spy, the poet—drinking heavily, in the grip of religious mania, and on the brink of perhaps the worst breakdown in his colorful career—rallied the other guests against Mrs. Ames and demanded a meeting with local members of the Yaddo board. Mrs. Ames, said Lowell, was “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system;” he insisted that she be fired immediately or else he'd continue his crusade on a larger scale; indeed, he felt as if he were fighting “against the Devil himself.” The board members, not a little shaken, assured the poet that they'd pursue the matter at their regular meeting in New York a few weeks later. Meanwhile the main topic of cocktail gossip in literary Manhattan was whether Yaddo was or was not a hotbed of communist traitors.
“John Cheever was wonderful in his loyalties,” said Eleanor Clark, “and Elizabeth [Ames] was one of them.” Clark recruited Cheever and three others—Alfred Kazin, Harvey Breit, and Kappo Phelan—to draft a letter of protest against the witch hunt. “We feel