Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  275 “you could read … identity”: “John Cheever and Family,” TV documentary, BBC Bookmark (1994).

  275 “talk to [him] through the dust bunnies”: BC, “My Life with the Bourbon Dynasty,” Independent, Nov. 27, 2000, Features sec., 7.

  275 “Fred talks on about his trip”: JJC, 115.

  276 “[A]t the moment I have nine dependents”: GT, 115.

  276 “I must realize that the people who read my fiction”: JJC, 121.

  276 “Coverly as Apollo and Moses as Dionysus”: ibid., 117.

  276 “what with the gin and one thing or another”: JC to Biddle, March 7 [1960], LC.

  277 “feed, shelter and educate”: JC to Henry Allen Moe, March 28, 1960, Guggenheim Foundation Records.

  277 “My one New Year resolution”: JC to Herbst, Jan. 4, 1960, Yale.

  277 “could be employed by [Edward] Teller”: manuscript fragment, Berg.

  279 “If you don't grow and change”: LJC, 314.

  279 “They thought of it as an art story”: ibid., 160.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE {1960–1961}

  281 “There will be the boredom and the bigotry”: JC to Biddle, April 30 [1960], LC.

  281 “smelled of old poker-decks”: JC to Dawn Powell, July 11, 1960, Columbia.

  281 “I'm quite pissy about my disappointment”: GT, 119.

  281 “and so handsomely restored by Eric Gugler”: JC, “The Second Most Exalted of the Arts,” Journal of Architectural Education 30, no. 2 (Nov. 1976).

  282 “enough bedrooms for us”: LJC, 224.

  282 Greenstein—”a pathological cheapskate”: author int. Charles McGrath, Aug. 5, 2004.

  282 “and all I have to do now”: LJC, 226.

  283 “It was the general hope that Cheever”: Robert Gutwillig, “Dim Views Through Fog,” New York Times Book Review, Nov. 13, 1960, 68–69.

  283 “This is not for publication”: JC to Gentlemen, May 20 [1959], LC.

  284 “The only writer I meant to attack”: JC to Bracher, “Summer 1962,” Bancroft.

  284 “all autobiographical characters who describe”: “Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel,” New Yorker, Nov. 12, 1960, 55.

  284 “abrasive and faulty surface of the United States”: quoted in Gutwillig, “Dim Views,” 68.

  285 “a sort of apocalyptic poetry”: Cowley to JC, Feb. 10, 1961, Newberry.

  285 Reviews of Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel: Charles Poore, in New York Times, May 16, 1961, 35; David Boroff, in New York Times Book Review, April 16, 1961, 34.

  286 “[Arvin] was fixed at a prepubertal stage”: Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 239.

  287 “kind presence will guide [him] away”: GT, 124.

  287 “the magnification of all our vices”: LJC, 229.

  287 “The sensation of my aloneness”: GT, 234.

  287 “fancy hotel apartment” at the Marmont: JC to Arthur and Stella Spear [c. Nov. 1960], courtesy of Pamela Spear Goff.

  287 “I ran up a bill of a hundred dollars”: JC to WM [c. Feb. 1961], Berg.

  288 “My God, John … your crotch!”: GT, 11.

  288 “a side-parlor in the Hotel Gladstone”: JC to WM [c. Dec. 1960?], Berg.

  288 treat Wald “like a demented child”: JC to WM [c. Nov. 1960], Berg; the remark is deleted from the letter published in LJC, 229.

  288 “They talk about Saroyan's tax problems”: Weaver to MC, Nov. 29, 1960, CFP.

  288 he liked Wald “immensely”: Joanne Stang, “Lancaster Swims in Deeper Waters,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 1966, 101.

  288 “literary graveyard”: JC to Cowley, Dec. 22, 1960, Newberry.

  288 “an old bath-house at the edge of the lot”: LJC, 229.

  289 “curious domestic scenes”: JC to the Spears [c. Nov. 1960], courtey of Pamela Spear Goff.

  289 Calvin Kentfield: much of the background derives from my interview with Evan S. Connell, July 21, 2005, as well as correspondence between Kentfield and Katherine Anne Porter on deposit at the University of Maryland.

  290 “I spend the night with C.”: JJC, 143.

  290 “When I die you can put on my headstone”: F, 121.

  290 his “seafaring progenitors” had all kept journals: GT, 17.

  290 “stacks of satisfied starlets”: LJC, 270.

  291 “a big, important film that will explore”: JC to WM, May 2, 1961, NYPL-MSS.

  291 “or in fact up them”: Kentfield to Porter, May 20, 1962, University of Maryland.

  292 “Kentfield's nude and battered body”: Point Reyes Light, Sept. 11, 1975, 1.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO {1961}

  293 “We know that it commands the greatest views”: quoted in Geoff Walden, “Dealing with Fame and Death,” Ossining Citizen Register, June 19, 1982.

  293 “I feel very much like a bum”: quoted in GT, 134.

  294 “Irwin came for lunch”: ibid., 155.

  294 “not for her work … but for a nonstop”: JC to Louise Bogan, May 4, 1959, Academy.

  295 “If the knife should slip”: LJC, 235.

  295 “intensely uncomfortable”: JC to Herbst [c. June 1964], Yale.

  295 “I'm glad you asked”: LJC, 234.

  296 “fire off [his] shotgun at intervals”: ibid., 258–59.

  296 “immediately thought of John Cheever”: author int. Andrew Ziegler, May 4, 2004.

  296 “I am loving the Beatles”: JC to WM [c. June 1964], Berg.

  297 “inhibitive megrims”: JC to Herbst, May 6 [1961?], Yale.

  297 “I never dreamed I'd take a leak”: GT, 141.

  297 “As he approached the bridge”: JJC, 148.

  298 “marvelous brightness”: Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1973), 111–14.

  298 “Micks in the White House!”: JC to Biddle [c. summer 1961], LC.

  298 Mrs. Vanderlip had decided to “hydrogen-proof “: JJC, 153.

  299 “[Bill] was a man who mistook power for love”: LJC, 314.

  300 “Did you know that The New Yorker“: CJC, 107.

  300 “[I]t has been my experience”: JC to Glenway Wescott, April 28 [1957], Yale.

  300 “Don't believe it” … “What is a shapely day?”: manuscripts of “The Bella Lingua” and “The Country Husband,” Brandeis.

  300 “I kept the conversation”: GT, 149.

  301 “I blundered. I thought there were two endings”: LJC, 233.

  301 “I admire Salinger, of course”: ibid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE {1962–1963}

  302 “I expect that I will continue to report”: JJC, 168.

  303 “Oh, don't worry about me, dear”: HBD, 67.

  304 “What is involved”: JJC, 150.

  305 “His favorite word for me was diffident“: author int. Ann Adams, July 13, 2004.

  305 “He has endured many disappointments”: JJC, 165.

  305 “I love you”: Sarah Cheever to FLC Jr., July 12 [1964?], PJC.

  306 “I was planning to take him trout fishing”: CJC, 124.

  306 “collection of quaint episodes”: Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 189.

  306 “My credentials”: Bracher to JC, July 4, 1962, Bancroft.

  306 “The Wapshot Chronicle is loosely situated”: Frederick Bracher, “John Cheever and Comedy,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 6, no. 1 (1963), 66–77.

  306 “He's reading Professer Bracher's paper again“: JC to Bracher, Sept. 20, 1962, Bancroft.

  307 “the first I've ever received”: Bracher to JC, Oct. 24, 1962, Bancroft.

  307 “[C]onsidering the complexity”: JC to Bracher, Feb. 13, 1963, Bancroft.

  307 “The body of Cummings”: Hortense Calisher, in A Century at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Corporation of Yaddo, 2000), 46.

  307 “The force and open
ness of their affection”: HBD, 60.

  307 “I think of Cummings”: JJC, 230.

  308 “thinking, without censure”: JC to James Holmes, April 4, 1979, courtesy of Ned Rorem.

  308 “But my itchy member”: JJC, 171.

  308 “to love what is seemly”: ibid., 208.

  309 “You have two strings to play”: ibid., 176.

  309 “Bottom-the-Weaver haircut”: GT, 161.

  309 “No necking in the parlor!”: NFB, 31.

  309 “I cannot say truthfully”: JJC, 167.

  310 “beaming like a foolish swain”: GT, 172.

  310 “[L]ast night I dreamed I was a Good Humor man”: ibid., 157.

  310 “But the middle, aiie, aiie”: ibid., 159.

  310 “A great many people felt”: JJC, 179.

  311 “This is the small agony”: CJC, 97.

  311 smelling of “cheap handsoap”: GT, 168.

  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 John before he had an accent”: quoted in Frederick Exley, “That Place,” unpublished essay, Rochester.

  334 “a suave, fictional dialect”: Dana Gioia, “Meeting Mr. Cheever,” Hudson Review 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1986), 423.

  334 “Noble might be a better word”: JC, in Atlantic Brief Lives, ed. Louis Kronenberger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 275.

  335 “I can't connect my life”: SD int. John and Mary Dirks, July 16, 1984, Swem.

  335 “he had his New England mumble”: SD int. Hope Lange, Oct. 24, 1984, Swem.

  336 “a writer of consequence, witty”: SD int. David Lange, June 6, 1985, Swem.

  337 “Will success spoil John Cheever?”: HBD, 153.

  337 Mary “flash[ed] her rubies and diamonds”: JC to Kronenberger [c. July 1964], Copley.

  337 “I have the disposition of an adder”: JC to Biddle, July 21, 1964, LC.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE {1964}

  340 “somber and mysterious trip to Russia”: GT, 172.

  341 “I loved the stories so much”: Litvinov to JC, April 9, 1961, Columbia.

  341 a “lost generation” of Russian youths: Harrison Salisbury, “ ‘Lost Generation’ in Soviet Union, Bored and Nihilistic, Worries Regime,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1962, 1, 4.

  341 “I was told that my liberty would be in danger”: LJC, 242.

  342 “pour[ing] vodka into [his] ears”: CJC, 81.

  342 “Then a man comes in with the boodle”: GT, 173–74.

  342 “It seemed as if he were in sort of a cloud”: SD int. William Luers, Aug. 22, 1985, Swem.

  343 neither side wanted any “bad incidents”: author int. Luers, July 30, 2004.

  343 “through oceans of sheep”: JC to Litvinov, Nov. 2 [1965].

  343 “Welcome to the house of … Chekhov”: JC, “The Melancholy of Distance,” in Chekhov and Our Age: Responses to Chekhov by American Writers and Scholars, ed. James McConkey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Center for International Studies, 1984), 126.

  344 “How many letters do you get?”: CJC, 54.

  344 “Everybody says that [Voznesensky is] a better poet”: JC to Litvinov, May 16 [1967?].

  344 “I seem to love him”: JJC, 201.

  344 “You drink like Siberian worker!”: author int. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Oct. 5, 2004.

  345 “May I kiss you?” Cheever asked: Litvinov to author, Dec. 22, 2004.

  345–346 “I'm getting conditioned to the ads”: Litvinov to JC, April 6 [1965?], CFP.

  346 “note how this is the dream�
�: SD int. Raymond Carver, Oct. 23, 1984, Swem.

  346 “We all enjoy your letters tremendously”: JC to Litvinov, March 15 [1965].

  346 “on some sort of International Amity Excursion”: LJC, 250.

  346 “heartwarming reunion with the Maxwell's”: Litvinov to JC, May 16, 1978, CFP.

  347 “I am sure that when I die”: LJC, 273.

  347 “I sincerely admire the brilliance”: JC to JU [c. March 1964?], Houghton.

  347 “He greeted us with glee”: Mary Weatherall to SD, Dec. 17, 1984, Swem.

  348 “as gay as an April in Paris”: OJ, 112.

  348 “Cheever's confession made me sad”: ibid., 116.

  348 “[Updike] tried to upstage me”: LJC, 248.

  349 “At one of our joint appearances”: OJ, 115.

  349 “John [Updike] loved Cheever's writing”: author int. Mary Weatherall, April 3, 2007.

  350 “I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience”: LJC, 245.

  350 “this is nothing you take with you”: LJC, 242.

  351 “As for Paul [Moor]”: JC to Litvinov, Sept. 14 [1965].

  351 “I would like to live in a world”: LJC, 264.

  352 “fifteen minute impersonation of Yevtushenko”: ibid., 246.

  352 “I am not a political person”: JC to Boris Ryurikov, Jan. 31, 1967, NYPL-MSS. A note is attached: “The following letter was brought to the attention of the FBI on February 28, 1967.” The letter is among papers collected by Herbert Mitgang via the Freedom of Information Act for his book Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988).

  352 “My name is mud”: JC to Bracher [c. Sept. 1965], Bancroft.

  352 “We all miss and love you”: Frieda Lurie to JC, Dec. 14, 1964, CFP.

  354 “can do the twist beautifully”: FLC Jr. to Sarah Cheever, Nov. 16, 1964, PJC.

  354 “trying to establish a sales pattern”: FLC Jr. to Denise Davidoff, Dec. 4, 1965, PJC.

  * See page 128.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX {1964–1965}

  355 “Where the hell are the reviews?”: JC, on The Dick Cavett Show, March 21, 1978, LC.

  355 Reviews of The Brigadier and the Golf Widow: n.a. in Newsweek, Nov. 30, 1964, 104–5; Glendy Culligan, in Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1964, A22; Orville Prescott, in New York Times, Oct. 14, 1964, 43; John Aldridge, in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, Oct. 25, 1964, 3, 19.