John Cheever (51 page)

As writers, though, what counted was not where they came from but where they let their writing take them. And Cheever, Bellow felt, had transformed himself through his fiction, growing and developing in the process. It was what he aimed to do himself and gave them a commonality of purpose shared by few others. “I felt
connected
with John,” he said emphatically.

The tie between Cheever and Updike was complicated by the public tendency to confuse the two writers and their work. Cheever was sometimes put off when an acquaintance would say how much he or she admired his latest book—“
Rabbit Redux
, wasn't it?” Once he was actually invited to do a reading at Notre Dame by a professor who complimented him on the masterful “Maple stories.” Updike was the victim of similar mistakes, and he cannot have been pleased by the bad pun that characterized him as an under- or an over-a-Cheever. Yet there was mutual respect between them from the time Updike wrote Cheever a fan letter about the hang of Cousin Honora's dress and Cheever recognized the unmistakable indications of genius in Updike's first work. “He's a winner,” Cheever invariably said of the writer who was nearly twenty years his junior. He admired Updike's willingness to take chances in his fiction and his capacity to move easily from story and novel to essay and poem. They were in fact “colleagues,” just as Cheever had said in response to the false report of Updike's death, and that collegiality gave their friendship an importance out of all proportion to the rare occasions on which they met. In 1977, John and Mary Cheever drove to Boston for Liz Updike's wedding. He would have gone to Korea to see Liz married, Cheever wrote Updike afterward. Such ceremonies enabled him to recognize the bond between them.

At another significant ceremony in June 1978, Cheever was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard. “A master chronicler of his times,” the citation read, “he perceives in the American suburb a microcosm of the divisions, tensions, and incongruous ecstasies of twentieth-century life.” The recognition meant more to him than to most. He was undoubtedly the only recipient that year whose academic career had ended with his expulsion from prep school. The other honorees included the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ephraim Katzir, the former president of Israel. “Did you graduate from Harvard?” Madame Katzir innocently asked Cheever. No, Cheever replied, nor from high school either. He'd spent most of what might have been his college years, he said, in furnished rooms on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, cold and hungry and lonely.

“Ah,” Madame Katzir said, “but that's all behind you.”

“No,” said Cheever. “I'm not sure that it is.”

At sixty-six, he might soon be on his own again, he hinted. The overseas trips with Mary were over. Now he traveled alone, or with others. In the summer of 1978, he visited Bulgaria again and took Ben and Linda along. According to Ben, he apparently had an affair with his interpreter on this journey, a young woman named Andrea. He insisted on Andrea's accompanying them on a trip to Varna, on the Black Sea. There he arranged a champagne-and-caviar celebration in honor of her birthday. The next day, Ben and Linda saw the two of them sunning on the beach in casual intimacy, Andrea topless. It seemed clear that they had spent the night together.

In the fall he was on the reading circuit again, this time on a tour of Canadian cities for the State Department. Word came in October that Susan, who had been spending a year in France for that purpose, had finished her first novel, later published as
Looking for Work
. He was proud of her, John wrote: completing a novel was a great accomplishment. He was happy that Susie was not ashamed of being the daughter of a novelist, and that she had not resorted to crypto-autobiography. In her book, he pointed out, the father rode to hounds and parted his hair in the middle. “I wouldn't be caught dead with a center part,” he said. He was even gladder that she hadn't taken a couple of years off waiting tables in Aspen to find herself. She “knows damn well” who she is and what she wants to do, he observed with approval.

At the end of October, Knopf brought out
The Stories of John Cheever
, a comprehensive collection of sixty-one of Cheever's stories. The book was a triumph, but it might not have existed at all but for the foresight of Bob Gottlieb. When Gottlieb first proposed the collection, Cheever resisted the idea. Almost all the stories had already appeared in both magazine and book form. “Who's going to buy a book just to read them again?” he argued. But Gottlieb saw the potential of a large volume of stories after the success of
Falconer
. Moreover, he did most of the work in putting the book together. All Cheever did was “pull the stories out from under the bed.” Gottlieb read through them, made his choices in consultation with Cheever, and worked out a tentative table of contents. The result was a brilliant assemblage of the best of Cheever, with some significant omissions among his early work and such other stories as the autobiographical “The National Pastime” and the explicitly homosexual “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish, and the Bear.” The stories were presented mostly in chronological order of composition. Cheever decided to lead off, however, with the masterly “Goodbye, My Brother” (1951), though several other stories in the book were written earlier.

The Stories of John Cheever
, nearly seven hundred pages in its bold red jacket, had about it the atmosphere of a magnum opus, a valedictory statement from a writer approaching the end of his threescore and ten. To the general reader and even to reviewers who should have known better, the book came as a surprise. Few realized how many excellent stories Cheever had written, or how many in different keys: some dark, some light, some “written from the outside” in an ironic tone, some “written from the inside” and illuminated by the sunny vision of the narrator, some realistic, some magical. Most of the reviews were ecstatic. “John Cheever is a magnificent storyteller,” Anne Tyler advised, “and this is a dazzling and powerful book.” The appearance of Cheever's
Stories
, John Leonard asserted, was “not merely the publishing event of the ‘season' but a grand occasion in English literature.” Cheever was “one of the two or three most imaginative and acrobatic literary artists now alive,” Stephen Becker proclaimed. Commercially, the book did extremely well. The local Books 'n Things store in Briarcliff sold almost nine hundred hardcover copies at a book-signing party, and sales were high throughout the nation. His new agent, Lynn Nesbit at ICM, negotiated a five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance from Knopf toward his next two books. He had no need ever to feel poor again.

Cheever welcomed the recognition as much as the money, and for good reason. Early in 1978 his name had been left off a list of three nominees for the American Academy–National Institute Gold Medal in the Short Story. The names submitted to the members were Mary McCarthy, Peter Taylor, and John Updike, distinguished artists all (Taylor won), with Cheever conspicuously absent. His name had come up in the deliberations, and was then dropped on the grounds that he had already received the Howells Medal for the novel from the organization and it was time to recognize someone else. Bill Maxwell propounded this view to the other members of the nominating committee, and it carried the day. To some extent, Maxwell was simply stating what he believed—that it was a good idea to spread the honors around—but he was also motivated by Cheever's ill-spirited remarks about him.

He was particularly incensed by the “Telephone Story”—the tale circulated by Cheever in newspaper and television interviews. In one version of the story, Maxwell recalls, Cheever said he had come to see his editor back in the mid-1950s when he was dead broke and asked if the editor would give him some money in exchange for a share in the royalties of the as yet unpublished
Wapshot Chronicle
. The editor supposedly offered him three thousand dollars, and when Cheever asked if he couldn't make it a little more, picked up the telephone and held it toward him, as if to say, “See if you can do better anywhere else.” No one who knew the gentlemanly Maxwell was likely to take that story seriously, but nonetheless it angered him. “Why should I further John's career when he tells those whoppers about me?” he thought. His part in this decision, Maxwell acknowledges, has subsequently “remained somewhat on my conscience. Maybe more than somewhat.” For the fact was that he thought Cheever the best short-story writer in America.

Malcolm Cowley, another who felt the same way, was outraged at not finding Cheever's name on the ballot circulated to members, and conducted a behind-the-scenes correspondence among officers of the American Academy–National Institute chastising them for letting such an oversight come to pass. Cheever would have been a shoo-in had his name been proposed, Cowley thought, and there was plenty of precedent for awarding the gold medal to those who had already won the Howells. Faulkner had been so honored, as had Cather and Welty. Naturally disappointed, Cheever insisted that he wasn't. He would much rather have written “The Swimmer,” he said, medal or no medal. Still, it must have seemed something like a vindication when
The Stories of John Cheever
received both the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for 1978, while narrowly missing the National Book Award.

The Pulitzer was the biggest prize so far, and it meant a great deal to Cheever. The news came through on Patriots' Day, when the Cheever family had assembled in Boston for Ben's first Boston Marathon. When the telephone call reached the desk of the Ritz, Ben was midway between Hopkinton and the Prudential Center, while his father and his son, Joshua—Cheever's first grandchild—were riding the swan boats in the public garden. Ben got back first, finishing the marathon in just over three hours and running on to the Ritz, where he brought the message for his father up to the room. When John returned, he opened it and discovered that he'd won the Pulitzer. For the Cheever family, as Mary pointed out, “it was a day to remember.”

Many in the literary community inclined to think that Cheever's Pulitzer was overdue. Also in the running for that year's prizes was John Irving's immensely popular
The World According to Garp
. Irving was asked in an interview how it felt to be edged out by Cheever. “When I was learning how to write,” Irving said, “John Cheever was one of the few people who made me realize that the kind of writing I loved could still be done. I can't imagine resenting any honor paid him.” Rumors about a potential Nobel Prize for Cheever began to circulate, rumors that were repeatedly brought to his attention. “When the house fills up with Swedish reporters,” he said, “I'll damned well know I'm up for a Nobel.” In the meantime, he didn't want to speculate on his chances.

Though the Nobel did not come through, John Cheever was by 1979 a wealthy and famous man. “The mail was thick” with invitations, Susan reported. It seemed that everyone who mattered wanted him to come to lunch, to dinner. All that attention rather turned her father's head, Susan felt. He began to talk about himself more than before, to take on airs, and to expect special treatment, she believed. Certainly there were times when he enjoyed his celebrity.

Knopf threw a gala dinner for
The Stories of John Cheever
at Lutèce, where Cheever's immediate companions were actresses Maria Tucci (Gottlieb's wife) and Lauren Bacall. Bacall was then engaged in writing her memoirs, and was delighted when Cheever encouraged her in that effort. Later, he attended a book-launching party for Bacall. “God, you're so terrific to me,” she told him. “You've really given me a boost.” Just don't write a novel, he responded; if she did, he might not be so nice. Much of this was flirtation, but the flirting was innocent enough. “He did give off an aura of being a terrific gent,” Bacall said. Perhaps if she'd known him in his younger days, well … In any event, Cheever was delighted with the Knopf party. It was good to have a publisher, he said, who didn't think writers should sleep on straw. And he was also appreciative when Gottlieb introduced his work to such British authors as David Cornwell (John le Carré), Harold Pinter, and Antonia Fraser. Cornwell wrote him fan letters. Pinter and Fraser took to fighting over who would get to read
Stories
at bedtime.

Contrary to democratic dogma, Cheever believed in the existence and importance of social class, and sneakingly admired the upper class. When Allan Gurganus used the phrase “very rich” in a story, he lined out the adverb. You were or you weren't, he said. “Rich” was one of the few words in the language that did not require qualifying. So he reveled in lunching with the Rockefellers in Pocantico Hills and dining at Mrs. Vincent Astor's. Her diamonds, he wrote in comic exaggeration, were so heavy she couldn't get up by herself. She asked him what he used his little shit-brown Volkswagen Rabbit
for
. “It's so
unbecoming
,” she pointed out. Cheever thought she was “glorious.”

Similarly he was in his element at the races in Saratoga, where he was invited along with Eugene and Clayre Thaw to sit in James Gaines's box. He mingled with the Gaineses and the Whitneys, the Palamountains and Ned Rorem came by to greet him, and he was even winning at the windows. Cheever was “like a little kid” bubbling over with high spirits, Thaw recalled, and was virtually shaking with pleasure as they walked down to the paddock between races.

He also delighted in the eight-thousand-dollar Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date Superlative Chronometer he was given for appearing in an advertisement. It seemed incongruous for a reticent understated Yankee like Cheever to wear this heavy ostentatious gold watch. So Cheever kidded himself about it, joyfully. He shot his cuffs in Dallas to display the massive timepiece, he said, but no one was impressed, because “everybody in Dallas has one.” Sara Spencer teased him about his Rolex-bearing arm growing longer than his other one, and he liked that too. Here was success such as his father only dreamed of.