by John Cheever
Make him employed or unemployed, put him in a strange city without money or on board a train leaving the city.… He is older. His face is lined. His topcoat is shabby. He stands on the platform smoking a cigarette. He has taken the wrong train and there is nobody there to meet him.
In actuality, Cheever was working to construct a happier future for himself than that represented by the bereft odd man out. He had started a novel at Yaddo partly in response to Cowley’s suggestion that he try to write a book that would appeal to the younger generation much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise had fifteen years earlier. But now Cowley had read the completed chapters of this novel, variously titled Empty Bed Blues and Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps, and found them disappointing. They read too much like stories, Cowley thought, each chapter reaching a dead end. And they sounded too much like Hemingway—particularly the Hemingway of “Cross Country Snow”—both in style and theme. That was discouraging news, and so was the fact that most of the stories Cheever had written lately were being rejected by the magazines.
On a Friday evening in midwinter, Cowley asked Cheever to come for dinner and a talk about his career. It proved to be one of the most momentous evenings of his life. Cheever obviously needed to make some money from his fiction, both men agreed. His novel-in-progress did not offer much promise along those lines. In addition, the stories Cheever was writing were too long, up to six or seven thousand words. Editors didn’t like to buy long stories from unknown writers, Cowley explained. The solution was to write shorter stories.
“It’s Friday now,” Cowley said. “Why don’t you write a story a day for the next four days, none of them longer than a thousand words? Then bring them to me and I’ll see whether I can’t get you some money for them.” It was a labor to daunt any writer, but Cheever agreed at once. On Wednesday afternoon he appeared in Cowley’s office with the four stories. The New Republic took one of them, an anecdote about a burlesque performer called “The Princess.” The other three Cowley sent to Katharine White at The New Yorker, and she took two—“Brooklyn Rooming House” and “Buffalo.” (The fourth story, “Bayonne,” was published in the spring of 1936 in a little magazine.)
So commenced one of the longest and most important publishing connections in American literary history. The New Yorker, barely a decade old in 1935, was looking for talented newcomers who could grow along with it and help to build circulation. In Cheever they found what they wanted. He was two days short of his twenty-third birthday when The New Yorker first printed a story of his. He was not quite sixty-nine when they printed the last one. Altogether 121 stories by Cheever ran in the magazine, more than by any other author except John O’Hara. In all other periodicals he published only 54 additional stories. William Maxwell, who edited most of his New Yorker stories (usually they required very little editing), became one of Cheever’s closest friends. Gus Lobrano, who replaced Maxwell for a time, provided conservative counsel and performed the fatherly service of teaching Cheever to fish. Even editor in chief Harold Ross, a gruff man who rarely trafficked with fiction writers, occasionally took Cheever to lunch.
The pieces Cheever wrote for The New Yorker in the 1930s bear little relation to the great stories that appeared there in later decades. Long stories like “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer” brought whole worlds to life and conveyed a powerful emotional charge. In contrast, most of the early New Yorker stories were brief, pessimistic sketches. “Goddammit, Cheever,” Ross swore, “why do you write these goddam gloomy stories?” There were reasons enough, and the young writer could hardly change his viewpoint on demand. Looking back on the decade thirty years later, Cheever could only bring the thirties into focus through a filter of grainy darkness. Everything sloped downhill, toward war.
Others more politically committed than he were madly hopeful. Cowley, for instance, has written of the 1930s dream of the golden mountains, of the invigorating sense of living in history with a chance to change it for the better, come the revolution. Cheever witnessed what seemed the last throes of capitalism—no one with eyes could have failed to—but could not summon up the utopian vision of the true believer. His stories of the period tell of poverty and disillusionment, and of his dark belief that neither Communism nor pacifism could rescue mankind from itself.
Time after time the economic crisis forces his characters to compromise their humanity and abandon their hopes. In evocations of the working class thought by latter-day critics to be beyond his ken, Cheever glimpsed the dreary and loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, striptease artists, and sailors down on their luck. More effectively, his tales caught middle-class people trying to maintain their dignity in a time of diminished expectations. An example is “Brooklyn Rooming House,” the first of his New Yorker stories. The landlady who runs the rooming house has clearly seen better days. It is not even her own house she is in charge of, and since she cannot evict the drunks and hooligans, she pretends that they are gentlemen. In a moving finish, one of her drunken renters collapses on the stairs. At first she purports not to notice. Then she goes to him, bends over, and as the passed-out man lies motionless, politely asks him three times, “Can’t you find your key? Can’t you find your key? Can’t you find your key?” Some of the Cheever family’s humiliation speaks in this story, and some of John’s own.
With nearly everyone fallen on hard times, it was easy to portray oneself as having once had a genteel background. So in a number of stories, near-indigent characters reminisce about the servants they used to have and the high-stakes bridge games their mothers played in and how those days are gone forever and the best they can hope for is a house in Westchester or Connecticut where they can have a garden and a family and some semblance of a comfortable life, and not many of them are going to reach even that goal.
However unlikely its fulfillment might be, people nonetheless refused to give up their dream—not a dream of the golden mountains where all might thrive but of their private gold mine or at least a place in the country where they might be better off than others. It is this thirst for gain that confounds the Communist Girsdansky in “In Passing” (1936), Cheever’s forthright tale of why it won’t happen here. With the passion of the committed, Girsdansky “spoke of revolution as if it were something that he would see on the next day, or the next.” His great selling point is poverty. “Why should you be poor when you can do away with poverty?” he asks his street-corner audiences. But his voice is dry, he lacks humor and human warmth, and the listeners drift away. Tom, the narrator, is living with European immigrants in Saratoga and working at the five-and-dime. All around him he encounters those who resist Girsdansky’s message. The immigrants have come to what they think of as a land of opportunity. The petty gamblers of the town have “nothing in their faces but a love of money, and the incorrigible dream of big money.” His younger brother daydreams about travel and making a fortune and lots of women. Even his parents, about to be dispossessed of their home, continue to pursue the ever-receding bonanza. At the end Tom takes the night bus to scratch out a chancy existence in New York City, while Girsdansky continues to preach to the trees and the lampposts.
Communism was not the answer, then, at least not in America. Still, simply surviving in New York remained a trial for Cheever. He might not have made it at all but for the generosity of Yaddo, where he spent most of his time from late 1935 to early 1938. During the long cold winter of ’35, he sounded out Elizabeth Ames about the possibility of a summer job running the launch at Triuna, the three-island complex on Lake George owned by the Yaddo foundation. In April he renewed the inquiry. By this time The New Yorker had taken the two stories, and he’d acquired as his first agent Maxim Lieber (a man who specialized in representing writers with liberal sympathies). But he needed time to write, he told Ames, and “would be glad to work for the chance.” Couldn’t a summer job at Yaddo “be fitted in” with writing hours?
This query elicited an unsym
pathetic reply in which Elizabeth Ames advised Cheever to spend more time at some occupation other than writing. He had to learn to support himself, she said. He should adjust to conditions rather than complaining about them. In some exasperation Cheever wrote back that he had held odd jobs all his life, and had supported himself through the winter doing synopses for M-G-M. But as of May 1935 the supply of jobs had run dry. He had put in applications for everything from busboy to copywriter, with no results.
At this Ames relented. Cheever went to Yaddo for the month of August and Lake George for the month of September. In Saratoga he saw a lot of the racing season, piling up background for future stories. On his way south, Cheever stopped in Boston for two days among the “pale, contrite faces” of the city’s lawyers and bankers. With relief he returned to New York, where the problem of gainful occupation was solved, for the time being, by his friend Walker Evans. Evans had been commissioned to photograph an exhibition of American Negro art for the Museum of Modern Art, and he hired Cheever—who had no previous experience—to make prints in a “gruesome hovel” of a studio at 20 Bethune Street. According to the expenses Evans submitted to the Museum of Modern Art, he paid Cheever twenty dollars a week for fourteen and a half weeks during the fall of 1935. Other evidence suggests that the weekly salary was ten dollars and that the job lasted less than three months.
In any event, this was a onetime chore and could not long keep the wolf from the door. Conditions for the free-lance writer could hardly have been worse. By 1935, book royalties had dropped to 50 percent of 1929 rates, and book sales were also cut in half. Magazine advertising linage was dropping steadily; editors were reluctant to build up any backlog, for fear their magazine might go out of business at any moment. The editor of The Atlantic Monthly declared in 1934 that he bought only one out of every four hundred manuscripts submitted. Sherwood Anderson, after two decades of professional writing, found himself “always in need of money, always just two steps ahead of the sheriff.” For beginning free lances the outlook was still dimmer.
To help brighten this dispiriting picture, the New Deal formed the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and appointed Henry Alsberg as national director on July 25, 1935. Exactly two months later, Cheever wrote Alsberg seeking employment. The major undertaking of the FWP was to be the writing, editing, and publishing of guidebooks to each of the forty-eight states and a few of the major cities. He could be of use, Cheever argued, because of the “clarity, ease, and meaning” with which he handled the English language.
He might have been hired at that time—he had not overstated his qualifications, certainly—but ran afoul of a provision of the law requiring that 90 percent of all employees must be on relief at the time they were employed. (Later the figure was lowered to 75 percent.) But he couldn’t go on relief, Cheever wrote Cowley late in October, because he didn’t have a residence. If Malcolm knew of anything he could do, he’d like to hear about it. Instead it was Yaddo that once more gave him sustenance. He spent the entire winter of 1936 on the grounds, along with Lloyd (Pete) Collins, Collins’s dog Oscar, who looked like a dandelion, Leonard Ehrlich, Daniel Fuchs and his wife, Sue—Sue could come, Elizabeth Ames decreed, if she promised not to “disturb the artists”—and of course Elizabeth herself. The group got along famously. Both Fuchses were impressed by Cheever’s capacity for friendship. “You felt good when you were with him,” Dan said. There was a dignity about him too, and a sense of honor. “He was a man who would have been mortified to hurt or disturb anyone else.”
Still, he was restless for success. All four of the men were fiction writers, though only Cheever and Fuchs—author of the Williamsburgh (New York City) novels and later an Oscar-winning screenwriter—were to achieve notable careers. The two of them used to sit in the bar of the New Worden Hotel and talk about the future. “What are you waiting for?” Dan asked Cheever. “For the world and my life to get integrated,” he answered. Yaddo housed and fed him, but otherwise he was broke. At The New Yorker Maxwell remembers getting a call from Maxim Lieber. “Could he have the check in a hurry?” Lieber wondered. His client was living in straitened circumstances upstate.
Hopefully he started working on his novel again, expanding it to a family saga. It was to be called The Holly Tree. For exercise he went skiing on the skis he’d brought with him. He and Fuchs constructed a miniature ski jump in front of the mansion. Cheever sailed over without mishap. Then Dan tried it; first he fell ass over teakettle, next he broke the skis. Cheever made no fuss, but Fuchs, seeing he was distraught, went to town and bought a new pair of skis.
Cheever stayed on at Yaddo well into the spring, earning his way as a kind of all-purpose caretaker. The winter residents departed, to be replaced by Nathan Asch, Eleanor Clark, and Josephine Herbst, all writers and all politically left-wing. Herbst was Stalinist in her orientation and Clark a Trotskyite, but Cheever remained largely untouched by their disputes—“a political innocent,” Clark thought. Instead he stuck to the task of writing his book. He finished the novel at his parents’ small house in Quincy on May 25. To celebrate he drove to the Cape, where the high waves were crashing. The following week he set out for Triuna to take over the job he’d angled for the previous summer. Simon & Schuster had agreed to give his novel a reading. Waiting for a response at Triuna, he ran the enormous Fay & Bowen motor launch, turned out stories, and generally enjoyed himself.
It was at Triuna in the summer of 1936 that Cheever met Anton (Ref) and Lila Refrigier. Ref, a painter of Russian and French parentage, was teaching stage design at the theater school Yaddo was running to bring in summer revenue. His new bride, Lila, taught costume design. Cheever immediately endeared himself to the Refrigiers by rearranging the sleeping accommodations. Elizabeth Ames had assigned them to a room with two twin beds and had given Cheever quarters with a large double bed all his own. Without authorization he undertook to switch his double bed to their room, a maneuver that, according to Lila, made Elizabeth furious. Lila appreciated that kindness, and liked Joey—as she called him—in other ways as well. He had a “delicious” sense of humor. He was a “very loving man.” She could not imagine anyone disliking him. And he took pains with his appearance. He had a pair of gray flannel trousers he wore with an old but well-kept tweed jacket with patches, a button-down shirt with black knit tie, and carefully shined shoes. “He always looked good,” she recalls.
Cheever was immediately attracted to Lila, a blond girl with a fetching ponytail. On a trip to Yaddo, they took a walk together around the stables at the racetrack. “The only other woman I’ve known a horse would whinny at was Dorothy Farrell,” he told her. He shared his successes with her, too. When he sold a story to The Atlantic Monthly, he smuggled a bottle of warm champagne into Triuna. He and the Refrigiers drank it down in toothbrush mugs to celebrate the sale. “Champagne never tasted better,” she remembers. “An extra dollar then meant more than ten thousand dollars later.”
At midsummer the theater school collapsed in the wake of a dispute between the faculty and the administration. The students had prepared a play for parents’ day, but at the last moment the school’s director called it off. When the Refrigiers went to Ames to object, she upheld her director and told them all—students and faculty alike—to go home. As a consequence the Refrigiers left Triuna and rented a house in adjoining Bolton Landing for the rest of the summer. Cheever often came over for dinner, and Lila chided him for staying on. Elizabeth was making a pet of him, she said, treating him like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Why didn’t he just leave Yaddo? But jobs were still scarce, and he valued the haven Yaddo provided. In a very real sense the place had come to seem like home to him. He had no permanent residence during those mid-1930s years. There were extended stays at Yaddo. The rest of the time he divided between visiting his parents and brother and sister-in-law on the South Shore and bunking in with friends in New York.
In the city he saw a great deal of Lila Refrigier. Together they e
xplored New York on the cheap while her husband was working on his canvases or on occasional commissions to do nightclub murals. They rode the Staten Island ferryboat for a nickel and rode the Fifth Avenue bus up and down Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Harlem. They walked up to Central Park to spend hours in the zoo and to go horseback riding. Cheever rode like a jockey, with his stirrups way up. They went to twenty-five-cent movies and to the track at Belmont. Later as he became marginally more prosperous he took her on picnics in his Ford Model A and on visits to see Josie Herbst at her Bucks County house in Erwinna. He also escorted her to cocktail parties at Muriel Rukeyser’s and Eleanor Clark’s. At Eleanor’s, he remembered years later, he was talking with her father when the poet Horace Gregory fell at their feet, drunk. To celebrate sale of one story, he took Lila to Charles’s on Sixth Avenue, where they drank half a dozen dry manhattans before dinner and went on to the Brevoort for after-dinner kümmel. He also confided to her his innermost feelings about his family, and particularly about his brother, Fritz, whom he seemed alternately to love and to dislike. In short, they became intimates.
Frances Lindley (Frances Strunsky by birth, and then married to Pete Collins) recalls a poignant conversation with Anton Refrigier about this relationship. He was disturbed because when Cheever telephoned them at their flat in Chelsea—where Zero Mostel “rented” Ref’s studio one summer without paying the rent—he did not even speak to Ref but simply asked for Lila. “Frances,” Ref said, “I have to ask you something. Is Lila in love with John?” Frances sighed with relief at the way the question was worded. It was a question she could honestly answer “I don’t know.”
Cheever struck almost everyone who knew him in those years as aggressively heterosexual, very much a woman’s man. He was “pretty promiscuous,” Frances Lindley reports, but that was hardly unusual in the Greenwich Village of the 1930s. The Village’s heyday as a center of political and sexual radicalism had passed, but it was still a place where young artists of both sexes could meet and talk and drink and make love without raising eyebrows. Science also made intercourse less risky. It may be significant that most of the women he knew and was attracted to were married when he met them—this was true of Hazel Hawthorne Werner and Dorothy Farrell and Lila Refrigier and Frances Lindley—and therefore posed no threat to his bachelorhood. Simultaneously he was developing his unusual capacity and need for friendship with women who would cherish and encourage him as his own parents had not. Josie Herbst took on the role of a fond older sister, ever interested in his welfare. Elizabeth Ames became virtually a surrogate mother. On the male side, Cowley acted like a father, advising and advancing the career of a talented son.