by John Cheever
Forty years later, Cheever wrote a young gay friend that he and Walker Evans had briefly been lovers when he first came to New York. In a letter he vividly described ejaculating all over Evans’s furniture and art works before departing at three in the morning. This account, obviously written to amuse, may contain no truth at all. Frances Lindley, who has read Evans’s private papers in her capacity as editor, thinks it highly unlikely. Evans had lovers of both sexes, but nowhere mentions Cheever as among them. Besides, it was clear to her as John’s devoted friend at the time that his sexual orientation was toward women.
In particular, Frances liked Johnny (as she called him) for his kindness. “There was a kind of sweetness in Johnny that was really very nice,” she observed. They had dinner at Malcolm Cowley’s soon after Malcolm’s mother had died. In bittersweet reminiscence Cowley dug out his childhood silver spoon, and Cheever was immediately tender toward him. On the whole he was less sympathetic to other figures in the literary establishment. He fell asleep listening to Anderson drone on about himself. Dos Passos he thought “dull but pleasant.” He and Edmund Wilson “detested one another” on sight. His hero was fellow Yankee Cummings, the tall patrician poet who bestrode the Village like a Colossus from his Patchin Place apartment, the lovely Marion Morehouse at his side. “It was Estlin Cummings who, through at least a similarity in background, made it clear to me that one could be a writer and also remain highly intelligent, totally independent, and married to one of the most beautiful women in the world.” That was what he wanted out of life too.
Cheever hoped that The Holly Tree would help him achieve a measure of that independence. It did not work out that way. In the fall of 1936 he got word from Simon & Schuster that his book needed revision. He had submitted a digressive and episodic book with a shifting point of view; the publishers wanted something much more conventional. So he headed upstate to Yaddo, aided by a loan from Cowley, planning to “go over the whole novel again, word for word.” Despite the loan, he had to turn out stories to make ends meet, and so the novel languished. His financial condition, as of December 1936, was the worst in two years. At Yaddo, the snowdrifts were piling up outside and the walls beginning to close in. He needed to escape, and did.
He spent much of January in Quincy, his longest visit in years. His father got to reminiscing about the impoverishment of Newburyport after the Civil War. Both parents lamented the more recent decline of New England. Brother Fred had even written a book—“not a very good book, but a book”—on the subject, he reported to Elizabeth Ames. But no one resented the collapse more than John himself. Even sadness seemed inadequate to deal with the story, he wrote in a book review for The New Republic. “For the glorious seaboard of the China trade means to most of us now a four-way turnpike and a few brilliant old women and the main-stem girls in Portland and empty harbors and fugitive mill towns and the smell of the tourist camps and a cretin at a gas station.” The glory days might be over, but with his brother he was eager to declare that the tradition was still vigorous, if temporarily quiescent, that there was more to their native land than crazy old aunts in the attic.
Cheever next went to New York for a week, where he stayed with the Werners and saw Dorothy Farrell, now divorced. He’d been away from the city for so long that he felt like a yokel: at the Lafayette he stared at a couple who were drinking champagne and playing backgammon. Either he or Max Lieber must also have had a conference with Simon & Schuster, for the publishers came through with a four-hundred-dollar advance, and by the first of February he was back at Yaddo, revising the novel. He had the time to do the job now, but no matter how he sweated and strained he could not bring it off. His publishers demanded a kind of novel he could not or would not produce. In the end he abandoned The Holly Tree entirely, returned to New York, and—according to a latter-day yarn—chucked the only typescript into a trash can. No copy has ever surfaced.
By 1937 the Spanish Civil War was stimulating political passions among his friends in the city. The Refrigiers marched in protest against Franco and collected money for Loyalist Spain. “Come on, join up, Cheever,” Ref urged him. He sympathized, yet refused. He did tramp down Fifth Avenue in the May Day parade with Josie Herbst and sixty thousand others, their banners proclaiming Solidarity Forever. And he made plans, at least, to attend the Writers’ Congress held in New York later that summer. But he signed no manifestos and joined no political organizations. “John sailed through the thirties without getting allied to any group whatever,” Cowley said. His heart was in it, Lila Refrigier observed, but he wouldn’t make a commitment. “Security meant an awful lot to him.”
Security undoubtedly had something to do with Cheever’s reluctance to sign on in the cause. More important still was his persistently gloomy anticipation of the future. For him the good old days had passed and would not return. One day a crowd assembled to gawk at a 1910 Pierce-Arrow in New York. “Don’t you dare laugh at this car,” the painter Niles Spencer told them. “The world in 1910 was a much better place than you have ever known.” Cheever was inclined to agree, and anticipated dark clouds ahead. In “Behold a Cloud in the West,” a story that appeared in a collection called New Letters in America (1937), edited by Horace Gregory and Eleanor Clark, he depicted the impotence of those who sought peace in our time. An aging pacifist, Dr. Hardwick, goes to a European peace conference full of hope, but he stands no chance against nationalistic rivalries and hatreds. “On the east end of the hall,” the AP man covering the conference writes, “stands an old man representing forces that at their best were weak and ephemeral. On the west end of the hall sit younger men representing an armed body of seven million soldiers.” The war in Spain was going to spread, and, according to Cheever’s fatalistic story, there was nothing to do about it.
Finally, Cheever resisted making a commitment to Communism because he knew that it would militate against his art. He had made the point, in “In Passing,” that Communism and the American dream were incompatible. So, he believed, were literature and Communism, or literature and any doctrinaire ideology. Human relations were not so simple as the Party tried to make them seem. The true artist had to write about these and not about abstract relations between classes or societies, about the individual and not about humanity as a whole. New Masses singled him out in the thirties, Cheever maintained, as “the last voice of the decadent bourgeoisie.” It did not bother him at all. He was “not concerned with social reconstruction.” He was concerned “with literature as an intimate and acute means of communication.”
MARY
1937–1942
With his novel scrapped, Cheever was forced to build his reputation as a writer of stories. The New Yorker printed two of his short sketches in 1935, two more in 1936, and one in 1937, but he was not yet wedded to that magazine. During 1937, for instance, he published six very different stories in five different publications: New Letters in America (where he shared space with Franz Kafka, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop), The New Republic, The New Yorker, Story, and The Yale Review. The tales ranged from a vignette about an aging stripper trying to keep her job, to a brief, tender story about office girls lonely for love, to the long stories—“The Brothers” and “Homage to Shakespeare”—that looked to Cheever’s recent and distant past for their subject matter. By and large, these appearances earned him more prestige than money. Late in 1937 he decided to try a more commercial market with more commercial stories. Drawing on his observations during the races at Belmont and Saratoga, he turned out the first of three racetrack romances for Collier’s. All are written to a formula: boy meets girl and they fall in love, complications ensue and they part, complications are resolved and they walk off together into the sunset. The first of these stories, “His Young Wife,” appeared in the January 1, 1938, Collier’s. Shortly before publication date, the magazine editors called Cheever at Yaddo, frantic. They had lost his story. Could he send along the carbon? No, he couldn’t, having kept no copy of his own. But he rewrote it from memory in a
day.
Even with sales to Collier’s, Cheever’s income from stories was hardly enough to support him. In early May 1938, he finally found a fifty-dollar-a-week job with the same Federal Writers’ Project that had rejected him two and a half years earlier as insufficiently poor. Nathan Asch, already employed on the project, sang Cheever’s merits to FWP director Henry Alsberg, Alsberg hired him, and so he entrained for Washington, D.C., to apply his editorial skills to the mound of material for the American Guide series that was pouring into headquarters from across the United States. Most of the copy that came to Washington had been thrown together by unemployed teachers and librarians and office workers, and it read that way. As a “junior editor,” Cheever was set to work rearranging “the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” On the administrative side of the FWP, Alsberg was about as disorganized a director as could be imagined. A genial man with an astute literary mind, he ran a chaotic shop. He did not bother to keep carbons of his own letters. As for correspondence from others, “if he were interested, it went into his desk; if not, into his wastebasket.” Moreover, Alsberg changed direction with the wind. What was demanded one month was countermanded the next. Few understood what they were supposed to do, and when, and why.
Neither the work nor Washington itself much appealed to Cheever. The clerks spoke in Southern accents, the streets were full of bureaucrats, everybody dressed alike, almost everybody talked about his civil service rating, the bars were closed on Sundays, and he missed New York.
During his months in Washington, Cheever stayed in Mrs. Gray’s boardinghouse at 2308 Twentieth Street, NW, not far from his office in the WPA building. Asch immediately exposed him to the international social life of the city. At parties he drank with conservatives and radicals, Cubans and Danes. Back at the boardinghouse he took his meals with fellow government employees and one elderly woman who went out of her way to denigrate WPA employees. Cheever pretended to be deaf when she asked him to pass the gravy.
At table he also heard rumors about the mouse in the National Archives and Drew Pearson in other people’s beds. Success in Washington, it became clear, depended on connections. The man next door at Mrs. Gray’s may or may not have made the chart described in The Wapshot Chronicle: a chart that detailed his social progress according to the political prominence of the hosts who had asked him to dinner in Georgetown, or to parties at the Pan-American Union and the embassies. And his landlady may not have been a fallen aristocrat who put on airs and shorted her boarders on butter for the spoon bread, as in a short story he wrote. But it was true that everyone he met “verged on being important or on knowing someone important or on being related to someone important.” He could guarantee his future in the government by courting the right girl, the widow of a four-star general told him. “Now [labor leader] John L. Lewis has a daughter,” she said. “She’s rather stout and she’s not awfully pretty but if you rush her, you’re made.”
Actually the abundance of available girls was one of the things that he liked about the city. He took Anna Keogh out for ice cream sodas on warm summer evenings and, for a time, thought he was in love. Life fell into a regular pattern. On paydays he cashed his check and got his shirts back from the laundry. On weekends he played touch football and volleyball and went to parties with fellow workers at the FWP. When Jerre Mangione and Charles Flato moved into an apartment near the Library of Congress, Cheever bought them a record of Midge Williams singing Langston Hughes’s “Love Is Like Whisky, Love Is Like Red, Red Wine” as a housewarming gift. He would never own any possessions that might tie him down, Cheever told Mangione. He wanted security, but he wanted to be free too.
Despite sharing the somewhat compulsive social life of FWP workers, Cheever made no important or lasting relationships among his fellow employees. Instead he relied on Asch and Josie Herbst for friendship. He spent delightful weekends at Josie’s house in Bucks County, drinking mint juleps and watching the brook ripple by. The second of his racetrack stories was about to run in Collier’s, and he had hopes of selling it to the movies. If he got some money, he’d buy a house near hers in Erwinna, he said. That was his goal: “a house a wife a bottle of whiskey and a chance to work.” Work on his own fiction, that is, not repairing the tortured prose of others. The job remained uninspiring at best. There must have been intelligent people around, Cheever later acknowledged, but he didn’t see much of them.
One Saturday, fireflies were twinkling as he rode horseback through the Maryland countryside. It was pretty, all right, but the colors could not compare with those of a New England autumn, and he was eager to get back to his “six-by-eight furnished room” in New York. In November he returned to the city, having agreed to stay with the FWP for as long as it took to get the New York City Guide ready for publication.
Unlike most FWP operations, the one in New York was blessed with literary talent. Among those who worked on the New York City Guide, in addition to Cheever, were Vincent McHugh, Richard Wright, Kenneth Patchen, Edward Dahlberg, and Kenneth Fearing. As well as the most talented, New York’s was also the most controversial FWP group. The original director, the one-legged poet Orrick Johns, ran afoul of his appetite for liquor and sex. Johns was making his way to his apartment one night for an assignation with an attractive employee, a bottle of brandy under his arm, when the employee’s boyfriend knocked him unconscious, poured brandy on his wooden leg, and set it afire. That made the papers, and Johns was fired. Next the writers made news by going on strike in protest against a cutback in employees mandated by Washington. Finally, in the autumn of 1938, the New York unit came under fire from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (or the Dies Committee, as it was known, for Congressman Martin Dies of Texas). The project was “doing more to spread Communist propaganda than the Communist Party itself,” the New York Journal-American declared. That was an exaggeration. There were Communists in the FWP, but most were liberal Democrats.
Whatever its political coloration, the New York group was lagging behind schedule, and Alsberg was under pressure to prove that his organization could produce the two volumes of the New York City Guide, and soon. He put Joseph Gaer, his troubleshooting executive editor, on the job. Gaer commandeered the services of the project’s most capable workers, and with Cheever’s help, put both volumes of the guide into production within a few months. Cheever himself, listed as an “Editorial Assistant” in the guide as it appeared in 1939, resigned as of May 25, having spent just over a year in the government’s employ.
When Cheever left the Federal Writers’ Project, he virtually obliterated it from his mind. His parents in Quincy were undoubtedly ashamed of his having been a WPA employee. The Republican middle class in general regarded the WPA as a make-work outfit that paid slackers to lean on shovels. For them the initials stood for We Poke Along. To have been a WPA employee came to represent, in later years, a confession of personal defeat. For some FWP workers, the memory of their experience became a secret shame. Cheever must have been among these. He rarely drew on the experience for his fiction, though he realized it had possibilities. “The Washington rooming-houses where one lived, the social and athletic life of the project, the diversity of the cast—drunken stringers and first-rate men—the bucking for power, the machinations of the Dies Committee and the sexual and political scandals all make an extremely interesting story but it doesn’t seem to be my kind of thing.” Only rarely, as time passed, could he be brought even to talk about those days, and then with bitterness. Jim McGraw, who worked with him on the FWP, saw Cheever at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980, for the first time in forty years.
“Hey, Johnny,” McGraw said. “It’s a long time since I last saw you on the Writers’ Project.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Cheever replied.
Liberated from the FWP, Cheever headed north to spend most of the summer at Triuna on Lake George, running the launch and water-skiing behind a neighbor’s Gar-Wood motorboat. Eleanor
Clark came for a stay, but she was gone by fall, along with all the other tourists. Then Cheever himself packed up, stopping in Saratoga for a visit on his way to New York. The previous year, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger had called him a resident of Saratoga. That was not so, but Yaddo and its environs did exert “a terrifying hold” over him. Lost Horizon romanticized Shangri-La, but Yaddo had Tibet “licked, hands-down.” In the fall of 1939 it seemed a million miles away from the real world, where wounded soldiers were straggling into Paris.
Day by day it became clearer that the United States could not stay out of the war indefinitely. “I feel confident that we are going to be involved … and that I will be killed,” Walker Evans predicted. With still more intense pessimism, a character in Cheever’s “I’m Going to Asia” (1940) anticipates the end of Western civilization. “We’re nice people,” a young man vehemently tells his mother, “and there isn’t going to be any room for nice people any more. It’s ended, it’s all over.” But his mother, who refuses to be troubled, contemplates a trip to Asia. “There isn’t any war in Asia, is there? Or is there?”