by John Cheever
“A Present for Louisa,” his Christmas story for Mademoiselle, addresses the issue of whether to get married without a firm financial footing. Roger and Louisa are considering marriage, but he’s not making enough money, and though she has a college degree she can’t find a job. They ought to hold off, Roger thinks. “Marriage isn’t a lark. It’s a serious contract between two adults.” In the end, though, love has its way and they take the plunge.
By the time John and Mary were married in the spring of 1941, they were in rather better shape than his fictional characters. Through her father’s connections, Mary landed a job at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. She worked first as a secretary to T. R. (Timmy) Coward, but lacked the requisite typing and shorthand skills and was transferred to editing and proofing manuscripts for the publishing house. (She stayed on the job until shortly before their daughter, Susan, was born in 1943.) John, meanwhile, continued his remarkable outpouring of publishable stories, mostly but not entirely for The New Yorker. Never again would he match the creative fecundity of the time of his courtship and early marriage. After the fifteen stories of 1940, there were eleven more in 1941 and ten in 1942.
In the fall of 1940, John and Mary resumed their premarital domesticity in Greenwich Village. They even acquired a cat named Harold, after Harold Ross; the name was changed, after a revelation from the veterinarian, to Harolde or Harriet. John paid a last bachelor pilgrimage to Yaddo in the dead of winter. He was ashamed of himself “for gallivanting off” while Mary worked, he wrote her, but the setting was as stimulating as ever. Sharing his pleasure, among others, were his good drinking companion Flannery Lewis and Katherine Anne Porter. At breakfast he heard Porter put down the overtures of a leering playwright. Porter was wonderful, he decided. A few nights later he and Lewis and Porter went downtown to the bars, where she held forth in self-inflating style on her friendships with the great. Porter wasn’t so wonderful, he decided.
He had a far better time the night he went to an amateur talent show with Nathan and Carole Asch. Writing Mary about that, he sang Saratoga’s praises. Living was cheap, and there were plenty of civilized people to talk to. Why didn’t she come up for the weekend and have a look?
On March 22, 1941, John Cheever and Mary Watson Winternitz were married at the Winternitz home in New Haven. The Reverend Sidney Lovett, chaplain and “Uncle Sid” to decades of Yalies, performed an ecumenical ceremony to suit Cheever’s Episcopalianism, Dr. Winternitz’s Jewish background, and Mary’s lack of religious commitment. It was not a large wedding, or a conventional one. Fred served as his brother’s best man. Mary’s sister Elizabeth was her only attendant. Serious-minded radical that she was, Mary “didn’t believe in white or a veil.” She wore a severe gray dress with a corsage at the shoulder. Polly organized “a very nice house wedding” with little sandwiches and champagne. John’s parents came down from Quincy. His father seemed a little fuzzy mentally, and Mary’s pretty stepsister Louise was deputized to look after him. Everything went smoothly. Afterward John and Mary Cheever returned to Greenwich Village and their new apartment at 19 East Eighth Street.
In reporting on the wedding, the Quincy newspaper was inexact about the educational accomplishments of the Cheevers. “The bride-elect was educated in Switzerland and New York,” the story read, while the groom “attended Thayer Academy and studied at Harvard.” The effect was to imply that John was Mary’s equal in educational background, though she graduated from Sarah Lawrence and there is no record of his having enrolled at Harvard. This imbalance created certain tensions, even during the halcyon days of courtship. One night in the fall of 1940, they had dinner with Helen McMaster, who (along with Horace Gregory) had taught Mary in writing courses at Sarah Lawrence, and with a young male instructor from the college. The two academics took the occasion to attack Cheever’s New Yorker fiction, particularly a story called “Happy Birthday, Enid” that was based on one of Mary’s willful stepsisters. Confrontation was the style at Sarah Lawrence. At college Mary was encouraged to express her opinions even when—especially when—they ran counter to received wisdom. But with John and the other men they saw—almost all of them older than John, who was six years older than she—Mary learned to hold her tongue. When she did speak up, they would say, “Oh, that’s just Sarah Lawrence” by way of dismissal. The peculiar timbre of Mary’s speaking voice also militated against her being taken seriously. Her voice is high and sweet, rather like that of the pianist-singer Blossom Dearie. And since she sounded like a little girl, people were often deceived into thinking her intellectually immature. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Once they were married, John was eager to make himself the breadwinner of the family. He had “very old-fashioned ideas” about marriage, Mary said, foremost among them the conviction that the male should earn the money and the female should make the home. The example of his own family undoubtedly solidified this feeling. His father had not succeeded as provider, his mother had gone to work, and to John’s mind, this reversal of roles had disastrous consequences. So, although Mary had a job when they first were married, he wanted to establish himself, start a family, and relieve her of the obligation/privilege of working as soon as possible.
For the most part, he and Mary were very happy together as newlyweds. John possessed then what he always had: the capacity to say the surprising thing. “Most people say what’s expected of them, and you can anticipate what’s coming,” Mary points out. It was not that way with John. The way he talked about things and people was so amusing, and so beautifully said, that it more than made up for their occasional disputes. As Bill Maxwell recalls from visits to their Eighth Street apartment, “in those days John was terribly funny and charming, and certainly not like anyone else.”
Social life in the Village involved a great deal of drinking. John drank more than Mary, but she participated too. They drank at the party the Werners gave to welcome Mary to their literary and artistic circle. They drank with artists Niles Spencer and Stuart Davis at the marble tables of the Lafayette, where Spencer, “a darling gentle man,” liked to play bagatelle. They drank with Flannery and Claire Lewis, who lived above a nightclub called the Black Cat. Lewis had been banished from Yaddo, the story ran, for drinking too much and urinating into the pool outside the mansion. They drank with Pete and Lib Collins, who were always broke but had a lot of style and didn’t mind that the Cheevers were somewhat better off. They drank and ate at the parties Dorothy Dudley used to give on Friday nights. Dorothy, a large hospitable woman with a down-Maine accent and a good job at the Museum of Modern Art, loved to cook. At her invitation the Cheevers and Collinses came over on Thanksgiving eve to stuff the turkey. Lib cut herself slightly on a piece of dry bread, put a small Band-Aid on her finger, and continued stuffing the bird. When the job was done, the bandage had disappeared. All four of them hoped it might turn up in the helping of one particularly stuffy guest the following day, but it never turned up at all. After Thanksgiving dinner Cheever and Edward Lazare, who ran a bookstore nearby, lay down on the floor, themselves stuffed.
Throughout the summer of 1941, the Cheevers spent their weekends looking after Josie Herbst’s place at Erwinna in her absence. Venery Valley, they called it, and some drinking was done there too. John worked around the house himself, and hired a neighbor called Foolish—who showed them his “collection of twisted roots” that resembled lewd animals—to mow the field and weed the garden. Just how much these outings in the country meant to John and Mary is suggested in a midsummer 1941 story called “Run, Sheep, Run.” Dave and Ramona, the couple in the story, are flat broke, but Dave steals eight dollars from a Greenwich Village bookstore, enough to pay for a Sunday journey by train and bike to the fresh air of Bucks County. All too soon it is time to go back to the city.
“I wonder where we’ll get the money next time,” Ramona said when she heard the train whistle.
“Don’t you worry, honey,” Dave said. “We’ll get it.”
With the bombing of Pe
arl Harbor, all merely personal matters faded into insignificance. John and Mary heard the news at Edward and Monie Lazare’s on Sunday, December 7. Within a week the country was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. “Never before,” President Roosevelt declared, “has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization.” The draft was extended to all men between eighteen and sixty-four. By the first of the new year, both Cowley and Herbst had gone to work in Washington, and Cheever asked them to look for openings there. When nothing developed on that front, he determined to enlist. He and Mary made a final trip to Josie’s place on Washington’s birthday where as usual they warmed themselves in bed with hot bricks wrapped in newspaper. Someday, he hoped, they might all foregather there again when the papers were carrying no war news at all. For the time being, though, all the news was bad. Bataan fell on April 9. John and Mary spent a long weekend together at Treetops. Corregidor surrendered on May 6. The next day Cheever went off to war.
ARMY
1942–1943
At the Fort Dix reception center in New Jersey, Cheever began to undergo the demeaning process of depersonalization immemorially employed by the military to transform civilians into soldiers. Nearly thirty, he was a good deal older than most of the recruits, but the army was no respecter of years. He stripped naked for the medics, was examined twice for gonorrhea, and was given the first of his shots for smallpox, typhoid fever, and tetanus. He had his hair sheared to regulation length, took standardized tests to measure his mechanical aptitude and general IQ, and put on the GI clothing he’d been issued. He saw the obligatory movie on venereal disease and was read the Articles of War, reminding him that the penalty for desertion in time of war was death.
On his third day in the service he got up at 4:30 A.M. for a fifteen-hour day on KP. Afterward, refreshed by a shower and a glass of beer, he felt completely peaceful and more than a little sad.
Within a week after induction, Private Cheever was shipped south on a troop train to an unannounced destination that turned out to be Camp Croft, five miles from Spartanburg, South Carolina. He was assigned to thirteen weeks of infantry basic training. That would be rough, but—he reassured Mary—there would be plenty of stories to write later; he hoped that he could continue to average forty dollars a week on his fiction even in the army. The army experience itself provided fresh material. Eleven of the fourteen stories he published between the middle of 1942 and the end of 1944 were directly based on characters and incidents he encountered in the service. For the moment, though, he was fully occupied with the business of basic training. Don’t bother to send magazines, he told his wife. He didn’t know when he’d be able to read them.
Neither John nor Mary liked the idea of his serving as a foot soldier on the front lines. During his three months at Camp Croft he explored three different alternatives to that dirty and dangerous job. First, he looked for a post on the camp newspaper, only to find out that there wasn’t even a paper. Perhaps he could start one himself, in due time. Second, he hoped for an assignment—once basic training was over—to Yank, the service magazine Harold Ross had recommended him to. Third, he applied for Officer Candidate School. None of these alternatives panned out.
The first few rugged weeks of basic training left Cheever exhausted. There were no three-day passes and no furloughs. The recruits worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week. Only on Sunday was there respite, when the men were allowed to sleep an hour past their usual 5:30 A.M. reveille—“no hour’s sleep ever seemed sweeter,” Cheever wrote home—and had the rest of the day pretty much to themselves. The other happy moments came at mail call, when Cheever could count on his daily letter from Mary and sporadic correspondence from Pete Collins, Flannery Lewis, Josie Herbst, Morrie Werner, Eddie Newhouse, and Gus Lobrano and Bill Maxwell of The New Yorker. His father, now doddering, sent him advice and counsel based on his experience with the Roxbury Horse Guards, “a fraternal organization that rode at the inauguration of the Governor of Massachusetts and spent an annual bivouac in drinking bouts.” Look into your boots each morning, father Cheever reminded son, to be sure no one has put an egg in the toe.
Some days of training were worse than others. On the second Tuesday in camp, John’s platoon went on a long march with full equipment. Then they practiced running up and down hills. That night, all he wanted to do, after scrawling a note to Mary, was to collapse on his bunk. Bayonet drill was the hardest work of all, and the bayonet field with its dummies the strangest of sights. Both his feet and his eyes were bothering him, he wrote on May 28, the day after his thirtieth birthday. He felt “every day of thirty.”
In addition to the physical strain, Cheever like all enlisted men had to get accustomed to the language and behavior of men very unlike himself and to a region of the country—the Deep South of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, as he explained it to Mary—he had never before penetrated. The South, he decided, was not for him. Spartanburg struck him as a depressing army-post town. The heat was murderous. On the radio, commercials promised a cure for malarial fever, and the music ranged from popular hymns to country western laments. A decade later, looking at “the delicate but ungenerous and sallow face” of Randall Jarrell on a book jacket, he was reminded of the “cultural bleakness” he found around Camp Croft.
With his fellow trainees—mostly New Yorkers—he got along well, even though their barracks talk relied largely on one all-purpose adjective. “In a fucking line-rifle company,” Farragut recalls in Falconer, “you get the fucking, malfunctioning M-I’s, fucking ’03’s to simulate fucking carbines, fucking obsolete BAR’s and fucking sixty-millimeter mortars where you have to set the fucking sight to bracket the fucking target.” His platoon at Camp Croft was mostly made up of men who had pursued a wide variety of occupations in civilian life. There were longshoremen and ex-cons, busboys and bank clerks, and one terribly sad fellow “who had never done anything. Anything at all.” As the weeks wore on, Cheever made friends with Charlie Baxter and Joe Burt and Andy Broznell, men with backgrounds more or less like his own who liked, as he did, to take a drink. But without question, the most memorable figure of basic training was the platoon sergeant who drove them hard and who seemed determined to make everyone as miserable as possible.
The name of this “strange and interesting” man was Sergeant Durham, a seven-year veteran, and accounts of his peculiar behavior soon came to dominate John’s letters to Mary. Durham was passionately determined to shape up his platoon. The way he went about this was to abuse his recruits unmercifully. Nothing they did could satisfy him, and their least lapse aroused his violent temper.
“You work with me, I make you a soldier,” Sergeant Durham told his men. “You cross me, you sell your soul to the devil.” Then he ran them in the hot Carolina sun until they dropped. He gave them close-order drill after lunch and rifle inspection after dinner and confined them to barracks night after night. He even called them out one Sunday night for shoe inspection. None of the other platoons suffered so many indignities, the troops soon found, and they threatened to rebel. Almost everyone hated and feared Durham for his temper and his cruelty and his obsession that nothing in the world mattered except the performance of his platoon. “I’ll kill the son of a bitch” was the refrain that ran through the barracks. Cheever was inclined to forgive him, however. Durham didn’t have a friend in the world, he realized. The army was his life. And he was making the platoon into the best one in the company.
Midway through basic training—after they ran through clouds of poisonous gases but before they crawled under barbed wire with live ammunition zinging over their heads—Durham went on furlough and the army seemed almost like a vacation. Cheever wrote long letters to Mary. He worked on his stories. He read a newspaper for the first time in weeks. A few days later, after their fifty-dollar-a-month payday, he and Joe Burt and Andy Broznell and Larry Doheny got weekend passes and hired a taxi driver to take them to the cool, light mountain air of Hendersonville, North Carolina, which w
as something like New Hampshire and nothing at all like Camp Croft.
Inevitably Durham “came back with a bang.” He was drinking now, and seemed not quite right in the head. One night just before taps, he rushed out of his room and began to rouse the men who had gone to bed. In his stupor, he thought it was morning. Maybe he was going crazy, he told his platoon the next day.
Near the end of basic, one of the privates beat Durham up, but he returned, stitches and all, in time for one last humiliation of his troops. On their final day the men were in the barracks relaxing when Durham blew his whistle and they raced to the quadrangle to assemble in ranks. “Not good enough,” Durham said. “You’ve got to fall out in fifteen seconds,” and he put them through this routine again and again “until their fatigues were black with sweat.” Finally it was time for the recruits to leave, Cheever for Camp Gordon, Georgia. Memories of Sergeant Durham traveled with him, and he decided to resurrect him in a story.
“Sergeant Limeburner,” which appeared in the March 13, 1943, New Yorker, had to clear both official military channels and the magazine’s informal judgment on what kind of army story it should run in wartime. In most particulars, Limeburner bears a close resemblance to the actual Durham. He is wantonly cruel and friendless, susceptible to alcohol, and possibly deranged. He calls his men out for shoe inspection. He marches them in the heat until they drop. He tries to get them to fall out of the barracks in fifteen seconds. But the story introduces an intermediate voice of reason, a Corporal Pacelli, who assures the troops that they are lucky to have Limeburner in charge. “You’ll appreciate this training when you get into combat,” Pacelli says. And in the final scene, Cheever alters the facts to create a measure of sympathy for the sergeant. He has been publicly beaten up, and is led away sobbing, by an officer who will—it is implied—bust him of his rank and relieve him of his job. “The faces watching him walk toward his judgment were the lean, still faces of the soldiers he had destroyed himself to make,” the last sentences read. “In the morning there was another sergeant to take his place.”