by John Cheever
It took the troop train all of Friday, August 14, to make the short trip to Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. The camp was big and new and looked something like, “of all places, Harvard.” On arrival at Gordon the men from Camp Croft were immediately split up. Cheever was assigned to E Company of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, but he expected any day, he wrote Mary, to be reassigned to a job on Yank. While waiting for this call that never came, he acclimated himself to the Regular Army. With basic training over, both the work load and the tension were sharply reduced. At first he slept so much he felt “bloated.” There was also time to write stories, and he soon located a typewriter to write them on. He finished one such story only two weeks after arriving at Gordon. “It’s not Shakespeare,” he wrote Mary, “but Lobrano might buy it.”
Financially, the Cheevers were neither well off nor impoverished. In addition to his fifty dollars a month, they could count on Mary’s salary from her publishing job and occasional checks from the sale of stories. Mary routinely received these from Maxim Lieber, and John asked her to wire him money—ten dollars at a time—when he was strapped. As a soldier’s wife Mary was also entitled to an allotment from the army.
He missed Mary badly. She had come to see him briefly in Greenville, South Carolina, during basic training, but now he was dreaming about Sunday afternoons together in New York, with Mary fixing dinner in her red smock. So he wrote her, signing off with “Love, Love, Love.” On the last weekend in August, he wangled a three-day pass and made the trip to New York. It was all that he’d hoped for. The time apart changed nothing, except that it made him love her more.
At Camp Gordon, Cheever discovered that he was no longer regarded as an anonymous trainee, but as a writer whose talents might be put to use. His company commander asked to see a copy of “Family Dinner,” his bittersweet story of a failed marriage that had run in Collier’s in July. He went into Augusta with Nat Greenstein, the company clerk, and heard that a request was in to transfer him to public relations. He was asked to work as the chaplain’s assistant, but turned that down. If he didn’t get Yank, what he wanted was a post in publications, attached to the field. He liked bivouac and night problems and living in tents. Cheever always enjoyed spending as much time as possible in the open air. This was true even in the countryside around his army posts, where poverty and soil erosion scarred the land. “There is not enough topsoil between Augusta, Ga. and Spartanburg, S.C. to fill a bait can,” he wrote Cowley, and used the same line to describe Coverly Wapshot’s army surroundings in The Wapshot Chronicle.
Augusta itself was much more attractive than Spartanburg, and Cheever spent many evenings there. The town had a population of seventy thousand and a pleasant resort hotel, the Bon Air. On Saturday nights, however, downtown Augusta became an “army town” void of civilians, with a fleet of buses on hand to carry the invading troops back to the post at midnight. Hospitable though Augusta was, it was still “embarrassed”—so Cheever put it—“by our numbers.” He was also troubled by lingering signs of Jim Crowism, such as relegating Negroes to the back of the bus. He was relieved to hear on September 10 that Herman Talmadge, running on a racist platform, had lost the election for governor of Georgia. Talmadge, he thought, stood for “everything that we are in training to destroy.”
Besides going into Augusta and writing stories, Cheever filled some of his leisure time at the fifteen-cent camp movies. Mrs. Miniver, the motion picture that earned Greer Garson an Academy Award, was, he thought, “a clever little piece” of effective propaganda, but nothing in the movie communicated the monotony of wartime training camps. Boredom and frustration repeatedly spawned rumors at Camp Gordon, where the 22nd Infantry Regiment was at full strength and, presumably, ready for actual combat. The rumor in the fall of ’42 was that they were slated to fight in the North African desert, where German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had so far outmaneuvered the Allied forces.
In late September and early October, Cheever got a ten-day furlough. Bus, taxi, and two trains took him to New York, where he arrived at nine o’clock Saturday night. A radiant Mary greeted him, there were plenty of good things to eat and drink in the apartment, and for eight days they “did exactly as they pleased.”
Midway through this furlough, Random House offered him a contract for a book of stories. Cheever had been working at his craft for more than a decade now, and at last he could be sure of seeing his fiction between hard covers in a book with his name on it. Publisher Bennett Cerf took him to a celebratory lunch at the Plaza, and afterward he floated downtown on the wings of euphoria. Sometime during this eventful furlough, also, the Cheevers’ first child was conceived. It had been a magical time. “I don’t think I have ever been so happy,” he said.
At Camp Gordon a letter from E. E. Cummings awaited him. Inside was an autumn leaf, a five-dollar bill, and a one-line message from the author of The Enormous Room: “I too have slept with someone else’s boot in the corner of my smile.”
Cheever’s joyous mood continued in the afterglow of his Random House contract. He told his fellow soldiers he was going “to have a book published,” but not many were impressed. For most of them, book meant comic book.
Early in November he and Mary managed a rendezvous in Richmond on a three-day pass. By then he had been promoted to private first class and recruited by the personnel office. Personnel work had its good points and its bad. On the bad side, he much preferred going on problems in the field to typing up furloughs. Besides, some of the personnel men seemed to calculate everything with their personal safety uppermost in their minds. On the other hand, office work fell into a regular routine, unlike the uncertainties of the field; you knew where you’d be and what you’d be doing every day.
Despite his developing literary reputation and New England accent, Cheever was regarded at Camp Gordon “as a very regular guy who used to drink at the PX with the rest of the guys.” He had a talent, then and always, for getting along with all kinds of people. His admiration went most of all to the rebellious, to those who broke the rules and took their punishment. He stood prison guard one day, and decided that the prisoners in the stockade were “the finest looking men” in the army, with a kind of fire and dash about them. But it was the ordinary enlisted men he came to know best and to write about in his letters to Mary. Included among them were Dashing John Dollard, the five-goal polo player from Albany; Smitty, the long mountaineer with no front teeth; Sam Jaffe who ran the payday poker game; Caleb Muse who hid a stolen chicken in the boiler room during inspection; and a soldier named Centennial Prescott. But there was no one at Camp Gordon, no one at all, remotely like Sergeant Durham. In his now abundant spare time, Cheever was crafting “the Durham saga.” He finished it Thanksgiving morning.
During the holiday season, PFC Cheever felt somewhat bereft. On a brisk and wintry Thanksgiving Day the men lined up in front of the mess hall, and the mess sergeant told them not to eat until the corporal said grace. The tables were covered with the same sheets they would sleep on for the next two weeks. The dinner was served by KPs. It was not the way Cheever would have chosen to spend the day. Perhaps they could be together next year, when they could celebrate as a family, he wrote Mary. Their family was very much in prospect. In his letters he commiserated with his wife about her morning sickness, referred to baby “Geoffrey” or “Tootsie,” and encouraged her to find a roomier apartment. He was delighted with the idea of being a father.
Christmas dinner was the same as Thanksgiving with the turkey served on bedsheets. Afterward Cheever took a nap and dreamed of the house he and Mary might inhabit after the war, in the country somewhere amid elm trees. There were presents from everyone—Bill Maxwell mailed him a copy of Pickwick Papers—but Camp Gordon was a hell of a place to celebrate Christmas. The months of waiting were beginning to take their toll. Every soldier at Gordon was eager to be sent somewhere.
Early in January 1943 it looked as if the 22nd would be shipped overseas soon. The men were inoculated, again. They were
ordered to use an APO return address and to make their wills. Guns were packed away in Cosmoline, machinery in crates. Finally everyone had to sign an embarkation form. “That cinched it,” the troops thought, but preparations stopped as abruptly as they had started. On January 10 an order came down to resume issuing passes and furloughs.
Sharing such inexplicable experiences served to draw the men closer together. In E Company, someone stole sixty-six dollars from Herman Nelson, a thirty-eight-year-old wheat farmer from North Dakota. Nelson was about to be discharged because of his age, and had been saving the money for his return home. The thief was not discovered, though the company commander restricted the company indefinitely in hopes of smoking him out. Nelson’s fellow soldiers, however, took up a collection of twenty-five dollars to help him on his way. In his story based on this incident, Cheever gives the farmer a farewell speech. “I’m going to miss all you fellows,” he says. “I don’t want to go away only it’s yust I’m not so young. Such fine fellows I never met before in all my life. Such fine fellows.”
Cheever himself was transferred from personnel to Special Services, as editor of the regimental weekly paper, The Double Deucer. On this job he worked with cartoonist Lin Streeter, “a very nice guy” who once had had a studio near their apartment in the Village. He rather enjoyed the work, and thought it might continue for the duration. Meanwhile, he resumed the attempts to get into OCS he had initiated at Camp Croft. He had not been selected earlier because he did not have a college education and because he had scored below 110 on the Army General Classification Test given to all entering recruits. Now, he thought, his book might substitute for the college degree, but he still had to do something about his AGCT score. Mary sent him some manuals on how to improve one’s IQ—he was especially weak on math—and he boned up on long division, nights. Then he took the test again “and passed into group two, which is OCS material.” He made it only with some assistance from Dave Rothbart, the personnel clerk who administered the test and was “not entirely scrupulous about the timing.” Rothbart admired Cheever’s writing but did not think of him as officer material. “If you saw him marching in formation, you wouldn’t think, ‘Now, there’s a soldier.’ There was something of a dreamlike quality about him, something of the New England country gentleman, even then.”
The Way Some People Live, Cheever’s collection of stories, was published on March 8, 1943. Complimentary copies went to the author’s parents, his brother, his in-laws, Gus Lobrano, Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth Ames, Eddie Newhouse, Flannery Lewis, and four of his officers at Camp Gordon. On the dust jacket Random House noted the uncanny ability of Harold Ross and The New Yorker to find “new writing stars” like Sally Benson, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, E. B. White, and now “the bright new luminary of the past two seasons,” John Cheever. Cheever was in the army, the jacket copy revealed, but upon his return “the publishers expect that he will be a major figure in American post-war literature.”
The book contained thirty stories arranged more or less by chronology. The first twenty-four derived from the prewar period; the last six were written after Pearl Harbor. They could also be separated according to length. Twenty-seven ran to fewer than ten book pages. Many of these read like vignettes or anecdotes rather than full-fledged stories, and almost all of them came from the pages of The New Yorker. Two of the three much longer stories, “The Brothers” and “Of Love: A Testimony”—both of them singled out for praise by reviewers—were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about.
In putting the book together, Random House worked from tear sheets Cheever and his agent supplied. At some stage of this process, the stories dealing with politics and with Cheever’s family background were culled out, among them such ambitious and interesting efforts as “Homage to Shakespeare,” “Autobiography of a Drummer,” “In Passing,” and “Behold a Cloud in the West.” Also scrapped were the purely commercial racetrack stories and the two overly contrived sketches about burlesque performers. The stories actually included in the book repeatedly touch on the reduced circumstances of middle-class people after the Depression. Usually the tone is lightly ironical, the narrative voice keeping its distance. Usually the outlook is dark.
For the first time Cheever read his reviews, and he survived the ordeal in good humor. William DuBois, in the New York Times Book Review, chided him for writing about “Tortured Souls” with “epicene detachment and facile despair,” a comment Cheever decided to regard as very funny. The two most thoughtful reviews—a rave by Struthers Burt, an attack by Weldon Kees—he did not dismiss so lightly.
Writing in the Saturday Review, Burt called The Way Some People Live “the best volume of short stories” he had come across in a long time and “Of Love: A Testimony” “one of the best love stories” he had ever read. After the war, he predicted, Cheever would become “one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist” and perhaps even as a playwright. He had all the requisite qualities: “the sense of drama in ordinary events and people; the underlying and universal importance of the outwardly unimportant; a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life, its ironies, comedies, and tragedies.” The only things he had to fear were “hardening” into a style that might “become an affectation, and a deliberate casualness and simplicity that might become the same. Otherwise, the world is his.”
What Burt was warning against, though the magazine’s name was not mentioned in his review, was the danger of Cheever’s fiction conforming too closely to the New Yorker pattern. It was this that bothered Kees in his review for The New Republic. Read individually in the magazine, the stories “seemed better than they are; read one after another, their nearly identical lengths, similarities of tone and situation, and their somehow remote and unambitious style, produce an effect of sameness and eventually of tedium.” All New Yorker stories, he maintained, were written in highly professional prose, yet displayed “a patina of triviality” both in style and subject matter. If he was to escape the formula, Cheever should write more stories like the 1934 “Of Love: A Testimony”—stories in which “he has room enough … to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”
The review by Kees was important as the first of many broadsides against Cheever as a “New Yorker writer” limited in scope by his association with the magazine. Unlike most later accusations, Kees’s had some validity. Since that day when Cowley first suggested he write much shorter pieces, Cheever had in fact been constructing sketches designed to suit the magazine’s special requirements. He needed to grow in his craft, to combine the skill of rhetoric and construction evidenced in his early New Yorker work with the emotionally powerful effects of his longer stories.
No critic could have been harder on this first book of stories than Cheever himself eventually became. In effect he repudiated the book, turning down offers of translation rights and allowing none of the stories in The Way Some People Live to be reprinted in the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning Stories of John Cheever. Even at the time of publication, he was curiously dispassionate about the book. Cerf had warned him not to expect much by way of sales, and Cerf was right. Random House printed 2,750 copies and sold 1,990 at two dollars apiece. Cheever made only one hundred and forty dollars in royalties beyond his advance of two hundred and fifty. The book’s appearance had other benefits, however. Seeing the stories in a book, as he wrote Mary with due modesty, showed him how much he had yet to learn. More immediately, several of the writer/propagandists at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, Long Island, read The Way Some People Live and liked it enough to badger Colonel Leonard Spigelgass into getting Cheever transferred to their unit.
UPTOWN
1943–1950
Cheever’s transfer to the Signal Corps unit at Astoria on Long Island could hardly have been more fortunate. He was already at Fort Dix with the
22nd Infantry Regiment, expecting shipment to combat duty overseas, when he got word of his reassignment in the spring of 1943. Later, his old regiment underwent terrible losses in the battle for Fortress Europe. The men of the 22nd splashed ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day morning, and within five weeks suffered 3,439 casualties, or more than the original strength of the unit at D-Day. Still worse was to come. In the fall of 1944, the 22nd fought both at Hürtgenwald, or “the Death Factory” as the men called it, and in the Battle of the Bulge. (The regimental commander during those battles was Colonel Charles T. [Buck] Lanham. And attached to the regiment was Lanham’s close friend, war correspondent Ernest Hemingway.) By V-E Day the total casualties mounted to 9,359. About four out of five enlisted men who served with the 22nd were wounded. Half were killed.
In later years, Cheever provided varying accounts of his army career. He wanted to stay in the infantry, he told an interviewer. He spent “four years as an infantry gunner,” he said on one occasion, “two years as a mortar gunner,” he said on another. Actually he was in basic training and attached to an infantry company for about one year only, and a strange year it was. In retrospect Cheever found it difficult to “connect his life” at Camp Croft and Camp Gordon with the man he subsequently became. “That person in the army,” he said, “that wasn’t me.” The South, the garrison towns, even Sergeant Durham faded into the mist.