by Blake Bailey
“Buffalo”—the first of 121* stories that Cheever would eventually publish in the magazine—didn't amount to much, though it's interesting as a starting point. Titled after the city where Reuel Denney was then teaching high school, the little sketch was much in keeping with what was then becoming known as the “New Yorker short story”: a character-driven mood piece with a slight twist at the end. Told in flat, declarative prose reminiscent of the magazine's most prolific fiction writer, John O'Hara (and therefore reminiscent, still, of Hemingway), “Buffalo” concerns a young man who develops a crush on a pretty waitress, only to learn in mortifying fashion that the middle-aged, nondescript baker behind the counter is her husband. Again, the story isn't much; comparing it to Cheever's later work is like comparing Michelangelo's David to an Olmec head.
Cheever's breakthrough had come just in time. “Things got lower and lower,” he wrote Denney, “and then I sold a mediocre story for forty-five dollars. Ever since then I've been going around like a kid with a broken bank buying scotch and sodas and dating up everyone I could lay my hands on.” But he didn't rest long on this modest laurel. Within two weeks, he'd hired the prominent left-wing literary agent, Maxim Lieber, who also represented (at one time or another) Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Thomas Wolfe, Nathanael West, and many others. His first act on Cheever's behalf was to rush another story, “The Cameos,” to The New Yorker. Katharine White's reply was just as swift, and suggests that Cheever had already forgotten Cowley's advice: “This story,” wrote Mrs. White, “we can't believe is for us. It is too much the routine short story, the sort of thing the monthly short story magazines use rather than the sort of thing we use. … We are anxious for more from Mr. Cheever and hope he won't go the way of most fiction writers when they try for ambitious long stories, i.e., we hope he won't just turn out conventional ‘Short Stories.’ “ In little more than a week, Cheever submitted “Brooklyn Rooming House,” a more suitable slice-of-life about a landlady's futile struggle to keep her house “respectable” despite the ravages of the Depression. The story was accepted on condition that Cheever respond to a few minor points, including a typical quibble from the editor in chief, Harold Ross: “She can't ask about her roomers’ habits every time she meets them in the hallways, can she?”
A year would pass before Cheever sold another story to the magazine, though hardly for lack of trying on the author's part. “I should be interested to know how Mr. Cheever works,” wrote Mrs. White, as the manuscripts piled up on her desk; “his stories often sound as if they were pretty hastily put together. … I wish he'd try a little editing of his own work before he submits stuff.” That was a taller order than she might have expected. Cheever's payment for “Brooklyn Rooming House” was double what he'd gotten for “Buffalo,” and fully eighteen times as much as M-G-M was willing to pay for a synopsis that often ran as long as twelve typed pages. For the first time ever, really, it occurred to Cheever that he might actually make a living as a writer, and for him the matter was especially urgent. As a high-school dropout he'd learned the hard way that he was virtually unemployable, and it was too late to remedy the matter—too late, indeed, for the world at large, as Cheever (and Walker Evans) would have it: “I've never imagined making a living out of this machine but … there isn't time for much else and there doesn't seem to be much time anyhow.” And then, why not write fast, if one could? As Gurganus put it, “John was a sprinter, not a dental technician.” As a young man he could easily write almost twenty pages a day without changing a word; “editing,” for the most part, meant tearing up a piece he deemed a failure. “Haste is a great limitation that can be traced back to my magazine experience,” he wrote in 1976. “The story was written, paid for, printed and applauded in the space of a week. Why should I have tried to make them more substantial?” It was an aesthetic choice, too, as Cheever liked the kind of movement that came from writing fast: “[G]ood prose,” he wrote Denney, “reminds me of a walking figure, preferably young.”*
At Cowley's urging he started another novel, though he suspected the form was a little passé. Such was the chaos of his own life, and modern life in general, that he wondered if he could express it in terms of a long, conventional, cause-and-effect narrative. As a kind of warm-up, he wrote “Of Love: A Testimony,” a longish but hardly conventional narrative that he sold to the less commercial Story magazine. As much as anything Cheever wrote, it reflects the fatalism he felt as a member of a doomed generation. “Before I left Hanover for the last time [1934],” he wrote Cowley thirty years later, “I spaded the vegetable garden and planted a potato patch. … I thought that I would never return to eat the potatoes I had planted (I don't like potatoes) and that in the years ahead the approach of war would trim and color most of my impulses; and in fact, pretty much from the time we sailed from Antwerp in August ‘31 until the day when I joined the army this turned out to be true.”
Something of the sort applies to “Of Love: A Testimony,” the most notable achievement of which is its peculiar originality—the way Cheever uses formal quirks to convey the disorder of his times. “It would be something as casual as the bartender's greeting,” the story abruptly begins, “as clear as a legal confession of murder. ‘I was born in a two-apartment house. …’ “ Without any explanation of what this odd little salvo signifies (though one is reminded that what follows will be a testimony of sorts), the characters are then evoked in a leisurely manner—young people leading unremarkable lives—with a rather heavy emphasis on the larger historical context (all but entirely absent, except by implication, in Cheever's mature work): “[Julie] was conceived four years before they shot the arch-duke in Sarajevo and while they were building battlements in the Prussian woods. It seems, for that generation of her class, as if every tradition were broken by the smoldering books, by the murdered millions, by the shattered statuary and the election of fools.” Such a hopeless course of events leads Julie, born 1911, to destroy a promising love affair with compulsive acts of infidelity. “Maybe I'm promiscuous,” she says to her stricken lover, Morgan. “But I was afraid. … It seemed as if we had too much, too much.” Expressing the vast collective nihilism in so many words, with a bit of random fornication, is bound to seem melodramatic; but then the story reverts to the quirky impressionism of its opening, until the narrator breaks frame to consider Morgan's future: “Make him employed or unemployed, put him in a strange city without money or on board a train leaving the city for some place like Niantic or South Nor-walk for a week-end …” The reader, in short, is left to choose the character's destiny, but in any case the inner result (as well as the pitiless course of history) will remain the same.
CHEEVER HAD COUNTED ON a small advance for his novel from Harrison Smith at Cape and Smith, which had published Cowley's Blue Juniata. But his chat with Smith went poorly. The man told him that “a story writer and a novelist are two different birds”: “He asked me how long I'd been writing,” Cheever reported to Cowley. “Ten years—I said; true enough. He looked at me dubiously, nearly sadly—And this is all you've done? … Ten years.”
After a while, the prospect of being a laborer at Yaddo didn't look so bad, though what Cheever really wanted was a job at Lake George, about thirty-five miles north of Saratoga, where Yaddo had recently taken over three small islands called Triuna. He pictured a long, larky summer of swimming and climbing mountains and chasing college girls. He let Mrs. Ames know that he was ready to make himself “generally useful,” particularly in an aquatic capacity: “While we were talking about Triuna, one evening last summer, you mentioned the fact that you would need someone to run the launch. … I can drive, swim well enough to be intrusted [sic] with a boat …” But Mrs. Ames was still, perhaps, a bit broody with respect to Cheever's shenanigans the summer before; she responded with gentle bemusement that Cheever (an able-bodied young man, after all) still hadn't found proper employment. “I have almost always worked,” Cheever replied, more desperate than indignant. “But about two years ago the possibility
of holding these jobs stopped. I have no trade, no degree, no special training. Straightforward application for any kind of work from a bus-boy to an advertising copy-writer has been completely ineffectual.” The woman's heart was a little wrung, and Cheever was allowed to return to Yaddo for what amounted to an indefinite stay. The highlights were a very brief trip to Lake George and a few pleasant days at the racetrack; the rest of it was monastic to a fault—a great fault, as Cheever saw it. “Yaddo still goes on if anybody should have forgotten,” he noted, after several months at the Trask mansion. “At six thirty every night Emma rings the chimes and we all file into the hall and the dinning [sic] room and speak as if we were afraid of waking someone. … The month of August has seemed like a year.”
At last he escaped to Manhattan, returning to his little room on Hudson Street and an old dilemma. “I can't get a WPA job because I can't get on relief because I can't establish residence,” he wrote Cowley. “And there don't seem to be any other jobs.” As the holiday season drew near, he tried to get work at a department store; however, after a long day of waiting in line with other applicants, he shook so badly from hunger and fatigue that he flunked the interview. At this decidedly low point, Walker Evans hired him as a darkroom assistant at twenty dollars a week. The photographer had just been given the enormous job of filling some sixty portfolios with images from the African Negro Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He'd hired a Dutch artist named Peter Sekaer as his second-in-command, and (once the actual photo-taking was done) reinstalled Cheever in his Bethune Street studio with many, many prints to wash and hang in the bathroom. Then Evans left town (“to chase some woman in Tennessee,” as Dodie Merwin recalled), and Cheever was alone again in a dingy basement. “I'm not doing the work I should do and I feel like hell,” he wrote in mid-November. A few weeks later the electricity was cut off, since Evans had neglected to pay the bill. Cheever typed by the light of a plumber's candle. “[P]oor John can't sit over there in the dark,” Sekaer appealed to Evans; “and anyway there are something like 50 more prints to be done.”
Such privations did not affect Cheever's politics much. Over the course of the next year, as civil war raged in Spain, many of his leftist friends became even more engagé—forming Marxist reading clubs and joining the Lincoln Brigade to assist the Loyalists against Franco. Cheever was sympathetic but aloof, and in the radical atmosphere of the Village and Yaddo he was often berated for his attitude. “C'mon, Cheever, join up!” said the artist Anton Refregier, but Cheever responded to all such appeals with the same pleasant demurral, and managed as ever to keep most of his friends.
“Last night at three o'clock,” he recorded in the early pages of his journal, “I heard a drunken woman on 11th street screaming: ‘I'm the United States of America!’ “ Cheever would always care more about the lone drunken woman than he would about ideological systems one way or the other, which (he believed) failed to take account of the vagaries of human nature—particularly an all-consuming selfishness that remains constant regardless of systems or the historical moment. Shivering in Evans's dark basement studio, he wrote an almost novella-length apologia titled “In Passing” that, to his utter amazement, was bought a few weeks later by The Atlantic Monthly. (“I can't seem to figure it out,” he wrote Denney. “I guess I'll go out and buy some shoes.”) The story's narrator is a young man like Cheever who leads a hard-scrabble, itinerant life—this after his middle-class Boston family loses their money and faces eviction from the fine old house where the narrator grew up. In Saratoga for the racing season, the narrator meets a communist named Girsdansky who has come to organize the city's Negro workers. Whether speaking face to face with the narrator or addressing a bored, harassed crowd, Girsdansky gives the same canned rant about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” while the narrator observes that “his talk [has] the clarity and dryness of a book.” Meanwhile the scene at the racetrack serves as a gross but invigorating counterpoint to Girsdansky's vision—the gamblers clamoring around the bars and betting windows with “nothing in their faces but a love of money and the incorrigible dream of big money.” Cheever leaves little doubt as to which dream will prevail. Returning to Boston at the end of the season, the narrator notices a lone speaker on the Common—Girsdansky, attended by a few odd stragglers, though he addresses his speech to “the trees and the wind and the sky as if he were addressing thousands.”
“In Passing” was a nice catharsis for the author, and also helped put an end to a long run of failure that had followed those heady New Yorker sales almost six months before. Indeed, Katharine White had begun to wonder whether they'd been too hard on the young man, whose flurry of submissions had abruptly ceased toward the end of 1935. “I hope he hasn't deserted us entirely,” she wrote Lieber, who reported that his client was now preoccupied with a novel, under contract with Simon and Schuster since December. Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps and Empty Bed Blues—the book's provocative and perhaps provisional title—was a “long narrative,” said Cheever, as opposed to an actual novel (“a bad word anyhow”): “I'm doing exactly the same thing I would do with a story,” he wrote. “But it will be ten times as long as a story and I will have just that much more room to move around. It will, quite incidentally, be topical. And probably forgotten as quickly as yesterday's newspaper.” Clearly the problems of his generation continued to exert a pull, though Cheever's better instincts had already begun to militate against fiction that was merely timely.
Hoping to stretch his four-hundred-dollar advance, Cheever returned to Yaddo in February as a kind of general caretaker in the off-season. For a while, the only other guest was Josephine Herbst, who was twenty years older than Cheever and as famous as she'd ever be. Her trilogy of novels—Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939)—reflect her socialist sympathies, though she disliked being “ghettoized” as a “proletarian writer.” Shortly before coming to Yaddo that winter, she'd spent months in Germany writing about Hitler's regime for the New York Post, and she compared notes on the subject with Cheever while huddling in the kitchen drinking rum. It was the beginning of an odd but lifelong friendship. Quietly dubious of Herbst's politics and literary merit, Cheever nonetheless found her a jolly companion with an almost inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, as the woman had known practically everyone—including Hemingway, whom she'd once forced (at the point of a shark rifle) to turn his boat around in a hurricane and head for land. As a proper socialist, she gave friends the run of her rickety old farmhouse in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, which the young Cheever would come to regard as a kind of personal pied-à-terre. In turn, Herbst would spend a number of holidays with Cheever's family, becoming a beloved figure to his children. “I thought of her not as a distinguished writer,” Ben Cheever remembered, “but as a small woman in an orange serape who smoked heavily and kept saying, ‘For Heaven's sakes.’ “ By then the world, too, had stopped thinking of Herbst as a distinguished writer, whereas Cheever's star would continue to rise—a state of affairs that would lead to some interesting friction between the two.
Another writer bound for obscurity, Nathan Asch, also came to Yaddo for a few weeks that spring. Son of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, Nathan had published an experimental first novel in 1925, The Office, while living in Paris and befriending Herbst, Hemingway, and other expatriates. After a handful of well-regarded stories in The New Yorker, Asch continued to write novels that nobody would publish and quietly faded away. To Cheever he became a cautionary figure of sorts—a writer whose grandiose ambition was out of proportion to his talent. “Poor Nathan,” he wrote Herbst in 1952. “I can remember him saying in Washington: It's all running through my mind like quicksilver! What a book I will be able to write!” For the next few years, at any rate, he was a good occasional companion to Cheever, each man playing the antic role of surrogate son to Herbst, whom they sent cards and wires on Father's Day.
CHEEVER FINISHED A DRAFT of his novel in April (“I'm not as satisfied with it as I w
ould like to be”), and a few weeks later managed to sell another story to The New Yorker. “Play a March” is a slight but artful vignette about an out-of-work accordion player and his wife, who is so busy consoling herself with pipe dreams that she won't let her husband practice his instrument. (“By the way, is ‘John Cheever’ right?” asked a puzzled Wolcott Gibbs on accepting the story. “Seems to me your first pieces were signed ‘Jon.’ “) Braced by the sale, Cheever did a quick revision of his novel and dropped it in the mail, then celebrated with a road trip to Cape Cod. By then he'd inherited his brother's Model A, which, after years of gadding about the South Shore, was quite a bit the worse for wear. Morris Werner considered it another subject for Walker Evans, but Cheever loved the stalwart jalopy: “It takes almost no gasoline, no oil, and I've had no tire trouble,” he proudly reported. However, since the car had no windows or heater, Cheever's winter travels were necessarily curtailed.
In May, he paid his family a lingering visit. His father—broken by the hardships of Hanover—had reconciled with his formidable wife and resigned himself to an obedient dotage in downtown Quincy, where he whiled away his days at the Thomas Crane Library. For the next twenty years, John would also affect a sort of obedience toward his mother, nursing a vast resentment in secrecy. And when he found himself losing patience with both parents, there was always Fred, who lived more and more prosperously in the nearby town of Norwell. In the old days he and Joey had often discussed the nature of their respective “Belle Isles,” but by 1936 Fred seemed content to the point of smugness. He and his family* lived in a well-appointed rental on Stetson Road, and presently Fred would build a Swiss-chalet-style house near the river. He treated his brother with a kind of jovial condescension, joshing him about his feckless hand-to-mouth lifestyle and dirty-neck friends. Fred was rooting for the fascists in Spain, while in his spare time he wrote a book titled A Song for These States, extolling the glories of his Yankee heritage and American democracy in general. “We disagree on everything,” John noted after that May visit. “Any desire, higher than that for warmth and security, seems to have died out in his frame and with that he has cultivated an immense contempt for those poor, sad fools, living on the fringes of society, who have been unable to rent a house in the country, stuff it with antiques, dress their wives attractively, produce beautiful children and come up the gravel drive-way at dusk to love, sherry, supper, wood-fires and the editorials of the Boston Evening Transcript.”