by Blake Bailey
Cheever was coming to terms with his own sense of exile. “I'm a stranger here and I guess it's just as well,” he wrote Denney. There were times, though, when he felt overwhelmed by a nostalgia that would never quite go away, whatever he saw fit to say about it. “But my days here are numbered,” he wrote in 1936, and so they were.
WHILE ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD from Simon and Schuster (he was hoping they'd finance a second book so he could move to Maine “and have a boat and a girl and a lot of good liquor”), Cheever was relieved to learn that Mrs. Ames was willing, at last, to let him run the launch at Lake George. “My father keeps telling me,” he wrote her, “and asking me not to forget, that one whistle means a starboard passing, two, a port passing, three a salute and four means astern. I've also been studying Marine engine instruction books.” Mrs. Ames wasn't entirely reassured. Stiffly she replied that insurance on the old Fay & Bowen absolutely stipulated that he keep the speed under twenty miles an hour “at all times.”
The pleasant islands of Triuna are spanned by a fanciful ninety-two-foot bridge built by the Trasks, and for the first month of the summer Cheever had the place mostly to himself. He did chores and shooed away trespassers and ate big meals prepared by “a distinguished woman named Daisey MacAfee Bonner.” In July he was joined by a young writer named Eugene Joffe, and the little town of Bolton Landing filled up with “a lot of nice girls” on vacation from colleges such as Skidmore and Beaver (a name that delighted Cheever). He was happy to give them rides in his boat, letting them aquaplane at speeds that probably exceeded twenty miles an hour, but his heart belonged to Lila Refregier, the ponytailed wife of his friend Anton. “[I] always hoped that something, the love of a beautiful woman, would cure my ailments,” he wrote in 1967. “I thought that Lila would lead me away from my jumpy past.”
By then his romance with Dodie Merwin, though still occasionally carnal, had cooled somewhat; she was an outdoorsy sort who liked going off to the woods and getting dirty, cutting her own firewood and so forth, which perhaps reminded Cheever a little too much of his mother (“flinging up weeds [in her garden] as a dog flings up dirt”). Lila, however, was chic: she and Anton barely made ends meet—he painted murals for nightclubs, and she taught the odd class in costume design—but when she did get a few dollars ahead, she liked to buy stylish high-heeled shoes and silk hats. She admired the same thing in Cheever: “He was a very dapper young man,” she said, remembering his gray flannel trousers, tweed jacket, button-down shirt, and “always polished” shoes. (In regard to the last, Cheever once breached a curious point of etiquette: “I remember Lila … burst into tears after a cyclonic orgasm,” he wrote in his journal, “when she discovered that I had not taken off my shoes.”) The Refregiers had rented a house in Bolton Landing for the summer, and at first Cheever was equally charming to both; but after a while he could hardly be bothered to greet the husband when he asked for Lila on the telephone. Finally the man pressed a mutual friend, Frances Lindley: was Lila in love with John? “I could honestly answer ‘I don't know,’ “ said Lindley, “though of course I knew well they had been sleeping together.” Eventually the romance became more of a comfortable friendship, and, like Merwin, the woman would continue to think fondly of Cheever, with only the faintest unnameable qualm: “Joey was such a nice person,” she said many years later, “a basically decent person, with something in him that kept him from being completely decent.”
Be that as it may, the first phase of the fling ended with the summer of 1936. Suddenly everyone was gone—the Refregiers, the college girls, even Eugene Joffe. Cheever wanted badly to leave, but he was broke again and still hadn't heard from Simon and Schuster; and even if he could afford gas, his car's steering gear was shot. “I woke one morning with a hangover and not a red cent,” he wrote Herbst, “and God only knows how I'll get out of this place.”
As ever, he tried writing his way out, but Katharine White at The New Yorker wasn't making it easy for him. “I am sorry that we don't like this story of John Cheever's at all,” she wrote of “Frère Jacques,” about an engagé man (“interested in the Spanish trouble”) and his fey mistress, who treats bundles of cornmeal, flour, or laundry as if they were the baby she longs for. “It is meant to be very serious and sad,” Mrs. White went on, “and somehow the child mistress … seems more ridiculous and half-witted than touching.” This is perhaps too harsh, but anyway the story's interest is stylistic. Like “Play a March” and other stories Cheever wrote around this time, it owes much to Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants”—a short two-character sketch written almost entirely in elliptical dialogue. In “Frère Jacques,” the man and woman banter awhile to no apparent purpose—this while the man tries to read a newspaper (“anxious to find who was holding Madrid”)—before the reader learns they aren't married, which somewhat explains the woman's loony determination, at the end, to sing “Frère Jacques” to a laundry bundle: “He was frightened, then, for … if she had been screaming and crying and drumming her heels on the floor, her words couldn't have held more finality and estrangement than the simple persistent words of that song.” Cheever was eventually able to sell the story to The Atlantic Monthly, and Mrs. White may have been surprised when it was selected for The Best Short Stories of 1939 and singled out for praise in the New York Times (“really illuminates the contemporary scene”). It would hardly be the first time one of Cheever's New Yorker rejections met with a (relatively) happy ending.
A week later, Cheever mailed the magazine another story of no particular distinction (“A Picture for the Home”), which proved to be his ticket off the islands of Triuna. “I haven't appreciated anything as much as I did that, in a long time,” he wrote Wolcott Gibbs, who'd expedited the check. Cheever was glad to leave, but within a month or so he was back at Yaddo: Simon and Schuster had asked—evidently without enthusiasm—for extensive revisions. “I've got to go over the whole novel again, word for word,” he sighed to Herbst. The manuscript, however, is lost to posterity; Cheever rarely mentioned it again, except to say that he'd used his revision notes to write “short things” out of financial necessity.
LILA REFREGIER (AND OTHERS) would sometimes badger Cheever about his dependence on Yaddo: high-school dropout or not, surely he could get some kind of job—and indeed he could. “I have a chance of a WPA job,” he wrote after leaving Lake George in October, “but I sincerely don't want it. And I have another chance of traveling all over the country with Walker Evans. … I'm not crazy about that either.” The fact was, he'd grown used to a freewheeling life, and starvation was no longer an immediate danger. He'd ingratiated himself with Mrs. Ames so successfully that he could come as he pleased to Yaddo or Triuna, and whenever he sold a story he'd simply hop back into his roadster and go spinning along the Hudson for a holiday in Manhattan, where he was entertained by a widening circle of friends.
At the marble tables of the Lafayette Hotel on University Place, he'd spend hours playing backgammon with the artists Niles Spencer and Stuart Davis. Or, in Chelsea, he'd call on the Refregiers—if both were home—and contrive to take Lila away on a cheap date enlivened by the excitement of illicit love: they rode the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel, or walked to the Central Park Zoo, or took the Fifth Avenue bus from Washington Square to Harlem and back. Sometimes, too, they'd go to a boozy salon at the Werners’ apartment or that of his friend Eleanor Clark, who (though a year younger than Cheever) was already a leading light of the intellectual left—a frequent contributor to Partisan Review and The Nation, not to mention Trotsky's translator in Mexico.* Or if Cheever simply wanted to relax and eat a good meal, he'd visit his friend Dorothy Dudley, an easygoing fat lady from Biddeford, Maine, who for many years worked as the registrar at the Museum of Modern Art. Cheever was struck by Dudley's habit of falling for self-destructive heels: maudlin drunks and consumptives who treated her badly despite an unwavering solicitude on her part. “Some day,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “I must write a story about women like Dorothy and call
it The Widow.Ӡ
But soon enough the money always ran out, and Cheever would return to Yaddo and live awhile with other perennial guests who enjoyed Mrs. Ames's favor for one reason or another. At the time there was Leonard Ehrlich, her lover, a valetudinarian in his late twenties whose only novel—God's Angry Man, about abolitionist John Brown—was already years in the past. There was also Loyd (Pete) Collins, another one-novel writer, who was then married to Cheever's friend (and future editor at Harper) Frances Lindley; Cheever found Collins “a good drinking companion” and continued the friendship for three decades on that basis. And finally there was the more accomplished Daniel Fuchs, whose novels about his youth in Brooklyn had sold poorly despite wide acclaim.‡ “It was a pretty idyllic time,” said Fuchs, remembering the “wonderful, choice people” at the Trask mansion, the long nights tippling at the Worden, where he once chided his friend John to get more serious about his career. “What are you waiting for?” Fuchs demanded. “For the world and life to get integrated,” Cheever replied.
It wasn't that Cheever lacked ambition. He worked hard, but still loved the world a little too much. “When I was younger,” he recalled in the midst of later fame, “I used to wake up at eight, work until noon, and then break, hollering with pleasure; then I'd go back to work through to five, get pissed, get laid, go to bed, and do the same thing again the next day.” Dodie Merwin, for one, knew the drill: when she paid a visit to Yaddo, it was understood that she took a backseat to Cheever's writing; if he managed to finish before sunset, they'd go skiing awhile before joining the others at the Worden and so to bed. Underlying Cheever's high spirits was a seething determination. “He wanted terribly to be respected,” said James Farrell's wife, Dorothy, who got to know Cheever well at Yaddo. “I have this image of him: John Cheever squaring his shoulders, confronting the world.”
Respect meant money as well as artistic achievement, and after being stuck at Yaddo for most of 1937, Cheever wrote an unabashedly trashy story for the slicks. “His Young Wife” is about a stand-up guy named John Hollis who marries a charming but “impulsive” girl much younger than he; both are “very happy” until she meets, at the track, a dissolute rogue her own age—but in the end, she sees the wisdom of staying with honest John (“crying like a young kid over the rediscovery of her own immense happiness”). Collier's bought the story for five hundred dollars, a fabulous sum, but then dispatched a troubling wire to Saratoga: they'd lost the typescript and would appreciate the author's sending a carbon. The problem, of course, was that Cheever never bothered to keep carbons, and thus had to spend another three or four hours rewriting the thing from scratch. “[W]hat's happened between now and then,” he wrote Denney, “has been pretty much the spending of that money. It enabled me to leave here whenever I felt like it, which was often and I shunted around a lot between here, Boston and New York.” Before leaving Yaddo that first time, he took Daniel and Sue Fuchs to Albany for a victory feast and then purchased a bottle of fine champagne for Mrs. Ames. Finally he came to Quincy as a conquering hero, lauded as such by a brief item in the Patriot Ledger: “A literary career which is growing quietly but steadily is that of John Cheever, son of Mrs. Mary Cheever of Spear Street …” Frederick is nowhere mentioned—almost as if his wife were wistfully casting ahead to widowhood—but then he had no pull at the Patriot Ledger.
* In exchange for which he sometimes babysat for his future son-in-law, Robert Cowley, then a toddler.
* The first one sold, that is: it wouldn't appear in the magazine until the June 22, 1935, issue, about a month later than “Brooklyn Rooming House” (May 25).
* It's not enough simply to say that Cheever wrote fast. Some stories seemed to come to him all of a piece, almost word for word, especially in the early years; but as one may discern by examining Cheever's typescripts at Brandeis, some stories—both his better and lesser efforts—were torturously worked over, often at the exacting behest of New Yorker editors. It's worth mentioning, too, that as a novelist he always progressed with the most painful difficulty—constantly making notes as he groped his way forward.
* Fred's daughter Jane had been born in 1935, and three more children would follow: David, Sarah, and Ann.
* Perhaps needless to say, Clark was another friend who gave Cheever a hard time (his entire life) over his lack of political conviction. She particularly nagged him for writing “frivolous” (apolitical?) realism, which she dismissed as a “blind alley.” Noting Clark's work in Partisan Review and two other like-minded publications, Cheever wrote Herbst: “It's the vision of those three sheets lined up on a book-shelf with their air of profound compromise, unjustifiable snobbishness, and phoney calm, that makes me so happy in my rank, blind alley.”
† The first mention of what would become, several years later, “Torch Song”—one of Cheever's best stories.
‡ Fuchs went on to have a very successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In Bech: A Book, Updike alludes to him as the Jewish writer who “turned his back on his three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
{1938-1939}
THE COLLIER'S money lasted until the spring of 1938, when the twenty-six-year-old Cheever finally surrendered to the inevitable. His friend Nathan Asch was an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project's American Guide Series, and was happy to recommend him to the program's director, Henry Alsberg, who took Cheever's word for it that he could manage the English language with “clarity, ease and meaning.” Hired as a junior editor at twenty-six hundred dollars a year, Cheever joined thousands of writers who would last out the Depression with a boost from the Works Progress Administration—an honorable roster that includes Bellow, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and others of like distinction.
At best Cheever was bemused by the situation. “Every time I saw a beggar in the streets [of Washington],” he wrote Mrs. Ames, “I used to wonder why anyone would choose that way of making a living; why didn't they go to work for the government?” A beggar's lot, as many saw it, was only slightly more demoralizing: those employed by the WPA (called “We Poke Along” by its detractors) bore “a stigma of the lowest order,” as writer Jerre Mangione put it, “a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.” It was especially bad for Cheever, whose family took a dim view of New Deal slackery, and whose own Yankee scruples were such that—four decades later, blessedly solvent—he'd try to return his first Social Security check. On the other hand, there was something to be said for collecting a regular salary: with his fifty dollars a week, Cheever was able to help his family, pay down his debt to Mrs. Ames, and put aside a little in the bank to finance a novel once he'd done his time. Perhaps most gratifying was slipping the odd tenner under the table to his wretched father, augmenting what must have been a very meager allowance: “Have the Bill Fold and the X [$10] enclosed—and thank you John boy,” wrote the grateful old man, who usually blew it on a big lunch at Locke-Ober.
Cheever thought Washington a dreary place. He'd taken a room at Mrs. Grey's boardinghouse, where he dined with librarians, government clerks, and “an old lady who sits at the head of the table and says all WPA workers are lazy and good-for-nothing.” Cheever found it hard to argue: his fellow employees were hopeless drones, and he kept his distance lest he be tainted by their dullness and mediocrity. Worst of all was the job itself, which wasn't quite the boondoggle he'd hoped for; as Dodie Merwin put it, “he let himself accept their pittance,” though he was “insulted” that such work was substantial enough to keep him from his writing. As for the social life, it was about as good as it would ever get in Washington. The evidence of his co-workers notwithstanding, Cheever wasn't the only talented young person who'd come to feed at the public trough, and the atmosphere was akin to that of a large college campus. Before long, Cheever was sleeping with a girl who worked in the archives and going to a l
ot of embassy parties; often drunk and “under the influence of Fitzgerald,” he liked asking cabdrivers to help him knot his black tie. Later he'd go so far as to claim a certain glamour for the era, though he knew it wasn't really so: he was just another “broody clerk,” the parties were third-rate, and it depressed him to chat with people about their civil-service classifications; what's more, his girlfriend had buck teeth and gave him “a bad case of crabs.” One of the only good times was a weekend spent in Maryland, alone, riding a rented horse around the countryside.
So the summer passed. The New Yorker had begun to wonder, again, what had become of one of its most promising young writers. “What about John Cheever?” wrote William Maxwell, a new fiction editor. “It is almost a year since we have had a look at anything of his, and we'd like very much to have him in the magazine again.” Cheever wanted nothing better than to oblige. He tried writing at night and on weekends, but his output remained “pathetically small”: his FWP duties left him frazzled and depressed, all the less willing to forfeit valuable drinking time to punch out stories, which—even when he did buckle down—just weren't flowing with the old facility. The one thing he'd finished in five months (“like pulling a tooth”) was another racetrack yarn for Collier's titled “Saratoga,” about a boy and girl who grow up with gambling in their blood (etc.) but finally quit the horses and get married. One senses Cheever's misery in almost every line. In fact, he considered taking the Collier's money and running back to New York, then and there, but instead he moved out of Mrs. Grey's to a more private arrangement near Dupont Circle, which proved to have a bedbug problem.