Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Cheever was more eager than ever for a desk job, and to this end Harold Ross wrote Colonel Egbert White of Yank, an army magazine with offices in New York: “I have a nomination of a writer if you want one. He is John Cheever, who has written some of the best short stories we've run in recent years, and is one of the leading and most promising short story writers there is, in our estimation here.” Stout praise, which Cheever was “sure” would do the trick, though he was a little disappointed to learn he'd have to finish basic training first (“but Dear Jesus I hope and pray that they will be able to do something then”). Alas, it turned out he wasn't the only writer who'd had such hopes: “[Yank] simply got over-manned,” Ross explained to Irwin Shaw, “and also they faced a new order … that hereafter such outfits could not request men by name. If Yank wants a writer now all they can do is request a writer.”

  IN AUGUST, Cheever and his platoon were sent further south to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, which he thought resembled Harvard of all places (“The barracks are white clapboard with small-paned windows and brick chimneys”)—an ironic resemblance for any number of reasons, including a certain incongruity of milieu. “I have never seen such poverty; in land, in people's faces, and in education,” Cheever wrote Mrs. Ames. “Sometimes I think of the dilapidated countryside the nineteenth-century Russians wrote about. Here are the idiot children, the tin-roofed farmhouses, the scrub-trees, eroded soil, religious cults, etc.” For a few days he was even “homesick for Camp Croft and Sergeant Durham,” but then some Special Service officers found out he was a writer and took him off the bayonet course for a while to work on a radio skit; Cheever hoped it might lead to something permanent in lieu of Yank. In the meantime his regular army duties included standing guard over a lot of “southern boys who run around the [prison] yard like a pack of dogs.” The delinquent rednecks (“Their offense is usually desertion”) endeared themselves to Cheever, who couldn't help admiring their shamelessness and soon became one of the more lenient guards. While presiding over “hard labor” with a loaded rifle, he'd accept and subsequently mail “the voluminous correspondence” hidden in the prisoners’ shoes, though he knew they weren't supposed to mail more than a single letter a week.

  Cheever's attitude toward the South—or Southerners anyway—went from wary hostility to a sort of bemused fondness. Certainly it was a different world: “When the conductor shouted ‘Columbia’ this morning”—he wrote Mary after returning from leave—”he might have shouted Berlin or Zagreb and the ‘I reckons’ and ‘yawls,’ etc. sounded as strange as German or whatever they speak in Zagreb.” For the most part, though, he found the locals a fun-loving bunch, especially the working-class soldiers, who were often blessed with a refreshing lack of inhibition. “Ain't that pretty?” a man named Calib asked Cheever in the shower, referring to his freshly painted passion-pink toenails and fingernails. Cheever—on the lookout for material, at least as a raconteur—offered his services as reader and scribe to some of the illiterate Southerners, whose letters (both written and received) were a lifelong source of delight. One man solemnly dictated a request for special leave so he could witness his brother's execution (“the first electrocution in the family”); a spurned young woman wrote—and Cheever read aloud—” ‘Don't you remember what you done to me on the floor? Didn't you mean it?’ …” In general Cheever preferred the company of regular guys—illiterate, Southern, or otherwise—whose weekend high jinks in Augusta tended to attract the notice of military police. Every weekend the city swarmed with soldiers, and Cheever was loath to miss the whole Hogarthian spectacle—the teeming juke joints and even the relatively staid places where locals tried to show their GI guests some Southern hospitality: “[We] went to a dance at the Eagle Club, Eyrie number seven, believe it or not,” Cheever reported. “I danced for about one minute with a southern beauty of about eleven who was uneasy about dancing with a Yankee.”

  But a month at Camp Gordon was perhaps too much of a good thing, and Cheever was ecstatic when he was granted a ten-day furlough in mid-September. The memories would stand him in good stead for the rest of his time in Georgia, and indeed for much of his married life thereafter. “[O]h Christ what fun,” he wrote Herbst.

  The Cheevers had plenty of lettuce and I took a taxi from here to the city of Columbia, South Carolina, a distance of some seventy-six miles, pulling on a bottle of sour-mash bourbon. The train for New York pulled out of Columbia at three AM and I still had some whisky left when we pulled out of Washington the next afternoon. … I hit New York about nine o'clock, sober and very, very happy. Mary was waiting, all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin, and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad greens, etc., filled the ice-box. We did exactly as we pleased for eight days which is more than a lot of people can say lying on their death beds.

  And there was more: On the last day, he went to the Plaza Hotel for a meeting with Bennett Cerf of Random House, who promptly agreed to publish a volume of his stories and sealed the deal with a check for $250. Finally—after a calming five o'clock cocktail at Longchamps on Twelfth Street—Cheever went home to tell Mary and walked into a surprise party in his honor, “involving nine Winternitzes, and a lobster dinner at Charles’.” Returning giddily to Camp Gordon, he may have wondered if it were all a dream—a notion dispelled by a note from Cerf: “Just a line to tell you how pleased I was to meet you the other day and to know that you are now a full-fledged Random House author.” Cheever replied that he'd been going around camp telling everyone that he was about to have a book published—”a fact that impresses no one,” he added, “because their idea of a book is Superman or Flash Gordon.”

  For Cheever, success was always a goad to work harder, and now that Durham was no longer ranting at him, he returned to writing stories for The New Yorker. “I have my schedule down now,” he wrote Mary, “so that I go into town on Friday nights and do my eating and drinking, have my hangover during inspection, and spend Saturday night at the typewriter.” One night a week (plus the odd stolen moment in vacant offices) didn't give Cheever much time to chisel his prose, but the magazine's editors were willing to be liberal: many of their finest writers were unavailable for the duration of the war, and besides they wanted as much fiction about army life as possible. Within two weeks of his furlough, Cheever obliged them with “The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York,” much of which is summed up by its title: a soldier longs to leave his army camp in Georgia and return to his beloved city, and a sudden neural paralysis gives him the chance to do so; however, with a resurgence of de rigueur patriotism, the man decides to stay put and disguise his injury (“Gordon brought the gun up to the salute and held it there, with the sweat and the tears pouring down his face, until the anthem was ended and they were given the command for the order”). Lobrano thought the story “really first-rate” and swiftly posted a check ($365) to Maxim Lieber; he also showed the manuscript to Maxwell. “There was a nervous, little letter from Bill Maxwell,” Cheever noted. “He thought it was so beautiful he couldn't stand it.”

  Cheever's army stories lack the stylistic flair of his prewar New Yorker fiction, but neither are they frankly trashy, like some of the stories he'd written for the slicks. Rather they stand as good conventional fiction—impressive for what they reveal of Cheever's growing versatility, an ability to modulate his prose, as it were, to suit the market. The army furnished plenty of material, which Cheever sifted for the most vivid scenes and details, as well as an eye for what was likely to fly with the Public Relations Office. He worried (for example) about his Durham story, “Sergeant Limeburner,” since he'd written it “for [his] own pleasure” and thus lovingly rendered the sergeant in all his lurid brutality. But because he needed money, too, Cheever was relieved when the censors returned his manuscript without a word changed, perhaps because Durham/Limeburner's bullying is made to seem a good thing, at least by army standards: “
You'll appreciate his training when you get into combat,” a soldier remarks to Limeburner's men. “You wouldn't want him as a friend, but when it comes to the Army, he's got a good head.” Another story, “The Invisible Ship,” was based on an episode in which Cheever's company was restricted to barracks after money was stolen from one of the older men; the thief was never caught—though he is, violently, in the story—and his victim was sent home to tend the family farm in North Dakota. The actual captain who imposed the restriction had a small wart on his nose that Cheever transposed to his chin for fictional purposes; otherwise the portrait squares with the reported facts: “[The captain] was an odd-looking man with a forced composure in his oval face and a wart on the right side of his chin. Two years as an officer in the field had given him an exaggerated cant to his head and an exaggerated and springy walk, as though he were always passing in review.”*

  The extra New Yorker money was needed to bolster the meager income of an army private—which Cheever remained, even as certain of his friends were promoted to corporal or sergeant, at least, while Newhouse was already a major with an office at the Pentagon. It was perhaps the first time Cheever had really regretted his mathematical ineptitude, not to mention his overall lack of formal education, since his score on the Army General Classification Test wasn't high enough (110 or above) to qualify him for Officer Candidate School. “I feel like a dope,” he wrote Mary, asking her to send a book “on easy ways to get a high IQ”: “[M]aybe I can raise myself out of the moron class. If I can't you'll have to swing along with a moron.” A year or so later, when he tried again for OCS, his friend Major Newhouse (soon to become Lieutenant Colonel Newhouse) had to pull strings to arrange for him to retake the test in Washington, and even helped him prepare—but Cheever scored “108 or something,” as Newhouse remembered, and never rose above the rank of technical sergeant. “Three stripes,” wrote his father, “good boy John. You got it the hard way—no transparent cellophane commissions, in the noncoms.”

  ALL THAT AUTUMN it was rumored that Cheever's regiment would soon be sent overseas, and before that happened he and Mary wanted to start a family. During a weekend pass in late October, they met at a fine hotel in Richmond that featured baby alligators in the lobby fountain, and within a month or so Mary knew she was pregnant—none too soon, or so it seemed: after Christmas the camp became a staging area for embarkation to Africa. The men were ordered to prepare their wills and assign personal power of attorney; they were inoculated with potent antitoxins and told “that the women in Africa have the old, familiar venereal diseases.” Then, suddenly, in late January 1943, emergency status was lifted and life returned to normal. It was oddly a bit of a blow. Cheever got another seven-day furlough to New York, after which Georgia seemed bleaker than ever. “On Lincoln's Birthday I went into Augusta for the first time since returning from New York,” he wrote Lobrano. “Obviously Lincoln's Birthday isn't much of a holiday in Georgia and the damned Georgia whores and the damned bad whisky are beginning to make the barracks attractive.”

  Things began to look up, a little, when Cheever was transferred to Special Services a couple days later and declared editor of a weekly regimental newspaper, The Double Deucer. Paired with a cartoonist, Lin Streeter (best known for “Pat Patriot, America's Joan of Arc”), Cheever tried to make the newspaper as entertaining as possible, spoofing such hackneyed features as the Inquiring Reporter (“I don't know how the Major will take it, but I'm sure the men will like it”). Meanwhile he almost fell in the line of duty. On a cold day in February, an officious lieutenant insisted on helping him build a fire in the Recreation Hall, near the newspaper office, and ended up burning the place to the ground. With flames licking at his feet, Cheever ran out the back door with a typewriter and the stencil for the latest Double Deucer, which became “a special fire issue”: when copies arrived from the printer, he and Streeter singed the bundle with a blowtorch as if it had been yanked from the fire in the nick of time.

  Cheever's first collection, The Way Some People Live, was scheduled for publication in early March, and though he was careful to pretend otherwise, Cheever had rather high hopes for the book—that it would improve his literary career, of course, but also do him some good with the army. He reminded Cerf to make sure copies were distributed among editors and officers alike, as well as to see about lining up sympathetic reviewers such as Herbst. And though he was glad to accept input from Random House on what stories to include, it was Cheever's own idea to arrange them in a kind of loose chronological order, ending with his induction story, “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello,”* thus imposing a kind of thematic scheme that wasn't lost on the book's most admiring reviewer, Struthers Burt: “The earlier stories have to do with the troubled, frustrated, apparently futile years of 1939 to 1941,” Burt would presently write in The Saturday Review of Literature. “This gives the book the interest and importance of a progress toward Fate; and so there's a classic feeling to it.” In the meantime Cheever was dismayed by his publisher's trade announcement: it was one thing to languish amid the darkness of Georgia, another to be described to the world as a “young Southerner.” As he instructed Cerf, “My family settled in Salem in 1632 and haven't strayed further east than Dedham for a long time.”† Cerf mollified the author as to his lineage, and assured him that the work at hand was “a mighty fine collection”: “I know you have no more illusions about the sale of a book of short stories than have I, [but] I think the critical acclaim will delight us both.”

  He was right about the sales. Published in a first printing of 2,750, The Way Some People Live sold just under two thousand at full price; the rest were either remaindered or pulped. The reviews were mixed. Most conceded Cheever's talent and hoped for better things, while damning him as a quintessential (and therefore trivial) writer of New Yorker fiction. Rose Feld's critique in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review was representative: “To the extent that in the writing world any material—sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction—is called a story, John Cheever's book … may be called a collection of stories;” such stories, however, were little more than “moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality, but inconclusive in effect.” Cheever's tone of remote pessimism was also condemned, as if he were regarding his characters with the same haughty nonchalance that Eustace Tilley fixes on that butterfly. In the New York Times Book Review, William DuBois stressed the author's connection with the magazine by way of explaining the “peculiar epicene detachment, and facile despair” of the stories. Such charges were not unwarranted: for the past eight years, ever since Cowley's advice that he shorten his work, Cheever had been training himself to write the sort of muted, elliptical “casual” that went over at The New Yorker, rarely allowing himself the luxury of longer, more ambitious stories. Reviewer Weldon Kees emphasized the difference: though Cheever's New Yorker stories (“among the best that have appeared there recently”) were similar to the point of tedium—at least when “read one after another”—the long, anomalous “Of Love: A Testimony” gave a glimpse of what Cheever was “capable of doing when he has room enough in which to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”

  As for Struthers Burt, in hindsight he seems prophetic, though it's hard to figure how he could have made such extravagant claims on the basis of The Way Some People Live. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” he declared, “when this war is over, John Cheever … will become one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist.” Far from finding the stories trivial, Burt applauded their revelation of the “universal importance of the outwardly unimportant,” and thought the author's apparent pessimism was in fact a laudable grasp of human ambiguity (“a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life”). Like other reviewers, Burt noted a certain monotony in Cheever's New Yorker fiction and cautioned the author lest his “especial style” harden into an affectation: “Otherwise t
he world is his.”

  Cheever took both praise and blame with a grain of salt—remarkably so for a first-time author. He was amused by DuBois's crack about his “facile despair,” seeing the justice of that and other complaints. As he wrote Mary, “[A]ll in all—even though they don't like me—the reviewers seem to be very diligent and earnest people, anxious to help a gloomy young writer onto the right path, and to safeguard the investments of their readers.” Ultimately the book's most bitter critic would be Cheever himself—the mature Cheever, who, improbably enough, had proved Struthers Burt to be absolutely right. “I find all this early work intensely embarrassing and wish it would vanish,” he wrote in 1968, having devoted himself to destroying every copy of The Way Some People Live that he could lay his hands on. The author of the Wapshot novels and five or six of the finest American short stories was appalled that he'd ever been capable of such lazy, formulaic work. Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the late sixties, Cheever pointed out that even the man's trashier stories “were not rueful vignettes or overheard conversations”—an apt description of Cheever's juvenilia—”but real stories with characters, invention, scenery and moral conviction.” Cheever's best work would have all that and something ineffably more.