John Cheever (10 page)

That summer of 1934, Cheever reviewed Josephine Johnson's
Now in November
, a novel about the Midwestern drought, for
The New Republic
. The author was young, only twenty-four, and Cowley may have thought that Cheever would feel a certain affinity for her work. He did and he didn't. He admired Johnson's “fragile and, in its way, nearly perfect” talent, but chided her for her tranquil tone and her interest in “the little things.” The drought was a national disaster. Johnson was “observing the salamanders while the fields [were] burning.”

Cowley also sent his young protégé to talk to Harrison Smith, of Cape & Smith, about his prospective novel. Smith had published Cowley's book of poems,
Blue Juniata
, in 1929. Perhaps he could be persuaded to give Cheever an advance. He could not, for a reason that was to have a continuing effect on Cheever's reputation. The short-story writer and the novelist were “two different birds,” Smith thought. Cheever refused to be discouraged, and set off for five weeks at Yaddo, determined to bring back a healthy chunk of the novel.

Already the estate in Saratoga was beginning to seem familiar. If the decor did not entirely suit his taste, it was certainly distinctive. Coming down the stairway from his room for breakfast—he occupied many different rooms during his visits to Yaddo—Cheever passed the brass mermaid, the Tiffany window of a woman holding a flower (this was supposed to be Katrina Trask herself), and the cast of Venus he would smack on the backside as he slid down the banister. His room invariably contained some emblem of culture—a charcoal drawing of Dante, perhaps—and was almost always in need of repairs. On one visit, a sign cautioned him to shut the shower door, lest water drip on the piano below. That turned out to be no problem at all, since the shower didn't work. Yaddo was one of a kind, unique,
sui generis
. Room and board were free to those who could not afford to pay. Cheever loved it there and thought it the best place in the world to work.

Despite Yaddo's encouraging ambience, what Cheever wrote during his 1934 visits did not sell. His beginning-of-a-novel failed to attract an advance. Meanwhile, a couple of magazine editors were holding stories. If he could only get one acceptance, he wrote Elizabeth Ames, the other editors might loosen up. In discouragement, he went back to New York to face the hardest winter of his life. “I was cold, I was hungry, I was lonely,” he recalled. Though M-G-M gave him an occasional book to write a synopsis of, funds were so short that he subsisted for weeks on stale bread and buttermilk. There were a few houses and apartments he could go to for a meal, but his pride would not let him abuse that privilege.

Cheever had plenty of company in his misery. In the Battery, drifters sat along the docks with their junk bags on mild days, sharing cigarette butts and staring into the water. As it grew colder, they huddled together over small bonfires. Some slept in doorways with newspapers for blankets. As many as twelve hundred a night slept at the Municipal Lodging House, Annex No. 2, in the old ferry shed at the foot of Whitehall Street. Farther uptown in Union Square, poor people ate in cheap restaurants that dispensed plain food for nickels and dimes and quarters, and forgot their troubles in cheap movie theaters that showed double features and gave away dishes during intermission. Cheever himself spent long afternoons in Washington Square, discussing with other hungry men the effects of not having enough to eat. “It was the torpor we objected to,” he recalled. Poverty complicated every detail of daily life. Someday when he got some money, his friend Shorty Quirt said, he was going to shave with a new blade and wear clean socks every day.

As Cheever wrote Elizabeth Ames, it had been “a lean strange winter” so far. At least he had two acceptances to report, from
The New Republic
and
Story Magazine
. Both stories drew heavily on his own experience. The documentary-style “Autobiography of a Drummer” read like an apologia for his father's failure. In the much longer and more complex “Of Love: A Testimony,” a story about a young woman who unaccountably shuttles back and forth as the lover of two close friends, he tried to work out his feelings about Iris and Fred. At the end he imagines a dim future for the odd man out in the triangle:

Make him employed or unemployed, put him in a strange city without money or on board a train leaving the city.… He is older. His face is lined. His topcoat is shabby. He stands on the platform smoking a cigarette. He has taken the wrong train and there is nobody there to meet him.

In actuality, Cheever was working to construct a happier future for himself than that represented by the bereft odd man out. He had started a novel at Yaddo partly in response to Cowley's suggestion that he try to write a book that would appeal to the younger generation much as F. Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side of Paradise
had fifteen years earlier. But now Cowley had read the completed chapters of this novel, variously titled
Empty Bed Blues
and
Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps
, and found them disappointing. They read too much like stories, Cowley thought, each chapter reaching a dead end. And they sounded too much like Hemingway—particularly the Hemingway of “Cross Country Snow”—both in style and theme. That was discouraging news, and so was the fact that most of the stories Cheever had written lately were being rejected by the magazines.

On a Friday evening in midwinter, Cowley asked Cheever to come for dinner and a talk about his career. It proved to be one of the most momentous evenings of his life. Cheever obviously needed to make some money from his fiction, both men agreed. His novel-in-progress did not offer much promise along those lines. In addition, the stories Cheever was writing were too long, up to six or seven thousand words. Editors didn't like to buy long stories from unknown writers, Cowley explained. The solution was to write shorter stories.

“It's Friday now,” Cowley said. “Why don't you write a story a day for the next four days, none of them longer than a thousand words? Then bring them to me and I'll see whether I can't get you some money for them.” It was a labor to daunt any writer, but Cheever agreed at once. On Wednesday afternoon he appeared in Cowley's office with the four stories.
The New Republic
took one of them, an anecdote about a burlesque performer called “The Princess.” The other three Cowley sent to Katharine White at
The New Yorker
, and she took two—“Brooklyn Rooming House” and “Buffalo.” (The fourth story, “Bayonne,” was published in the spring of 1936 in a little magazine.)

So commenced one of the longest and most important publishing connections in American literary history.
The New Yorker
, barely a decade old in 1935, was looking for talented newcomers who could grow along with it and help to build circulation. In Cheever they found what they wanted. He was two days short of his twenty-third birthday when
The New Yorker
first printed a story of his. He was not quite sixty-nine when they printed the last one. Altogether 121 stories by Cheever ran in the magazine, more than by any other author except John O'Hara. In all other periodicals he published only 54 additional stories. William Maxwell, who edited most of his
New Yorker
stories (usually they required very little editing), became one of Cheever's closest friends. Gus Lobrano, who replaced Maxwell for a time, provided conservative counsel and performed the fatherly service of teaching Cheever to fish. Even editor in chief Harold Ross, a gruff man who rarely trafficked with fiction writers, occasionally took Cheever to lunch.

The pieces Cheever wrote for
The New Yorker
in the 1930s bear little relation to the great stories that appeared there in later decades. Long stories like “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer” brought whole worlds to life and conveyed a powerful emotional charge. In contrast, most of the early
New Yorker
stories were brief, pessimistic sketches. “Goddammit, Cheever,” Ross swore, “why do you write these goddam gloomy stories?” There were reasons enough, and the young writer could hardly change his viewpoint on demand. Looking back on the decade thirty years later, Cheever could only bring the thirties into focus through a filter of grainy darkness. Everything sloped downhill, toward war.

Others more politically committed than he were madly hopeful. Cowley, for instance, has written of the 1930s dream of the golden mountains, of the invigorating sense of living in history with a chance to change it for the better, come the revolution. Cheever witnessed what seemed the last throes of capitalism—no one with eyes could have failed to—but could not summon up the utopian vision of the true believer. His stories of the period tell of poverty and disillusionment, and of his dark belief that neither Communism nor pacifism could rescue mankind from itself.

Time after time the economic crisis forces his characters to compromise their humanity and abandon their hopes. In evocations of the working class thought by latter-day critics to be beyond his ken, Cheever glimpsed the dreary and loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, striptease artists, and sailors down on their luck. More effectively, his tales caught middle-class people trying to maintain their dignity in a time of diminished expectations. An example is “Brooklyn Rooming House,” the first of his
New Yorker
stories. The landlady who runs the rooming house has clearly seen better days. It is not even her own house she is in charge of, and since she cannot evict the drunks and hooligans, she pretends that they are gentlemen. In a moving finish, one of her drunken renters collapses on the stairs. At first she purports not to notice. Then she goes to him, bends over, and as the passed-out man lies motionless, politely asks him three times, “Can't you find your key? Can't you find your key? Can't you find your key?” Some of the Cheever family's humiliation speaks in this story, and some of John's own.

With nearly everyone fallen on hard times, it was easy to portray oneself as having once had a genteel background. So in a number of stories, near-indigent characters reminisce about the servants they used to have and the high-stakes bridge games their mothers played in and how those days are gone forever and the best they can hope for is a house in Westchester or Connecticut where they can have a garden and a family and some semblance of a comfortable life, and not many of them are going to reach even that goal.

However unlikely its fulfillment might be, people nonetheless refused to give up their dream—not a dream of the golden mountains where all might thrive but of their private gold mine or at least a place in the country where they might be better off than others. It is this thirst for gain that confounds the Communist Girsdansky in “In Passing” (1936), Cheever's forthright tale of why it won't happen here. With the passion of the committed, Girsdansky “spoke of revolution as if it were something that he would see on the next day, or the next.” His great selling point is poverty. “Why should you be poor when you can do away with poverty?” he asks his street-corner audiences. But his voice is dry, he lacks humor and human warmth, and the listeners drift away. Tom, the narrator, is living with European immigrants in Saratoga and working at the five-and-dime. All around him he encounters those who resist Girsdansky's message. The immigrants have come to what they think of as a land of opportunity. The petty gamblers of the town have “nothing in their faces but a love of money, and the incorrigible dream of big money.” His younger brother daydreams about travel and making a fortune and lots of women. Even his parents, about to be dispossessed of their home, continue to pursue the ever-receding bonanza. At the end Tom takes the night bus to scratch out a chancy existence in New York City, while Girsdansky continues to preach to the trees and the lampposts.

Communism was not the answer, then, at least not in America. Still, simply surviving in New York remained a trial for Cheever. He might not have made it at all but for the generosity of Yaddo, where he spent most of his time from late 1935 to early 1938. During the long cold winter of '35, he sounded out Elizabeth Ames about the possibility of a summer job running the launch at Triuna, the three-island complex on Lake George owned by the Yaddo foundation. In April he renewed the inquiry. By this time
The New Yorker
had taken the two stories, and he'd acquired as his first agent Maxim Lieber (a man who specialized in representing writers with liberal sympathies). But he needed time to write, he told Ames, and “would be glad to work for the chance.” Couldn't a summer job at Yaddo “be fitted in” with writing hours?

This query elicited an unsympathetic reply in which Elizabeth Ames advised Cheever to spend more time at some occupation other than writing. He had to learn to support himself, she said. He should adjust to conditions rather than complaining about them. In some exasperation Cheever wrote back that he had held odd jobs all his life, and had supported himself through the winter doing synopses for M-G-M. But as of May 1935 the supply of jobs had run dry. He had put in applications for everything from busboy to copywriter, with no results.

At this Ames relented. Cheever went to Yaddo for the month of August and Lake George for the month of September. In Saratoga he saw a lot of the racing season, piling up background for future stories. On his way south, Cheever stopped in Boston for two days among the “pale, contrite faces” of the city's lawyers and bankers. With relief he returned to New York, where the problem of gainful occupation was solved, for the time being, by his friend Walker Evans. Evans had been commissioned to photograph an exhibition of American Negro art for the Museum of Modern Art, and he hired Cheever—who had no previous experience—to make prints in a “gruesome hovel” of a studio at 20 Bethune Street. According to the expenses Evans submitted to the Museum of Modern Art, he paid Cheever twenty dollars a week for fourteen and a half weeks during the fall of 1935. Other evidence suggests that the weekly salary was ten dollars and that the job lasted less than three months.