John Cheever (15 page)

Neither John nor Mary liked the idea of his serving as a foot soldier on the front lines. During his three months at Camp Croft he explored three different alternatives to that dirty and dangerous job. First, he looked for a post on the camp newspaper, only to find out that there wasn't even a paper. Perhaps he could start one himself, in due time. Second, he hoped for an assignment—once basic training was over—to
Yank
, the service magazine Harold Ross had recommended him to. Third, he applied for Officer Candidate School. None of these alternatives panned out.

The first few rugged weeks of basic training left Cheever exhausted. There were no three-day passes and no furloughs. The recruits worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week. Only on Sunday was there respite, when the men were allowed to sleep an hour past their usual 5:30
A.M.
reveille—“no hour's sleep ever seemed sweeter,” Cheever wrote home—and had the rest of the day pretty much to themselves. The other happy moments came at mail call, when Cheever could count on his daily letter from Mary and sporadic correspondence from Pete Collins, Flannery Lewis, Josie Herbst, Morrie Werner, Eddie Newhouse, and Gus Lobrano and Bill Maxwell of
The New Yorker
. His father, now doddering, sent him advice and counsel based on his experience with the Roxbury Horse Guards, “a fraternal organization that rode at the inauguration of the Governor of Massachusetts and spent an annual bivouac in drinking bouts.” Look into your boots each morning, father Cheever reminded son, to be sure no one has put an egg in the toe.

Some days of training were worse than others. On the second Tuesday in camp, John's platoon went on a long march with full equipment. Then they practiced running up and down hills. That night, all he wanted to do, after scrawling a note to Mary, was to collapse on his bunk. Bayonet drill was the hardest work of all, and the bayonet field with its dummies the strangest of sights. Both his feet and his eyes were bothering him, he wrote on May 28, the day after his thirtieth birthday. He felt “every day of thirty.”

In addition to the physical strain, Cheever like all enlisted men had to get accustomed to the language and behavior of men very unlike himself and to a region of the country—the Deep South of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, as he explained it to Mary—he had never before penetrated. The South, he decided, was not for him. Spartanburg struck him as a depressing army-post town. The heat was murderous. On the radio, commercials promised a cure for malarial fever, and the music ranged from popular hymns to country western laments. A decade later, looking at “the delicate but ungenerous and sallow face” of Randall Jarrell on a book jacket, he was reminded of the “cultural bleakness” he found around Camp Croft.

With his fellow trainees—mostly New Yorkers—he got along well, even though their barracks talk relied largely on one all-purpose adjective. “In a fucking line-rifle company,” Farragut recalls in
Falconer
, “you get the fucking, malfunctioning M-
I
's, fucking '03's to simulate fucking carbines, fucking obsolete BAR's and fucking sixty-millimeter mortars where you have to set the fucking sight to bracket the fucking target.” His platoon at Camp Croft was mostly made up of men who had pursued a wide variety of occupations in civilian life. There were longshoremen and ex-cons, busboys and bank clerks, and one terribly sad fellow “who had never done anything. Anything at all.” As the weeks wore on, Cheever made friends with Charlie Baxter and Joe Burt and Andy Broznell, men with backgrounds more or less like his own who liked, as he did, to take a drink. But without question, the most memorable figure of basic training was the platoon sergeant who drove them hard and who seemed determined to make everyone as miserable as possible.

The name of this “strange and interesting” man was Sergeant Durham, a seven-year veteran, and accounts of his peculiar behavior soon came to dominate John's letters to Mary. Durham was passionately determined to shape up his platoon. The way he went about this was to abuse his recruits unmercifully. Nothing they did could satisfy him, and their least lapse aroused his violent temper.

“You work with me, I make you a soldier,” Sergeant Durham told his men. “You cross me, you sell your soul to the devil.” Then he ran them in the hot Carolina sun until they dropped. He gave them close-order drill after lunch and rifle inspection after dinner and confined them to barracks night after night. He even called them out one Sunday night for shoe inspection. None of the other platoons suffered so many indignities, the troops soon found, and they threatened to rebel. Almost everyone hated and feared Durham for his temper and his cruelty and his obsession that nothing in the world mattered except the performance of his platoon. “I'll kill the son of a bitch” was the refrain that ran through the barracks. Cheever was inclined to forgive him, however. Durham didn't have a friend in the world, he realized. The army was his life. And he was making the platoon into the best one in the company.

Midway through basic training—after they ran through clouds of poisonous gases but before they crawled under barbed wire with live ammunition zinging over their heads—Durham went on furlough and the army seemed almost like a vacation. Cheever wrote long letters to Mary. He worked on his stories. He read a newspaper for the first time in weeks. A few days later, after their fifty-dollar-a-month payday, he and Joe Burt and Andy Broznell and Larry Doheny got weekend passes and hired a taxi driver to take them to the cool, light mountain air of Hendersonville, North Carolina, which was something like New Hampshire and nothing at all like Camp Croft.

Inevitably Durham “came back with a bang.” He was drinking now, and seemed not quite right in the head. One night just before taps, he rushed out of his room and began to rouse the men who had gone to bed. In his stupor, he thought it was morning. Maybe he was going crazy, he told his platoon the next day.

Near the end of basic, one of the privates beat Durham up, but he returned, stitches and all, in time for one last humiliation of his troops. On their final day the men were in the barracks relaxing when Durham blew his whistle and they raced to the quadrangle to assemble in ranks. “Not good enough,” Durham said. “You've got to fall out in fifteen seconds,” and he put them through this routine again and again “until their fatigues were black with sweat.” Finally it was time for the recruits to leave, Cheever for Camp Gordon, Georgia. Memories of Sergeant Durham traveled with him, and he decided to resurrect him in a story.

“Sergeant Limeburner,” which appeared in the March 13, 1943,
New Yorker
, had to clear both official military channels and the magazine's informal judgment on what kind of army story it should run in wartime. In most particulars, Limeburner bears a close resemblance to the actual Durham. He is wantonly cruel and friendless, susceptible to alcohol, and possibly deranged. He calls his men out for shoe inspection. He marches them in the heat until they drop. He tries to get them to fall out of the barracks in fifteen seconds. But the story introduces an intermediate voice of reason, a Corporal Pacelli, who assures the troops that they are lucky to have Limeburner in charge. “You'll appreciate this training when you get into combat,” Pacelli says. And in the final scene, Cheever alters the facts to create a measure of sympathy for the sergeant. He has been publicly beaten up, and is led away sobbing, by an officer who will—it is implied—bust him of his rank and relieve him of his job. “The faces watching him walk toward his judgment were the lean, still faces of the soldiers he had destroyed himself to make,” the last sentences read. “In the morning there was another sergeant to take his place.”

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.