John Cheever (16 page)

During the holiday season, PFC Cheever felt somewhat bereft. On a brisk and wintry Thanksgiving Day the men lined up in front of the mess hall, and the mess sergeant told them not to eat until the corporal said grace. The tables were covered with the same sheets they would sleep on for the next two weeks. The dinner was served by KPs. It was not the way Cheever would have chosen to spend the day. Perhaps they could be together next year, when they could celebrate as a family, he wrote Mary. Their family was very much in prospect. In his letters he commiserated with his wife about her morning sickness, referred to baby “Geoffrey” or “Tootsie,” and encouraged her to find a roomier apartment. He was delighted with the idea of being a father.

Christmas dinner was the same as Thanksgiving with the turkey served on bedsheets. Afterward Cheever took a nap and dreamed of the house he and Mary might inhabit after the war, in the country somewhere amid elm trees. There were presents from everyone—Bill Maxwell mailed him a copy of
Pickwick Papers
—but Camp Gordon was a hell of a place to celebrate Christmas. The months of waiting were beginning to take their toll. Every soldier at Gordon was eager to be sent somewhere.

Early in January 1943 it looked as if the 22nd would be shipped overseas soon. The men were inoculated, again. They were ordered to use an APO return address and to make their wills. Guns were packed away in Cosmoline, machinery in crates. Finally everyone had to sign an embarkation form. “That cinched it,” the troops thought, but preparations stopped as abruptly as they had started. On January 10 an order came down to resume issuing passes and furloughs.

Sharing such inexplicable experiences served to draw the men closer together. In E Company, someone stole sixty-six dollars from Herman Nelson, a thirty-eight-year-old wheat farmer from North Dakota. Nelson was about to be discharged because of his age, and had been saving the money for his return home. The thief was not discovered, though the company commander restricted the company indefinitely in hopes of smoking him out. Nelson's fellow soldiers, however, took up a collection of twenty-five dollars to help him on his way. In his story based on this incident, Cheever gives the farmer a farewell speech. “I'm going to miss all you fellows,” he says. “I don't want to go away only it's yust I'm not so young. Such fine fellows I never met before in all my life. Such fine fellows.”

Cheever himself was transferred from personnel to Special Services, as editor of the regimental weekly paper,
The Double Deucer
. On this job he worked with cartoonist Lin Streeter, “a very nice guy” who once had had a studio near their apartment in the Village. He rather enjoyed the work, and thought it might continue for the duration. Meanwhile, he resumed the attempts to get into OCS he had initiated at Camp Croft. He had not been selected earlier because he did not have a college education and because he had scored below 110 on the Army General Classification Test given to all entering recruits. Now, he thought, his book might substitute for the college degree, but he still had to do something about his AGCT score. Mary sent him some manuals on how to improve one's IQ—he was especially weak on math—and he boned up on long division, nights. Then he took the test again “and passed into group two, which is OCS material.” He made it only with some assistance from Dave Rothbart, the personnel clerk who administered the test and was “not entirely scrupulous about the timing.” Rothbart admired Cheever's writing but did not think of him as officer material. “If you saw him marching in formation, you wouldn't think, ‘Now, there's a soldier.' There was something of a dreamlike quality about him, something of the New England country gentleman, even then.”

The Way Some People Live
, Cheever's collection of stories, was published on March 8, 1943. Complimentary copies went to the author's parents, his brother, his in-laws, Gus Lobrano, Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth Ames, Eddie Newhouse, Flannery Lewis, and four of his officers at Camp Gordon. On the dust jacket Random House noted the uncanny ability of Harold Ross and
The New Yorker
to find “new writing stars” like Sally Benson, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, E. B. White, and now “the bright new luminary of the past two seasons,” John Cheever. Cheever was in the army, the jacket copy revealed, but upon his return “the publishers expect that he will be a major figure in American post-war literature.”

The book contained thirty stories arranged more or less by chronology. The first twenty-four derived from the prewar period; the last six were written after Pearl Harbor. They could also be separated according to length. Twenty-seven ran to fewer than ten book pages. Many of these read like vignettes or anecdotes rather than full-fledged stories, and almost all of them came from the pages of
The New Yorker
. Two of the three much longer stories, “The Brothers” and “Of Love: A Testimony”—both of them singled out for praise by reviewers—were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about.

In putting the book together, Random House worked from tear sheets Cheever and his agent supplied. At some stage of this process, the stories dealing with politics and with Cheever's family background were culled out, among them such ambitious and interesting efforts as “Homage to Shakespeare,” “Autobiography of a Drummer,” “In Passing,” and “Behold a Cloud in the West.” Also scrapped were the purely commercial racetrack stories and the two overly contrived sketches about burlesque performers. The stories actually included in the book repeatedly touch on the reduced circumstances of middle-class people after the Depression. Usually the tone is lightly ironical, the narrative voice keeping its distance. Usually the outlook is dark.

For the first time Cheever read his reviews, and he survived the ordeal in good humor. William DuBois, in the
New York Times Book Review
, chided him for writing about “Tortured Souls” with “epicene detachment and facile despair,” a comment Cheever decided to regard as very funny. The two most thoughtful reviews—a rave by Struthers Burt, an attack by Weldon Kees—he did not dismiss so lightly.

Writing in the
Saturday Review
, Burt called
The Way Some People Live
“the best volume of short stories” he had come across in a long time and “Of Love: A Testimony” “one of the best love stories” he had ever read. After the war, he predicted, Cheever would become “one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist” and perhaps even as a playwright. He had all the requisite qualities: “the sense of drama in ordinary events and people; the underlying and universal importance of the outwardly unimportant; a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life, its ironies, comedies, and tragedies.” The only things he had to fear were “hardening” into a style that might “become an affectation, and a deliberate casualness and simplicity that might become the same. Otherwise, the world is his.”

What Burt was warning against, though the magazine's name was not mentioned in his review, was the danger of Cheever's fiction conforming too closely to the
New Yorker
pattern. It was this that bothered Kees in his review for
The New Republic
. Read individually in the magazine, the stories “seemed better than they are; read one after another, their nearly identical lengths, similarities of tone and situation, and their somehow remote and unambitious style, produce an effect of sameness and eventually of tedium.” All
New Yorker
stories, he maintained, were written in highly professional prose, yet displayed “a patina of triviality” both in style and subject matter. If he was to escape the formula, Cheever should write more stories like the 1934 “Of Love: A Testimony”—stories in which “he has room enough … to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”

The review by Kees was important as the first of many broadsides against Cheever as a “
New Yorker
writer” limited in scope by his association with the magazine. Unlike most later accusations, Kees's had some validity. Since that day when Cowley first suggested he write much shorter pieces, Cheever had in fact been constructing sketches designed to suit the magazine's special requirements. He needed to grow in his craft, to combine the skill of rhetoric and construction evidenced in his early
New Yorker
work with the emotionally powerful effects of his longer stories.

No critic could have been harder on this first book of stories than Cheever himself eventually became. In effect he repudiated the book, turning down offers of translation rights and allowing none of the stories in
The Way Some People Live
to be reprinted in the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning
Stories of John Cheever
. Even at the time of publication, he was curiously dispassionate about the book. Cerf had warned him not to expect much by way of sales, and Cerf was right. Random House printed 2,750 copies and sold 1,990 at two dollars apiece. Cheever made only one hundred and forty dollars in royalties beyond his advance of two hundred and fifty. The book's appearance had other benefits, however. Seeing the stories in a book, as he wrote Mary with due modesty, showed him how much he had yet to learn. More immediately, several of the writer/propagandists at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, Long Island, read
The Way Some People Live
and liked it enough to badger Colonel Leonard Spigelgass into getting Cheever transferred to their unit.

UPTOWN

1943–1950

Cheever's transfer to the Signal Corps unit at Astoria on Long Island could hardly have been more fortunate. He was already at Fort Dix with the 22nd Infantry Regiment, expecting shipment to combat duty overseas, when he got word of his reassignment in the spring of 1943. Later, his old regiment underwent terrible losses in the battle for Fortress Europe. The men of the 22nd splashed ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day morning, and within five weeks suffered 3,439 casualties, or more than the original strength of the unit at D-Day. Still worse was to come. In the fall of 1944, the 22nd fought both at Hürtgenwald, or “the Death Factory” as the men called it, and in the Battle of the Bulge. (The regimental commander during those battles was Colonel Charles T. [Buck] Lanham. And attached to the regiment was Lanham's close friend, war correspondent Ernest Hemingway.) By V-E Day the total casualties mounted to 9,359. About four out of five enlisted men who served with the 22nd were wounded. Half were killed.

In later years, Cheever provided varying accounts of his army career. He wanted to stay in the infantry, he told an interviewer. He spent “four years as an infantry gunner,” he said on one occasion, “two years as a mortar gunner,” he said on another. Actually he was in basic training and attached to an infantry company for about one year only, and a strange year it was. In retrospect Cheever found it difficult to “connect his life” at Camp Croft and Camp Gordon with the man he subsequently became. “That person in the army,” he said, “that wasn't me.” The South, the garrison towns, even Sergeant Durham faded into the mist.

Life at Astoria—as veterans of the Signal Corps Photographic Center call their post—contrasted sharply with the restrictions and rigors of Regular Army duty in the South. Cheever was treated like a professional there, and granted certain privileges accordingly. Best of all, he could live at home in New York with Mary, now seven months pregnant, and commute to his work like a civilian.

In preparation for the baby, the Cheevers settled into a small garden apartment on Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues in Chelsea. It was not a fashionable neighborhood in those days. On their first Sunday in residence, an outraged cry punctured the morning quiet as Mary served breakfast outdoors. “Dontcha call me a whore,” a whore yelled. That night a drunken woman wearing a feather boa and carrying a fluffy dog under her arm stopped to pee in the gutter. Cheever was back in New York.

At three in the morning on July 31, Mary gave birth to a healthy eight-pound baby girl they named Susan Liley Cheever. John was on hand during delivery, and held Mary in his arms through the last of a long labor. Both parents were very proud. Mary “liked being pregnant … and now she likes nursing,” John wrote Josephine Herbst. “Mother's bird,” Mary called the baby, and attached a rose over her cradle. As for John, the birth made him “absurdly happy.” Having a child, his father used to tell him, was as easy as “blowing a feather off one's knee.” But Cheever felt a kind of rapture mingled with justification. Susan's arrival, and later that of her brothers, Ben and Fred, gave him the family he ardently wanted. The most exciting days of his life, he was often to proclaim, were the days his children were born.

The Signal Corps Photographic Center where the new father went to work occupied the capacious grounds of the studios at Thirty-fifth Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street in Astoria, Queens. Many of the great silent movies of the 1920s had been made there. Quiescent during the Depression, the studio hummed to life as part of the propaganda war that Frank Capra—deputized by President Roosevelt—was leading against the sophisticated techniques of Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis. In charge of operations when Cheever came on board in 1943 was Colonel Manny Cohen, the five-foot-tall former production chief at Paramount Studios. Stanley Kramer was administrative head. Head writer Leonard Spigelgass directed the work of such professionals as Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, Carl Foreman, Don Ettlinger, Arnand D'Usseau, Jimmy Gow, John D. Weaver, and Ted Mills. Their primary function was to write scripts for the biweekly
Army-Navy Screen Magazine
, a film series “using fact and humor, animation, combat footage and specially photographed features to answer gripes, clear up confusions and misunderstandings, pass on information about new policies or plans,” and in general improve morale among the nation's servicemen. The unit also turned out special films on the D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris, and so forth. As a group the filmmakers felt a strong sense of mission as “shock troops in the idea war,” along with an uneasy sense that they were really amateurs at the business of propaganda.