John Cheever (8 page)

Rollin Bailey recalls going into the city with John—this may have been as early as 1928 or 1929—to a party in a second- or third-floor apartment. On hand were a number of “volatile and athletic young men” engaged in “some fencing matches,” with “much exuberance and horsing about.” There were also a few older women, who struck Bailey as “foreign, perhaps Nordic, Italian, lively, friendly.” The atmosphere of the place was “genuine and uninhibited.” Bailey, a year younger than John, had never seen anything like these people “who had the temerity to be themselves and to express openly how they felt.” Boston's bohemia, and its radical fringe, was not generally impoverished. One teatime on Beacon Street, Cheever recalled, the aristocratic left-wing poet Jack Wheelwright tossed sandwiches into the fire as unsuitable and caused his pretty Irish maid to cry. Wheelwright had been talking about his favorite uncle, Henry Adams, but on the way home Cheever could think of nothing but the smoking sandwiches and the weeping maid.

In such literary and intellectual circles Cheever met and befriended Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana and Hazel Hawthorne Werner. Harry Dana, the son of Richard Henry Dana III and Edith Longfellow, was a drama professor closely allied with Communism. He had been dismissed from Columbia's faculty in 1917 for his pacifist sentiments. By the early 1930s, when Cheever came to know him, he was lecturing across the United States for the League Against War and Fascism and paying extended visits to the Soviet Union. When in Cambridge, he lived at Castle Craigie, the historic high Georgian house at 105 Brattle Street where Washington had lived in the eighteenth century and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth. Dana took an interest in Cheever's career and even subsidized him modestly. According to Cheever, Dana was also interested in his person, and pursued him through the halls of Castle Craigie demanding, “How can you be so cruel?”

Hazel Hawthorne Werner, wife of the M. R. (Morrie) Werner who had been biographer of P. T. Barnum and herself a talented fiction writer, also served as a patron to Cheever. She introduced him around in Boston's literary community and took him to Cape Cod to see Provincetown and its playhouse. It was through the Werners that he met E. E. Cummings for the first time. Some of the political passion of Dana and the Werners (Morrie had written a history of Tammany Hall and was working on a record of revolutionary activity since 1848) apparently rubbed off on Cheever. With brother Fred, he attended meetings of the John Reed Club. And in his second published story, “Fall River” (1931), he attempted a proletarian theme. This story, appearing in the second number of a short-lived journal called
The Left
, sketched the gray outlines of the Massachusetts mill town whose mills had closed. Cheever described the effects of poverty and hunger in Fall River, and warned that the rumblings of the workers sounded “like thunder beneath the hills.” Wealthy people in Boston were nervous, but there was not much they could do about it. Cheever's piece conformed to
The Left
's announced belief in “the disintegration and bankruptcy of the capitalist system.” Artistically, though, “Fall River” was a failure, since it consisted almost entirely of descriptive passages, with little plot or characterization to command interest.

Cheever's early literary career moved along slowly. He had started near the top, with “Expelled” in
The New Republic
at eighteen, and it took time to develop his craft and locate his market. Since leaving Thayer, he had been keeping the journal that was to become a lifelong habit. In addition, he was turning out stories, but during his first half-decade as a writer only three were published, and two of those in publications that did not pay. He faced the problem that invariably confronts the young writer: lack of material. He already had a lively awareness, characteristic in his best work, of the way that fantasy impinged on reality, but of the real world itself he had little experience. The literary contacts he made in Boston led to the appearance of “Late Gathering” in a new quarterly called
Pagany
(1931) and “Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions” in the better-known
Hound & Horn
(1932), but both stories drew on Cheever's family situation for the subject matter.

In late 1930 Cheever and his brother spent an evening drinking a bottle of bathtub gin—a spider was embalmed inside—with Richard Johns, the editor of
Pagany
. Soon thereafter Cheever sent Johns the typescript of “Late Gathering,” along with a note disparaging its quality. When Johns not only accepted the story but noted it in a list of upcoming items, Cheever wrote to thank him. The letter, typed without the use of capital letters (and hence written after Cheever had met Cummings, almost certainly), also bemoaned the difficulty of getting started as a writer, with little but rejection notices to show for his efforts.

He was not even exactly sure what “Late Gathering” was about, Cheever told Johns, suggesting that he was turning out a good many stories at the time. In fact, the story focuses on a woman named Amy who maintains a summer hotel, probably in New Hampshire, and on two young men named Fred and Richard, not identified as brothers but so close that they spend “whole days in the hills lying on the sharp grass wondering about one another.” It is autumn and Amy dreads the loss of paying guests during the winter ahead. Among the guests is a Russian lady who talks about how beautiful the mountains in Switzerland are; she is describing Switzerland on the basis of “milk chocolate advertisements,” the narrator decides. This is amusing, but there is not much by way of characterization and no real drama. “Late Gathering” risks making no statement whatever.

“Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions” again takes up the character of Amy, now further depicted as a forty-five-year-old widowed in World War I who lets rooms at her house in the country. As she awaits the coming of spring and the return of tourists, some “Indians” make a bargain to camp in her meadow for five dollars a week. After an attempted rape of one of her guests, the Indians flee and she discovers that they weren't Oklahoma Cherokees at all but a band of Gypsies masquerading as Indians to finagle cash out of the locals. The story is little more than an anecdote, for Amy—based on Cheever's mother—is not well realized and the whole lacks focus.

“Bock Beer” appeared in the same issue with a story by Hazel Hawthorne Werner. Lincoln Kirstein, who was editing
Hound & Horn
in Cambridge, took both young authors to lunch, over which Cheever became argumentative and startled Hazel by contradicting Kirstein on the subject of Henry James. Later he told her he'd been drinking all morning to screw up his courage for the lunch.

Whatever the merits of Cheever's story, its publication in
Hound & Horn
earned him considerable prestige. In its short existence the quarterly attracted submissions from a number of the leading writers of the day. The issue of October-December 1932, for example, printed a long article by M. R. Werner on why collectivist Communism would not work in individualistic America, together with work by T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings. Cummings, a Yankee who had moved to New York, provided Cheever with an exalted view of his calling. “A writer is a prince,” he said in his “beautiful windupthechimney voice.” He also told the young Bay Stater to leave Boston. “Get out of Boston, Joey,” Cummings said. “It's a city without springboards for people who can't dive.” New York was the place for a writer.

Cheever did not go to New York when Cummings advised him to, probably early in 1931. In refashioning the details of his past, Cheever eventually maintained that he had struck out for New York at eighteen, soon after leaving prep school. He did make one brief trip to New York in 1930, to meet Malcolm Cowley. But he did not actually move there to pursue his career until four years later. He spent the interim period in Massachusetts, living with his parents through 1930 and 1931 and sharing apartments with his brother in Boston from 1932 to 1934.

The relationship between the brothers intensified during their hiking trip to Germany in the summer of 1931. Fritz had landed a new and better job beginning in the fall, and on the strength of that prospect the brothers set off for their abbreviated
Wanderjahr
. Joey was still a teenager, and Fritz a man of the world, who wore a mustache and played bridge for high stakes. The militarism they encountered everywhere in Germany caused a quarrel; it troubled Fred not at all, John a great deal. But such arguments were smoothed over during the summer months of travel together. In looking back on that period late in his life, Cheever sometimes hinted that he and his brother had become lovers, and it may be that this happened during their 1931 trip. He told his agent Candida Donadio, for instance, that he had first been deflowered at nineteen, without indicating whether it was a man or a woman who was involved. She rather thought it was a man. “It's apparent to me now,” Cheever said in a 1979 interview, “that [Fred] was instrumental in my growing and so instructive in the nature of love.” At the very least his older brother cared for him and nurtured him as his parents had not.

Soon after their return from Europe, the brothers moved into an apartment at 6 Pinckney Street in Boston. Until that time John had been at least nominally in residence at 123 Winthrop Avenue in Quincy, but his parents' quarreling and his own desire for independence drove him to depart. He was also annoyed by his parents' unrealistic expectations for his work. “Have you been writing today?” they would ask. “Isn't that nice?” Then they would tell everyone from the charlady to the president of the women's club that their son John was going to write a book, any minute now.

Mrs. Cheever kept a firm rein on her emotions as her sons left the family home. She even arranged, cheerfully enough, for their furniture to be sent to the apartment in Boston. Yet as they backed down the driveway with the last pile of belongings stowed in the car, the headlights struck her face for a second and both brothers saw her face gleaming with tears. Neither of them said anything about it, to her or to each other.

In mid-1932 their mother faced yet another trauma when the bank moved to foreclose on the Quincy house. In a 1936 story called “In Passing,” Cheever vividly depicted the anguish of dispossession. The woman of the story is distressed when surveyors come to look the place over in advance of foreclosure, and she sends her son outside to order them off the property. For a moment, she breaks down. “I can't stand it any longer,” she cries. “It's too much to ask of anyone. This is our house.… For thirty years we've been working, saving, trying to find something, anything. And now it's all gone.… We haven't a place to rest in, to die in. We may die in a hotel. On the street.…” Then she recovers herself and makes her son promise not to say anything to his father about her outburst. As it happened, the loss of the house led also to a temporary separation between Cheever's parents. His mother moved to a small house on Spear Street in Quincy, near the public library; his father went to live with his cousin Mary Thompson on her farm in Assinippi.

In Boston, Fred took up his new job and continued to support his brother's struggle to make a career as a writer. Success did not come easily. In fact, there was a three-year gap between the publication of “Bock Beer” in the spring of 1932 and the appearance of “Brooklyn Rooming House” in the May 25, 1935, issue of
The New Yorker
. It was not that Cheever was not trying. He was sharpening his craft and storing up material, in Boston and out. For example, he and Charles Flato rented Prescott Townsend's studio in Provincetown at off-season rates during the winter of 1932. A victim of polio who was later to achieve a distinguished record in government service and public relations, Flato was also trying to write fiction. Conditions on Cape Cod were less than salutary, however. “It was March,” Flato recalled, “on a wharf without heat and the floorboards wide enough to see the water at high tide. We tried to type wearing our overcoats and gloves.…” For food they depended on the generosity of their fisherman neighbors, and on the supplies that brother Fred brought down on the weekends.

By the following year, Cheever was more eager than ever to see what he could accomplish with a change of venue. From New York his benefactor Malcolm Cowley encouraged him to seek a residency at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, and in the spring of 1933 Cheever wrote colony director Elizabeth Ames. He was still learning his craft, he acknowledged, and his goals were modest enough: if granted a residency, he hoped to produce “a handful of good short stories.” Unhappily there was no room at Yaddo that summer. In writing to tell Cowley the news, Cheever again emphasized how little he expected from his immediate efforts. He was glad that Cowley had not seen fit to publish the stories he'd sent him. He wasn't even sure yet what direction his writing might take. It could be five years before he turned out “anything worth publishing.”

Meanwhile, Cheever was immersing himself in the cultural life of Boston and Cambridge, where the presence of T. S. Eliot in the winter and spring of 1933 had, he said, been “equally sterilizing and stimulating.” Eliot, who had returned to the United States after seventeen years to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, chose as his topic
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
. The “shadow of discipline” that Eliot had cast over criticism was undoubtedly a good thing, Cheever thought, if only because it should cut down on the amount of criticism produced. But he was troubled by Eliot's celebration of impersonality in art. His critical machinery would break down, he felt, when applied to Hart Crane or Cummings.

The next year Cheever tried for Yaddo again, was admitted, and began an association that was to last the remainder of his life. The letter of application, written from the brothers' new apartment at 46 Cedar Lane Way, indicated Cheever's interest in the collapsed glories of Boston and the surrounding area. He had lived all his life within view of the city and “nearly every day of the last two years within” it. In his writing he would try to deal with the way relics from the past consorted uneasily with modern life in Boston. Nothing Cheever wrote quite fit this prospectus, but almost everything he wrote is pervaded by a sense of the intermingling of past and present there articulated. He was finding his way, and Yaddo was a fine place for that.