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By Root 4045 0

Cheever's neighbors attached very little cachet to being an actual writer, and Cheever had to admit in his journal that he felt “out of water” and was “occasionally cut.” What these people knew for certain about writing—based on Cheever's example—was that it didn't pay worth a damn. The neighbors (“in the advertising business to a man”) lived in big houses and drove Cadillacs; Cheever drove a secondhand Dodge and lived in a “rented toolshed.” And he was lucky to have even that much, as his would-be benefactors were careful to remind him. Every so often a Vanderlip daughter would drop by the toolshed with a well-heeled friend on the lookout for a country pied-à-terre. “Perfect!” the friend would say, oblivious to the fretful little man in the corner, making drinks for his guests. As Susan Cheever wrote, “When the rich people had left … my parents would huddle in their wake like refugees. As my father always reminded us, we had nowhere else to go. This sort of observation was often accompanied by a laugh.”

Rest assured he was not laughing on the inside. In his early days at Beechwood, while dressing for a social evening with prosperous neighbors, Cheever often found himself nervously rehearsing the “vital facts” of his father-in-law's career at Yale—realizing as he did so (“like a third person”) that he was “still compelled by his father's failure to regale himself with the facts of his father-in-law's success.” To some extent Cheever would always be the strange, friendless boy from a disgraced family, whose occasional scorn of the wealthy was in mitigation of an almost unbearable feeling of envy—but also, of course, he was an exceptional man and knew it, and wanted terribly for the world to know it too, and give him the admiration he deserved. “Every indifferent glance,” he wrote, after one year in Scarborough, “every back turned to me by chance, every hint of indifference, real or imagined, sinks into my breast like an arrow dipped in poison. I am consumed.” Gradually, though, he began to adapt somewhat. Rather than tell stories about his in-laws, Cheever acted all the more as if he himself were to the manner born, whatever his reduced circumstances as a (distinguished) writer. With, for example, a local friend such as Sally Swope—a Bostonian of unimpeachable pedigree—Cheever was almost “stuffy,” as she recalled, in observing the dictates of their common (so to speak) background: “My father taught me that a gentleman only wears dark clothes after six o'clock,” he'd drawl, then perhaps chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Generally he kept them guessing—was he really such a snob, or only pretending to be?—but in his heart he wanted very badly indeed to be considered “first-class,” and fortunately there was more to it than wealth or breeding per se: “You and I will get along without the awkward and the ugly,” he wrote in his journal. “They will ring your doorbell; they will bring you roses and pears; they will invite you into steerage. They disguise stupidity with seriousness; they sneer at the wit and grace they miss. … So the bores travel through infinity, a little below the waterline. Don't deceive yourself with illusions of equality. There is brilliance and there is stupidity.”

DESPITE HIS ASSURANCES to Linscott about the accretion of “durable” novel chapters, Cheever had pretty much scrapped his previous drafts of The Holly Tree and started over from scratch in the summer of 1951—which is not to say he was telling a different story. Retitled The Impostor, the novel was still “the sad annal of a family that never amounted to anything,” and focused mostly on the travails of a Frederick-like character now called Leander. Though he gave out optimistic reports on his progress, the work went as fitfully as ever and he wondered, again, whether there was something “intrinsically wrong” with his material, which he suspected was not only depressing but dull. He was still convinced, though, that he had to write about his own past and get it over with, out of his system, since he felt a novel required some vital personal issue