Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [113]
* The trip to Concord took place in April 1954, around the time Cheever had begun writing the final version of The Wapshot Chronicle, early fragments of which he'd shown to Maxwell. Thus he refers to his mother as “Mrs. Wapshot” and himself as “Coverly,” as he did habitually in his journal.
* Cheever had a mildly retarded cousin, Robert Devereaux Young (one of Aunt Liley's children), who was then running a freight elevator at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel—where Jane Cheever made her debut. “Life's little ironies,” John's mother remarked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
{1952-1954}
DURING THAT UNPRODUCTIVE SUMMER of 1952, Cheever tried to get a job writing for television (“because poor little Benjy is dressed in rags”), though he loathed the prospect. “The only thing to come my way so far is a husband & wife show,” he wrote Herbst, “in which the humor begins with the fact that their name is Arbuckle. Fuck ‘em.” A few months later, something a little better came along: an adaptation for CBS of Clarence Day's Life with Father and Life with Mother, which had been successfully adapted as both a play and movie by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The producer of the proposed series, Ezra Stone, had been explicitly seeking a New Yorker writer who could evoke the memoir's genteel urban milieu, and finally picked Cheever when St. Clair McKelway and Patricia Collinge turned him down.
Cheever was paired with an experienced writer of radio sitcoms, John Whedon (“a quiet man with a twinkle, very like Cheever,” Stone remembered), and soon the two finished a pilot script and were summoned to a story conference with the playwrights Lindsay and Crouse, as well as Clarence Day's widow—all of whom (especially Mrs. Day) had a number of “long-winded suggestions” to make on how to improve the script. “I don't recall whether or not [Whedon and I] exchanged notes but we certainly exchanged glances,” Cheever wrote thirty years later for TV Guide, “and at the end of an hour we stood and said—in unison—that to adapt Clarence Day's memoirs to accommodate eight [sic] vastly dissimilar interpretations of the book was a project we did not wish to undertake. We left, slamming the door. So ended my experience with commercial television.” In fact, Cheever and Whedon obligingly revised their script at least six times, but as it happened Stone had other writers working on the pilot, and a different script was eventually used. Cheever was paid a nominal sum for his trouble, and ultimately the project was taken out of Stone's hands and moved to the West Coast, where the show was produced for a couple of mediocre years. As Cheever told Dick Cavett in 1978, the last he heard from CBS was when someone called to insist he return his copies of Life with Father and Life with Mother.
One consolation (as well as a source of further dread) was that a second collection of stories, The Enormous Radio, was about to be published in the spring of 1953. Two years before, Cheever had broached the idea of a new collection with Linscott, who looked over some tear sheets and thought the stories “stand reading and rereading wonderfully well,” but wanted to wait until they could be published “in connection with the novel.” Cheever (who knew, of course, just how long such a wait might turn out to be) found an English publisher, Victor Gollancz, who was willing to split production costs with Random House. Linscott still resisted, however, and finally Cheever requested permission to cast about “for an improvident publisher.” This proved to be Funk & Wagnalls, the encyclopedia people, who were “looking around desperately for the beginnings of a trade list,” as Cheever noted.
For The Enormous Radio, Cheever selected fourteen strong stories which had been published since the war, at least two of them arguably classics (the title story and “Goodbye, My Brother”).* Cheever was adamant about publishing the collection for two main reasons: he wanted to build a reputation outside The New Yorker that only a book could bring, and (perhaps more important, given his