• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4142 0

recent creative setbacks) he wanted to know where he stood as a writer—that is, to find out what serious critics thought of his work, “to get a clearer idea of where [the stories] fail and where they [don't] and to get some measure of the increase in breadth I should aim at.” Naturally he expected the worst. Having sent galleys “to old, tender-hearted, soft-brained friends” in hope of getting a few blurbs, he inferred from a brief silence that he was being snubbed, and remarked that he might “have to fall back on old Spigelgass” (what with the man's delight in his “childlike sense of wonder”). It might have seemed a good sign that he was interviewed for Harvey Breit's column in the New York Times Book Review, but after their lunch together Cheever fretted in his journal that he'd behaved in an “unstable” and “indiscreet” manner. On the contrary, he'd come across as a “tough-minded short-story advocate” (so Breit wrote), who considered the novel an “artificial” and “anachronistic” form—not an entirely disinterested apologia, under the circumstances, though actually Cheever's aesthetic ideas had changed very little over the years, reflecting his view of modern life as fragmented and nomadic: “The short story is determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event. The vigorous nineteenth-century novel is based on parish life and lack of communications. … I've always noticed that just as people are about to tell you the secret they're transferred to another city. The way people drop out of sight. Really drop!”

In that same issue of the Book Review (May 10, 1953) was James Kelly's critique of The Enormous Radio, which was everything Cheever might have hoped for (if he hadn't been so morbidly insecure at the time). Kelly described the stories as “miraculous expressions of life among the middle-class have-not-enoughs,” though he added (as did other critics) that the stories were less impressive when read one after another, as the reader discovered a certain sameness of theme and setting. “But not one can be called insignificant or shoddy or inadequately observed,” Kelly concluded. “No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever.” William Peden, writing in the Saturday Review, was also enthusiastic: “John Cheever shows an absolute genius for taking the usual and transforming it into the significant. … [He] is one of the most undervalued American short story writers.”

What Cheever was apt to notice most in Peden's review, however, was an incidental remark that his stories were “less spectacular” (albeit more likely to “improve with rereading”) than those of J. D. Salinger, whose Nine Stories was published around the same time to ecstatic acclaim. Indeed, a comparison of the two books was the basis of one of the most wounding reviews of Cheever's career—all the worse given that the reviewer, Arthur Mizener, had become one of the nation's most prominent critics after the recent success of his pioneering Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. Appearing in The New Republic, Mizener's review was framed as an assessment of the “New Yorker story,” which Mizener thought a good thing for the most part: “If their limitations on subject matter are in the long run dangerous to real talent, they nonetheless provide a stiff course in the craft.” As Mizener would have it, Salinger exemplified the Good sort of New Yorker writer—a brilliant craftsman who transcended the “limitations” of the form—and thus his place on the best-seller lists was “as it ought to be.” Cheever, however (“not a writer of any great talent”), was the Bad sort—an empty craftsman, a craftsman tout court: “Congreve” (wrote Mizener) “once remarked that he selected a moral and then designed a fable to fit it. … It is the glaring fault of Mr. Cheever's stories that they all appear to have been produced in that way.”

Salinger was a sore point. Five years before, he'd come to Cheever's and everybody else's attention with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which provoked a flurry of letters to the magazine (Why did