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and was also included in Best American Short Stories (and finally adapted as a feature-length film for Playhouse 90 on CBS—this while Cheever was mercifully in Italy: “I saw a script before we sailed,” he wrote the Boyers. “They changed everything but the title”). Around that time, too, he went to Washington to receive the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award for best story of 1954: “The Five-Forty-Eight.” For the moment, at least, he stood at the top of his genre, and in the midst of such eminence he visited his mother in Quincy “I read in the newspaper that you won a prize,” she remarked. “Yes, mother,” he replied, “I didn't tell you about it because it wasn't terribly important to me.” “No,” said the old woman, “it wasn't to me either.”

*”The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” was not included, since it hadn't appeared in print yet.

* And what about Salinger's misanthropy?—so Cheever may have protested. After reading “Seymour: An Introduction,” he wrote a monitory note in his journal: “I am reminded of the bitterness in my own work, that bitterness that is not art but that is its opposite. So I would like to write a story that is all yellow, yellow, yellow, the brightest yellow.”

* Jowett's actual words: “Wherefore my counsel is that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods …” Cheever's version says nothing about justice and virtue.

*”The Chimera” (1961).

*”If I have to go,” Cheever wrote a friend in October, “I'm going to go as the late Warren G. Harding.” In fact, he went as a Chinese acrobat, or so he claimed twenty years later; Mary was “the seven-eyed Sybil.”

* With such a passage in mind, Cheever once wrote that he knew “no greater pleasure” than drawing together disparate incidents in fiction “so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.” When he later taught writing, one of his favorite assignments was to have students take seven or eight dissimilar things and put them into a coherent scheme.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

{1954-1956}

TOWARD THE END OF THE SUMMER in 1954, Cheever got a telephone call from the poet Paul Engle at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop: would he like to come out and teach for a year? Cheever—longing once again to leave Westchester (“even if I were traveling in the wrong direction”)—enthusiastically accepted the offer. Then he waited. Finally, a brief note arrived, explaining the position had been filled. “Mary thinks that the University called the New Yorker and asked for Jean Stafford's telephone number and got mine by mistake,” he wrote Herbst. Still, the idea had been planted, and so (“to vary this landscape somewhat”) he accepted a job at Barnard, beginning in January 1955, to teach a single two-hour writing class every Monday afternoon.

At first Cheever was intimidated by his small group of honor students. He'd never taught his own class and had no degree, and for a while he found himself wasting time at his writing desk “giving imaginary lectures”—some of them rather abstruse: “[F]or the Barnard girls” (he reminded himself in his journal) “there is the statement that writing fills in that discrepancy between what we mean to be and what we are; between our very real vision of life and its possibilities and those experiences that gall us.” True enough, though what stuck in his students’ minds were his more down-to-earth insights. He mentioned, for example, that it would be much harder for them to pursue writing as a career than it had been for him in the Depression, when it “wasn't a crime” to be a writer without a job—that said, they needn't act like bohemians to succeed, and he warned them explicitly against sleeping with editors (particularly at