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also the question of tone: “[t]he irresistable attraction [that] satire, irony, the memory of Fielding have for me,” he wrote, having made a breakthrough of sorts with the darkly exuberant “O Youth and Beauty!” With a somewhat Fieldingesque treatment in mind, then, he wrote “The National Pastime” in the summer of 1953—an attempt to recast Leander in a more comic, malevolent mode. This was the father he was never able to “requite”: the gruff, distant old man who refused to play baseball with him; the self-absorbed zany who wore a fez and read to his cat. In the story, Leander writes in his will, “ ‘To my changeling son, Eben … the author of all my misfortunes, I leave my copy of Shakespeare, a hacking cough …’ The list was long and wicked [the narrator-son observes] … the piece of paper was evidence of my own defeat.” For the purpose of his novel, though, Cheever preferred to make peace with his father's ghost rather than the opposite, and anyway the wacky, fez-wearing Leander was perhaps too thin to sustain over the course of a long narrative. “[The story] seems like a model of wrongness,” he wrote Maxwell, “although I might be able to use some of it later in a different light.”

Next he wrote “Mrs. Wapshot,” still another attempt to get his mother down on paper. In her final incarnation in the novel, Sarah Wapshot is a single-minded but essentially pious and gentle woman; the heroine of “Mrs. Wapshot,” however, is much closer to the real-life model (still abiding in Quincy at the time, it bears repeating). “She is a very enterprising woman,” Mr. Wapshot explains to his sons. “She used to go alone to those dark streets in Boston where the rag-pickers were and buy rags by the car-load. When she and her friends had made enough quilts to cover every coolie in China they had a bazaar and sold the quilts for the benefit of the Armenians.” This unpublished story is over thirty pages in manuscript, and the Wapshot cast is still evolving: the father is a gentle apologist for his wife's vagaries, and dies in the early pages; there are three sons—Moses, Coverly, and William—the last a divinity student, while in this version Coverly is based somewhat on the author's piano-playing cousin, Randall Young. At any rate Cheever was not surprised when The New Yorker rejected the story as diffuse (“a series of eddies and whirlpools”). “My plan to write a novel piecemeal seems frustrated,” Cheever wrote.

But a piecemeal approach was the only way to proceed, given his finances. Indeed, the journal suggests that the first usable part of The Wapshot Chronicle was the “Clear Haven” episode—begun in early 1954—which appears in the last third of the published novel. “Clear Haven” originated as a lampoon of the Vanderlips’ ghastly mansion—to say nothing of Mrs. Vanderlip herself (who, like Cousin Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scaddon, was a great believer in celibacy)—but a long time would pass before Cheever could figure out how to relate it to the rest of his material. In the meantime he put it aside to write what he hoped would prove a salable, self-contained story about the Wapshots, “Independence Day at St. Botolph's [sic],” which appeared that summer in The New Yorker and was partly cannibalized into the first and fifth chapters of his novel. In the magazine story, Leander is named Alpheus,* a ferryboat captain who loves “boarding-house widows, seaside girls, and other doxies,” and freely consoles himself with same after learning that his high-minded wife doesn't like to be “embraced.” On Independence Day, Mrs. Wapshot discovers her jewelry box has been rifled and assumes, tearfully, that Alpheus has robbed her in order to run away with a randy widow. In fact, Alpheus has hocked the baubles to buy fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks: “He was in high spirits, for he knew there would never again be such a display at the farm.”

For the actual Leander of the novel, though, Cheever wanted something more than simply a colorful scoundrel, and hence considered “breath[ing] some fire” into the character by including his “autobiography”—that is, a document