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based on Frederick Cheever's notes about his youth during the gaslight era of old New England. The problem was how to turn his father's “antic” and “vulgar” writing into a properly elegant prose style. “Having revised these lines as Gide might have written them,” Cheever later wrote, “I realized that my father was a better writer than I, and using his style I went on then to invent a character and a life that would have gratified him.” At the time, Cheever wrote two chapters of Leander's journal (sometimes quoting his father verbatim) and rather doubtfully gave them to Maxwell, hoping for a little feedback at best. Maxwell was not only wildly enthusiastic (“I was mad about that journal”), but willing to publish the whole thing almost word for word in The New Yorker as “Journal of an Old Gent.” For Cheever it was the crucial turning point: “So many of my plans for books have backfired, withered and vanished,” he wrote Maxwell after getting the news. Now, however, he had both confidence and money enough to continue—though little existed of the novel except a few bright scraps: the first part of Leander's journal; the Independence Day parade in St. Botolphs; and bits of “Clear Haven” (which might or might not fit into the ultimate design). As Cheever noted in early February 1955, “[W]hen I drink a martini after dark the book seems to unfold before my eyes like a roll of pianola music … but in the clear light of morning I have my troubles.”

A MONTH AFTER THIS WATERSHED, Linscott decided to pull the plug. “It is nine years now since we advanced you $4800 to write a novel and two years since the last report of ‘No progress,’ “ he wrote on March 2, 1955, with unwonted severity. “Meanwhile our finance department has been pressing me to make some sort of arrangement for repayment.” The man added, pro forma, that of course he'd prefer a complete, publishable manuscript, but in lieu of this he suggested that Cheever “undertake to pay us back in installments.” After further negotiation (epistolary), Linscott agreed to release Cheever if he could repay half the advance, and Cheever began casting about for a savior (“I wonder if any publisher will pay as much for a forty-three year old writer”). In the meantime, expecting a modest windfall from the television sale of “The Country Husband,” he took his family to Nantucket for the summer.

He'd rented a big, rickety old Boston cottage* atop a bluff on the narrow northeastern tip of the island, in Wauwinet, with spectacular views of the ocean on one side and the bay on the other. “I am able to spend a good deal of money on liquor,” he wrote the Spears, “because we have found a sea pond that is teeming with steamers, cherry stones, oysters, and blue crabs and we can count on a good deal in the way of free groceries.” One day the family was frolicking naked in the little pond, digging for clams, while the dog Cassie furtively removed their discarded clothing: “When we climbed back to the sand dune that afternoon there was nothing but one shoe,” Ben remembered. “My father had to slink back to the house naked, and then return with clothes for the rest of us.” The place was isolated but hardly deserted; nearby was a family-owned hotel with little cottages, and the Cheevers had plenty of social life. They hired a well-born young woman named Cordelia (“Dilly”) to help look after the children and teach them how to sail, as well as to team up with Cheever in the local yacht-club races—a “disaster,” as Mary recalled: “They found themselves going backward. John came from an old maritime family, so he liked to believe he knew something about sailing.”

He was fretful about finances: the television deal was still in suspense, and always nagging at the back of his mind was that unpaid Random House advance. “These old bones are for sale,” he wrote Simon Michael Bessie, a senior editor at Harper & Brothers whom he'd met at a Westchester lunch. He mentioned the price—twenty-four hundred dollars—and warned Bessie that the novel “may or may not ever be written,” but in any event he was tired of running into