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By Root 4178 0

on one of Ross's byzantine systems. Having decided that the magazine's fiction was getting too long (moving away from the frothy “casuals” he preferred), Ross provided what he hoped would prove an incentive for shorter work: he doubled the word rate on the first two thousand words, after which the rate was half or less in certain cases. Shaw's minimum rate in 1945, for example, had been “34-15,” or thirty-four cents a word for the first two thousand and fifteen cents thereafter (later the system was revised to the “first 2,000 words or first half of wordage, whichever greater”). Ross also established a system that assigned grades to stories, ranging from C— to A, which dictated the price of a story. Maxwell always gave any story he accepted an A (“on the ground that it was not a cent too much”), and in Cheever's case would hasten over to bookkeeping, figure out the exact price of a given story, and order an immediate check up to 75-80 percent of the total, the balance to be paid on publication (“Sometimes,” he recalled, “this process would be forgotten, and John would be distressed when the check was small on publication”).

Perhaps because he took such pains, Maxwell was touchy on the subject of money; also, as Brendan Gill once noted, though Maxwell “seemed the gentlest of men,” he was “on some level of his being … tough as nails.” Cheever knew this as well as anybody, and privately mocked his friend's “gentle and tender” manner when imparting bad news of some sort, particularly bad news for which Maxwell was largely responsible—a rejection, say, or the fact that one of Cheever's stories had been stuck “behind the cartoons” (“One is always being pushed into second class”). Once, at a dinner party in Scarborough, Mary Cheever had adamantly told Maxwell that he ought to pay her husband better, whereupon Maxwell had stormed out of the house (only to find he'd left his headlights on and couldn't start his car; Cheever came out and pushed him down a hill and on his way).

In any event, Cheever's request for a raise went over badly—“embarrassing and painful,” as he wrote in his journal. Eventually he'd make a funny story out of it: as Susan Cheever remembered, “[H]e often set it on Christmas Eve and threw in a snowstorm and the suggestion that he couldn't afford to buy presents for his children.” In fact, Cheever did complain that he was “harassed by indebtedness,” and—though he loved working with Maxwell, of course—he simply had to make more money. Maxwell threw up his hands: he was only a part-time editor, he said, and couldn't change the payment system; with the best will in the world, he suggested that Cheever might be able to do better elsewhere.

Through the falling snow—as he liked to tell it—Cheever walked to a pay phone on Forty-fourth Street. (“I remind myself of my brother,” he noted at the time; “sitting in a pay-phone, trying to make some business arrangements. … Since he has failed and since I look like him I seem bound to fail.”) Cheever hadn't had an agent to handle his stories since he and Lieber parted company in the forties,* but now he called Candida Donadio, whose clients had been listed that year at the “red-hot center” of Esquire's “literary universe.” She told him to give her a few minutes, then called back: The Saturday Evening Post, she said, would pay him twenty-four thousand for a first-look contract and a minimum of four stories a year, which would roughly triple his New Yorker income.

He returned to Maxwell's office and reported the offer. “Great consternation” ensued: Mr. Shawn was summoned, along with the magazine's treasurer, Hawley Truax, and together the men tried to reason with Cheever. He was, of course, one of their most illustrious fiction writers, but they simply couldn't afford to pay him the sort of money that would support his lavish lifestyle (“I am accused of improvidence”); as Maxwell claimed, “To do so we would have had to make an exception of him, and that would make others furious.” In the end, as Cheever put it, he was offered “a key to the men's room and all the bread and cheese