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interesting and sometimes more significant. I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position, and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself—genteel, traditional—and it is generally accepted. But what are the bare facts, if I were to write them?” For his own edification he often wrote the facts. There were, for example, the soiled underpants hanging from a nail on the bathroom door (“When I complained about this I was slapped down”). There was the player piano his father had won in a raffle, which was later supplanted (anecdotally) “with a glistening parlor grand, some Schumann on the rack;” in fact, the instrument was upright, mice-infested, and the tunes it played when one pumped the pedals were not Schumann sonatas but dance-hall hits like “Lena from Palesteena.” There was the cat to whom his father read Shakespeare. And finally there was the coral-embroidered, homemade dress his mother wore to Symphony Hall, to which she never bothered to bring tickets: “Young man,” she'd say, “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever and my seats are number 14 and 15.” Actually, Cheever was somewhat inclined to mention that spectacular dress and certain other details—her tri-corn hat, say (“what shit,” he glossed privately)—because they “[made] the cast seem charming and eccentric when it was neither.”

“Eccentric,” in this context, is meant to suggest a desirable originality—that is, as opposed to undesirable, as opposed to aberrant: “Sexual losers, sartorial losers, bums at the bank,” Cheever wrote of his family. “Unclean outcasts whose destiny, written in the stars, was to empty garbage pails and pump the shit out of septic tanks but who, through some cultural miscalculation, imagined themselves being carried off the Lacrosse field on the shoulders of their teammates and then dancing with the prettiest girl in the world.” Such an outcast was something Cheever never intended to be, and so he spent much of his adult life “impersonat[ing] squares” and living among them, despite his own “passionate detestation of the establishment.” And much the same may be said of his brother Fred, who rebelled against his own Babbittry by becoming an “exhaustively” offensive drunk, and later a sixty-something hippie riding a Harley around the South Shore.

Cheever was a great believer in Satchel Paige's advice not to look back lest you see something gaining on you. “I'm tickled to know that the letters still serve,” he wrote Josephine Herbst when she mentioned rereading their old correspondence, “although I always throw the damned things away myself. Yesterday's roses, yesterday's kisses, yesterday's snows.” Nor did he keep carbons of his stories, or (so he claimed) copies of his own books. Cheever worried that, if he got in the habit of dwelling on the past, he might also be inclined to dwell on the fact that his father was a failed salesman and his mother ran a “cluttered gift shop” and that hence, with an origin like that, he should have ended up “a slightly drunken gas-pumper” rather than a distinguished author with “the airs of a disenfranchised but charming duke of the holy Roman empire.” As for souvenirs, there were “the antiques and heirlooms out of Cheever's Yankee past,” as one journalist observed—meaning the ivory fan, the Canton china, the lowboy from Newburyport, and of course Aunt Liley's portrait of the artist as a young man. “Gene [Thaw, an art-dealer friend] frames the portrait,” Cheever noted in 1977, “[and] my whole past takes on authority and substance.” It wasn't his whole past, of course, and sometimes—when he was speaking of his dear old days at Thayerlands, or the time his cousin Randall spent at Eastman Conservatory—his wife would laugh at him: “ ‘When I was at Thayerlands,’” she'd mimic, “and what is this Eastman Conservatory … “

THAYER ACADEMY WAS an old-fashioned New England day school that had no truck with the progressive, “child-centered” principles of its junior school. Founded by Sylvanus Thayer—the so-called Father of West Point, a man who opposed “dissipation of every