Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [21]
Cheever did not shine in such a climate, though at the time he was not shining generally. Sloppy and depressed, he refused to improve his abysmal math skills (“What future is there for a man who can't deal with figures?” his anxious mother had remarked while John was still in grade school), nor did he make more than a token effort in classes that might otherwise have interested him. His freshman English teacher, Louise Saul, remembered him as a young man who did perfunctory work and “didn't take well to discipline;” in her class and in history, he managed a low C, while receiving D's or E's (failing) in pretty much everything else. Meanwhile he was an almost total outcast, and never forgot his “nearly animal resentment”: “Second-hand clothes that didn't fit, lost friends, athletic incompetence, poor marks, no pocket money, bad food in a dark lunch-room where nobody much wanted to sit with me. … the member of a deposed family.”
During his second year he transferred to Quincy High, where he could fail at no expense to his family* whom he'd begun to help support with a job delivering the Quincy News in a Model T. Cheever enjoyed the independence of driving alone to little towns along the South Shore—Houghs Neck, Braintree, Milton—especially during the World Series, when he'd make an extra trip at dusk to deliver a late edition including box scores and full accounts (“It made me feel good to be the one delivering the good news”). When he got home, though, his mother would sometimes make him wash up and put on his brother's “safety-pinned tuxedo” so he could keep up appearances at some “backstreet cotillion.” His grades continued to sink: for the fall 1928 semester he received a 77 in English and French, a 66 in Latin; the next semester his grades in those classes were, respectively, 55, 45, and zero.
One reason (of many) for Cheever's apathy was that he was too consumed with his own reading to bother with mundane schoolwork. Even as a child he'd spent summer vacations hiding in a canoe to read Machiavelli, and now that he was a lonely, inquisitive teenager he read “everything.” Then and later, his favorite novel was Madame Bovary, not only because of its “absolutely precise” writing, but also a c'est moi identification with its heroine: the novel, said Cheever, was “the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia,” a phenomenon he was somewhat familiar with. He reread the book over and over as an adult and could recite long passages word for word—in English, though he generally advised friends to read it first, if possible, in Flaubert's glorious French.* When reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time he always stuck to his native tongue, but to read the entire masterpiece in whatever language, at age fourteen, is astonishing enough. “It must sound awfully precocious,” Cheever conceded in a 1969 interview, but it appears to have been no idle boast. He also reminisced in his journal about “how disturbed” he'd been, as a boy, to learn of Baron de Charlus's secret homosexuality: “This was in the house in Quincy where the clash between what I read and my surroundings made an intolerable discord,” he wrote, while reflecting that he himself had “none of the ebullience it must take to lead a double life” (though at the time he was leading such a life, to some extent, ebulliently or not).†
In an altogether different category was Hemingway, whose importance to Cheever is hard to measure. Much of Cheever's apprentice