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By Root 3999 0

fiction reads almost like deliberate homage (or parody), but there was more to it than that: “I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his,” Cheever wrote after Hemingway's suicide in 1961, “and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers, and the smells of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard … extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain.” A little later, Cheever met the great man's widow and was thrilled to learn that Hemingway had once rousted her out of bed to read “Goodbye, My Brother.” As time went on, though, Cheever became more ambivalent about his lifelong hero: reading the posthumous A Moveable Feast (with its unseemly reference to “Scott [Fitzgerald]'s cock” and so on) made Cheever feel as if he'd met “some marble-shooting chum of adolescence who has not changed.” Finally, at the height of his own fame, Cheever seemed to worry that readers would overestimate Hemingway's (passing) influence on his work, the earliest samples of which he'd labored to keep out of the public eye. “What have you learned from Ernest Hemingway?” asked a well-meaning admirer at the Ossining Library. “Not to blow my head off with a shotgun,” Cheever replied.

He also read Faulkner,* with whom he had a more subtle affinity but an affinity nonetheless. As Malcolm Cowley pointed out, both men were autodidactic high-school dropouts with “enormous confidence in their own genius,” and Cheever also cultivated his “little postage stamp of native soil” à la Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha (postage stamps plural in Cheever's case, as he mythologized—inimitably if less ambitiously—such diverse locales as provincial New England, the West-chester suburbs, and the lost midcentury Manhattan that “was still filled with a river light”). Both writers, too, were attracted to the sprawling, picaresque novels of the eighteenth century—though, as with Hemingway, Cheever would sometimes hesitate to admit the breadth of his debt to Fielding (whose work he'd consumed “intravenously”). “Oh no, no,” he hemmed when a visiting graduate student asked about Fielding's influence on the Wapshot novels. Cheever's wife had overheard the exchange, however, and sniped “That's not true! You've been reading Tom Jones again!”—then vanished back into the house.

The fact was, Cheever had read so much as a young man, and come so far as a writer, that he could honorably deny any particular influence—there were simply too many. “I seem to be running down,” he wrote a few months before his death, “but as a very young man, choosing a career, to be a serious writer seemed to be to emulate heroes. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway all seemed to me heroes.”

HE WAS BADLY IN NEED of heroes. In the space of a few years, his father had gone from a jaunty golf-playing burgher to a sodden failure with a hacking cough who always seemed to be sitting on the porch with nothing to do. Everybody in the neighborhood knew about “poor Mr. Cheever”: he'd taken to drink and odd behavior; he wore the shabby cast-off clothing of his dead friends. His son John “deeply resented his defeatism,” but resented his mother's strength even more. Her latest venture was a restaurant she'd opened in a family farmhouse in nearby Hanover, where Frederick was relegated to an outbuilding and fed only after the last customer had left. John came to understand such contempt as unique to wives in New England and peculiarly evident in his mother's case. “Why don't you want to eat with me?” his father would say, following his wife around the house. The woman could hardly bear the sight of her idle, drunken husband, and would either eat standing at a sideboard with her back to the room (“For Christ's sake,” Frederick would protest, “what have I done to deserve this?”), or remain at table to indulge in a bit of chilly repartee. “Don't these chops taste good?” she once asked, and when