Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [25]
Miss Gemmel understood, and even looked kindly on her shaggy protégé when he'd stay behind in her classroom long after the bell rang, vividly absorbed in his writing. Eulogized in the yearbook as “our more-than-teacher, seeing guide, / Who understands our faults, but trusts our strength,” Miss Gemmel gave Cheever tea and cookies at her home on Sunset Lake and shared the fruits of her more-than-teacherly wisdom. In the story Cheever was soon to write, she appears as the “very nice” Margaret Courtwright, a “slightly bald” woman who adores Galsworthy and warns the young narrator away from the “sex reality” of writers such as Joyce. “When I told her people laughed at Galsworthy she said that people used to laugh at Wordsworth,” Cheever wrote. “That was what made her so nice.”
The sardonic prodigy—reading his way through Proust and Joyce and Hemingway, et al.—soon decided that the likes of Harriet Gemmel didn't have much to offer him. As for Thayer at large, Cheever later observed that it “existed not to educate us in any way but to make us admissible to Harvard University”—where he claimed a scholarship had awaited him, though he sensed an Ivy League career would prove “disastrous.”* Thus he became even more recalcitrant, ignoring his lessons (“I refused to commit to memory the names of Greek playwrights whose work I had not read”) and smoking behind the tennis court—the last an offense for which he was repeatedly warned and finally expelled. Or so he usually claimed.
Thayer's headmaster at the time was Stacy Baxter Southworth, a beloved figure known throughout greater Braintree as “Uncle Stacy.” “From someone who remembers Stacey [sic] Southworth vividly” Cheever inscribed a copy of Falconer for the Thayer library, and once, on television, he praised the man as “extremely understanding and vastly intelligent.” Southworth was, in fact, keenly aware of John's troubled home life and more than willing to be patient (he'd excused him from math and Latin, after all), if only the boy would meet him halfway and buckle down to his studies a bit more. But John refused, and that was that. “The young man was not expelled from the Academy,” wrote a furious Southworth three weeks after Cheever's “Expelled” appeared in The New Republic. “He left entirely on his own volition in the late spring season, presumably because of the added attraction of the May orchard blossoms, which he characterized in his unique way.” Another unique characterization in Cheever's story (among many) was that of the headmaster's “gravy-colored curtains,” which occasioned a lot of knowing snickers behind Uncle Stacy's back.
Shortly after leaving Thayer in March, Cheever took a job in the stockroom of the Shepherd Company in Boston, a large department store, where he presumably pored over The New Republic during lunch breaks. Judging from “Expelled,” he'd become quite familiar with a few of the left-wing magazine's pet issues. For example, the governor of Massachusetts—a Republican Cadillac-dealer named Alvan T Fuller—was a particular target for having refused to commute the sentences of Sacco and Vanzetti, and so in his story Cheever mentioned “the Governor” who comes to the narrator's prep school and delivers a Memorial Day harangue against the “Red menace.” Meanwhile a gallant history teacher named Laura Driscoll is fired for daring to suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Miss Driscoll also serves to embody the higher possibilities of modern