Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [26]
Cheever commended his story to the attention of a young associate editor, Malcolm Cowley, whose first book of poetry, Blue Juniata, had struck the young Cheever (so he remarked in his cover letter) as the work of a sympathetic soul. Cowley read the precocious slush-pile manuscript and agreed: “I felt that I was hearing for the first time the voice of a new generation,” he recalled sixty years later. So emphatic was his advocacy of Cheever that his fellow editors decided to suspend a long-standing rule against publishing fiction.
“Expelled from Prep School” by “Jon” Cheever (as he'd spell his name for the next five years) was the lead story in the October 1 issue, prefaced by a little note from the editors explaining that its author had recently been expelled “from an academy in Massachusetts … where education is served out dry in cakes, like pemmican.” It's an astonishing debut. At age eighteen, Cheever had evolved a voice that alternated seamlessly between droll, oddly precise details (“a soft nose that rested quietly on his face”) and flights of somber lyricism: “The year before I had not known all about the trees and the heavy peach blossoms and the tea-colored brooks that shook down over the brown rocks. … I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows. That is perhaps why I left school.” Here and there, Cheever's adulation of Hemingway lets him down a little, as when he resorts to a kind of lumbering irony: “Our country is the best country in the world. … Dissatisfaction is a fable. … It is bad because people believe it all. … Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.” For the most part, though, the story is a curiously self-sufficient performance—“alarmingly mature,” as Updike put it, “with a touch of the uncanny, as the rare examples of literary precocity—Rimbaud, Chatterton, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Green—tend to be.”
Years later, when asked what it felt like to sell a story to The New Republic at such a tender age, Cheever cocked his head and replied, “It felt precisely … eighty-seven dollars, that's what it felt like.” That may have been what it felt like to his parents, too, who suddenly developed an avid interest in their son's literary career: “Have you been writing today?” they kept asking him, bruiting it about Wollaston that their celebrated boy was working on a novel. In the meantime another notorious local dropout, Curtis Glover, sought out Cheever for his views on educational reform. Two years before, Glover had made the front page of the Boston Herald by abruptly leaving Dartmouth to live in the woods like Thoreau. Cheever enjoyed Glover's visit in the same spirit of jaunty mockery that informed his narrative voice: “[Glover] was tall, blonde, with a pink and white complexion, wide hips and a loose mouth,” he reported to Cowley “[H]e laughed through his nose, ate his toast with a knife and fork and read the ‘new republic’ faithfully.” For the time being, at least, Cheever finally seemed to be having some fun.
But it came at a certain price. Among respectable people, Cheever was more a pariah than ever: simply to write for such a “radical” magazine as The New Republic was bad enough, but to play “fast and loose with the truth”—as Stacy Southworth noted in a letter to a sympathetic Thayerite—was unforgivable, even in a purported work of fiction. “Laura Driscoll,” for instance (the firebrand Sacco-and-Vanzetti supporter), was an obvious surrogate for Mary Lavinia Briscoe, late of the history department. In