Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [31]
FRED WAS EXCITED by what he'd seen in Germany, and the following summer he proposed a return trip with his brother. John didn't see why not; his novel was stalled and he hadn't been able to follow up his New Republic coup with another sale. Meanwhile Fred had gotten a promising job in the advertising department of Pepperell, a textile manufacturer, and was happy (as ever) to pay for the whole thing. On a rainy day in July, then, they sailed for Bremen, where they caught a slow train to Munich and watched the swastika-laden scenery.
Apart from the beer, John wasn't particularly impressed by Germany, and he was appalled by Nazi militarism. “Everything I saw meant war,” he later wrote Cowley, “although no one, especially Bruce Bliven [chief editor of The New Republic], seemed interested in my accounts of the National Socialist Party.” Fred was exalted, however, and would always speak of the trip as one of the great adventures of his life. He adored the Führer's insistence on discipline and was touched by the renascent pride of the German people, whose mettle was evident in the superior merchandise they produced.* He breezily made friends with total strangers, eager to canvass their views on the combustive Zeitgeist of 1931, and thereby gained a number of lifelong pen pals. John apparently kept his own counsel (Fred remained under the impression that his brother had relished the trip almost as much as he), but a fissure had begun to form in the relationship. Indeed, John's memory of that summer was so troubling he managed to repress most of it (“I have no memory for pain”)*—claiming many years later, for example, that he'd never once gone to France because his infantry comrades had been slaughtered on the beaches of Normandy; in 1931, however, he and Fred did stop in Paris, whence Cheever reported the following “Talk of the Town” item for The New Yorker: “On the Quai de Louvre, we are told, is now a sign on a lamp post: ‘Pietons avant de traverser, allumez le signal.’ One pushes the button, a bell rings, a red light gleams; then, while the traffic halts, one crosses statelily”
When he returned to the States, Cheever sought the literary advice of a new acquaintance, the gay communist biographer Newton Arvin, who pronounced the young man's work “contemptible” because it failed to address the problems of the working class. Cheever promptly hitchhiked to Fall River and took a room in a slum occupied mostly by unemployed mill workers. The product of this experiment was “Fall River,” an impressionistic sketch of local bleakness that reads like something a young Hemingway might have written if he'd fallen under the influence of Newton Arvin. Cheever thus evokes an abandoned mill: “On the floors and on the beams and on the brilliant flanks of steel the mist of the web was covered with dust like old snow.” The images of dust and dead leaves and stark hilly distances recur often in Cheever's early stories, suggesting a somewhat too avid study of the famous first paragraph in A Farewell to Arms. Fortunately, elegant Hemingway pastiches on proletarian themes were at the height of their vogue, as most of the arty little magazines had been replaced by organs of radical propaganda. An example of the latter was The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art, whose manifesto announced “the disintegration and bankruptcy of the capitalist system”—as did “Fall River,” more or less, which appeared in that journal's Autumn 1931 issue.
Cheever found he didn't like writing about hunger and cold, much less living in a Fall River slum, so he returned to Quincy and reverted to a more apolitical mode. “It had rained hard early in August so the leaves were off the trees,” the story “Late Gathering” begins. “In the sunlight the hills were like scorched pastry and when there was no sun the meadows were gray and the