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By Root 3796 0

trees were black and the clean sky parted in firm lines down onto the smooth horizon.” Let it serve as a testament to Cheever's precocity that, at this point, it was almost impossible to distinguish his prose from the master's. But while Cheever had mastered the style all right, his content needed work. Both “Late Gathering” and his next story, “Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions,” are mostly concerned with a middle-aged war widow named Amy who runs a boardinghouse in the country and presides over events that resist analysis. What's notable about the second story is the enigmatic motif of its title, which is sounded throughout but never explained: “[Amy] thinks about her forty-fifth April and the great symbol and seal of spring as Bock beer and Bermuda onions.” Such ambiguity had a nice modernist savor, whatever else it lacked, and both stories were placed in reputable journals. “Late Gathering” appeared in the second issue of Pagany, founded by a high-school dropout from Lynn named Richard Johns, with whom Fritz and Joey shared a bottle of bathtub gin (“One could tell it was bath-tub gin,” Cheever later recalled, “because the bottle contained a large, perfectly preserved spider”). The other story was published in Lincoln Kirstein's Hound & Horn, alongside the work of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and—perhaps most auspiciously for Cheever's purpose—Hazel Hawthorne.

As Fred Cheever would later describe her, Hawthorne was “one of the original beats”—a woman who'd married young, had many children, then left her minister husband to explore the world and work on her writing. Around the time she met John, she'd married Morris Werner—the biographer of P. T. Barnum and Brigham Young—and henceforth divided her time between Greenwich Village and Province-town, while dividing herself among a great many men (including both Cheever brothers). A descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne, she was “the Compleat Wasp”—as writer Roger Skillings put it—”who had entirely slipped the noose of respectability … a grand figure, much admired, said to have competed for lovers with her beautiful daughters.” She was introduced to Cheever over lunch with Kirstein and another editor, both so tall that John and Hazel (as she recalled) had to “hop along” to keep up with them. The diminutive Cheever was otherwise undaunted, however, feistily arguing some point about Henry James with the aristocratic Kirstein. Later he confided to Hawthorne, a little sheepishly, that he'd been drinking all morning to get his courage up for the lunch.

The thirty-year-old Hawthorne was charmed by the witty teenager (“What I always liked best about John,” she said, “was his persiflage”) and invited him to New York, where he slept on a sofa in Hazel and Morrie's fifth-floor apartment on Waverly Place. Beginning with that visit—the first of many—the couple spared no effort to launch Cheever in literary Manhattan. Through the Werners he would eventually meet Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, James Agee, Walker Evans, and many others. “Their kindness,” he said, “was exhaustive and indescribable.” Hawthorne also lured him back to Provincetown, where she introduced him around the famous playhouse; the emancipated atmosphere appealed to Cheever, and he decided to rent a studio there in the early spring of 1932. His roommate was another Hound & Horn contributor, Charles Flato, a young man with a hunchback (from a childhood bout with polio) who was working on a biography of Mathew Brady. The two lived in a creaky, unheated shack on a wharf, where the water splashed through the floorboards at high tide. Spring came late that year and they shivered over their typewriters, punching away with their gloves on, subsisting on whatever fish was left over from their neighbors’ daily catch.

By far the most important connection Cheever made through the Werners was Cummings—”Estlin”—whom John admired as much for his literary genius as for his stylish poverty despite an impeccably haut Cambridge background. When the two first met, Cummings was at a particularly low