• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3854 0

ebb in his affairs: “His hair was nearly gone,” Cheever recalled, “his last book of poetry had been rejected by every estimable publisher, his wife was six months pregnant by her dentist and his Aunt Jane had purloined his income and had sent him, by way of compensation, a carton of Melba toast. He bit into the toast and exclaimed—oh so wonderfully—’Now I know why they call it Melba.’” Cummings was, for Cheever, an elusive ideal of sorts: “The only Yankee on the American literary scene,” he remained happily married to his third wife, Marion Morehouse, while residing for decades in the same little apartment on Patchin Place (around the corner from the Women's House of Detention, where the poet would blithely hail the whores by name as he passed below their barred windows); effortlessly hilarious, Cummings could imitate everything from a ticket-punching machine to “a wood-burning locomotive going from Tifflis to Minsk,” and his everyday “windupthechimney” voice became a key ingredient of Cheever's own. “A writer is a Prince!” Cummings declared, and he touched his sword to Cheever's shoulder: “Get out of Boston, Joey! It's a city without springboards for people who can't dive.”

While testing the water in New York, Cheever also paid a visit to his patron at The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley, who was impressed by the young man's winning smile and “stubborn jaw.” Cowley was not the heroic figure that Cummings was, but he would prove more useful over the long haul. As Cheever wrote him in 1977, “You taught me to be polite to [New Yorker editor] Katharine White, by-pass the French symbolists, train a retriever with a fresh egg, buy my shoes at Fortnum & Mason, catch a trout and keep my literary sights high and earnest. My gratefulness is vast.” Cowley also invited the nineteen-year-old prodigy to what was perhaps his first New York literary party, where he was greeted by Cowley's first wife, Peggy, and shown to the bar. As Cheever remembered:

I was offered two kinds of drinks. One was greenish. The other was brown. They were both, I believe, made in a bathtub. I was told that one was a Manhattan and the other Pernod. My only intent was to appear terribly sophisticated and I ordered a Manhattan. Malcolm very kindly introduced me to his guests. I went on drinking Manhattans lest anyone think I came from a small town like Quincy, Massachusetts. Presently, after four or five Manhattans, I realized that I was going to vomit. I rushed to Mrs. Cowley, thanked her for the party, and reached the apartment-house hallway, where I vomited all over the wallpaper.

Cowley took pains to remind the young man that he had Voice of a Generation potential and was therefore obliged to produce a novel, whereupon Cheever presented him with a few sample chapters. Alas, they wouldn't do as a novel, Cowley was sorry to report: along with their blatant debt to Hemingway (most notably “Cross-Country Snow”), “each chapter was separate and came to a dead end.” The latter was a problem Cheever would struggle with for the next twenty-five years or so, and arguably never quite resolve.

WHEN FREDERICK CHEEVER sold out of the shoe business, he invested the proceeds in Kreuger and Toll International Match. On March 12, 1932, Ivar Kreuger shot himself in a Paris hotel room rather than face creditors, and Cheever's father lost his “anchor to windward,” as he called it. For a long time, the Cheevers had borrowed against the big house on Winthrop Avenue, and when they couldn't pay their mortgage or fuel bills, the bank foreclosed. As John would later tell it, he'd overheard an argument one night between his father and “Mr. Pinkham” (owner of the local Granite Trust), whom his father indignantly informed that he, Frederick Cheever, was a “human employer of forty-two people whose birthdays and names he remembered, and coldhearted Mr. Pinkham simply dealt with money.” The next day, said Cheever, his family was routed out of their house, which was summarily razed to the ground. The house was indeed razed, but it took a few months at least, and of course Frederick had