Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [35]
“Other than Malcolm's word and a few published stories, I have little to recommend me,” Cheever wrote in April 1933 to Elizabeth Ames, director of the Yaddo artists’ colony. “I am planning to be a writer and have been working for the last year on apprenticeship prose. At present I am trying to write a handful of good short stories.” Such a modest, even perfunctory, request for admission suggests that Cheever was still a bit reluctant to leave his brother; in any event, Mrs. Ames replied with like brevity that perhaps he should try again next year. Cheever didn't seem put out. He thanked Cowley for recommending him, and added, “I don't expect to do anything worth publishing for five years or so. There is a lot of time.”
Then another year passed—a bad year, one suspects. The brothers moved to 46 Cedar Lane Way, even closer to the arty heart of things, where it might have become clearer than ever that that particular garden was closed, at least where John was concerned. Meanwhile two years had passed since his last published story, and almost four since that marvelous debut in The New Republic. “The idea of leaving the city for a short while … has never been so distant or so desirable,” Cheever wrote again to Mrs. Ames in March 1934, promising to work hard on a novel (about the incongruities of Boston life) if she saw fit to extend an invitation. Vague desperation was a better tack than modest ambivalence, and this time the hostess of Yaddo consented.
John seems not to have mentioned his decision to Fred one way or the other, and perhaps he wondered to the end whether he'd actually be able to leave. One day in June, though, he simply packed his bags and shook his brother's hand: “Fred, I'm leaving.” “Oh, are you?” Despite the decorous reticence, it was a parting (“impetuous, visionary, and dangerous”) that would haunt Cheever the rest of his life. “Oh brother, brother, why has thou forsaken me,” he repined thirty-four years later. A putatively happy man at the time—prosperous and acclaimed—he'd never stopped longing for the one person who loved him as he wished to be loved. “[C]rowding fifty-six I want my big brother to come back and be my love,” he wrote, “and when he comes, pious, artistic and floundering in sentimental self-deceptions, I can barely stay in the room with him.”
* One of Townsend's later boarders was the young John Waters, years before he made his name as director of Pink Flamingos and Lust in the Dust: “It was like living with a lunatic Swiss Family Robinson,” Waters recalled. “Part of the apartment was made out of a submarine, and trees grew right up through the living room.”
* For the rest of his life, Fred made a point of buying German cameras, binoculars, etc., and claimed to be the first person in Massachusetts (circa 1950) to own a Volkswagen. And while he and Hitler fell out over World War II and the Holocaust, Fred continued to find a certain validity in the man's racial theories. “We had a funny conversation once in the early sixties while driving between Connecticut and Boston,” said his daughter Sarah, who distinctly remembered her father's observation that “blacks [were] inferior because of malnutrition;” he then dilated on the relatively superior nutrition and educational opportunities of white Germans.
*”Untouched by the magic of fable, whole areas of experience have disappeared,” Alwyn Lee wrote in his 1964 Time cover story on Cheever. “This includes an early walking tour of Europe with his brother Fred.”
* Cheever is listed in the 1933 Boston City Directory as a “reporter,” and he vaguely spoke