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By Root 3905 0

” He was, in short, somewhat in the throes of a “sane conservative” phase influenced, in part, by Henry Adams.† Fred was also a lifelong Adams fan, and had recently loaned his brother a volume of the great historian's letters. Adams was congenial in a number of ways, not least because Cheever was “born in the shadow of the house where [Adams] wrote some of the Education” (and of course his family had hired their coachman's daughter); also, the desperate reversals of Cheever's adolescence had left him susceptible to Adams's bleakly deterministic view of history: “There is something immense and significant,” Cheever wrote of the dying Adams circa 1918, “in that doddering figure standing on the beach at Newport as if he could see them bombing Rheims and dismantling Chartres.” If anything, Cheever found himself more pessimistic than all that. What with the Depression and the rise of oppressive regimes throughout Europe and Asia, history seemed in a downward spiral that might even have startled Adams. For his part, Cheever deplored such contemporary works as Malraux's La Condition humaine because it “read form into a scene of such violence,” whereas he himself was inclined to “admit the futility of art in the present or near future.” This included fiction, and perhaps reflected a passing frustration with his own work as much as a larger Weltschmerz. Whatever the case, Cheever was considering some rather bizarre literary projects, such as writing short biographies of Adams, Poe, and Hart Crane—”a simple disarming analysis of the three men and their ends drawn from a viewpoint as personal as if they were my ancestors.”

Such was the young man who found himself at Yaddo in the summer of 1934. And let it serve as evidence of Cheever's amiability, then and later, that he was able to mix with what should have been (except for Denney) a pretty inimical cast of characters. James Farrell was there, writing the last volume of his Studs Lonigan trilogy; a hard-boiled Irishman from Chicago, Farrell was a little bemused by Cheever's elaborate Yankee manners, but liked him well enough to toss a baseball back and forth. Muriel Rukeyser, the radical lesbian poet, became a good friend for the next decade or so. Even Leonard Ehrlich would warm to Cheever over time, and vice versa, though Ehrlich embodied the sort of naïve idealism that drove Cheever up the wall: “He's a liberal, a gentleman and a romantic,” he wrote of Ehrlich, “and he makes me feel like a bloody son of a bitch with his concern over the defense of political prisoners and his desire to preserve a free and inquiring spirit in a highly questionable world.”

Cheever's only serious work that survives from that summer is “Letter from the Mountains,” a response to the misguided utopianism of his peers at Yaddo and beyond: “I think of Europe as a rat-toothed bitch,” he declared with Poundian scorn. “Even up here I often have a sense of something cracked.” This odd document (a continuation of his dialogue with Denney, who'd left Saratoga at the end of June and gone back to Buffalo) suggests that Cheever had taken to heart Cow-ley's advice about writing on behalf of his generation, which might have suited Cheever's wistful desire to “identify with a group,” the more explicitly the better: “Born in the vicinity of nineteen-twelve”—his own birth year—”we come as strangers to this wreck.” Cheever suggested that his generation, victimized by its elders, was drifting helplessly from one great war to the next. At last he fixed the time and place of this fatalistic manifesto (“July, 1934/the Adirondacks”) and mailed it off to Cowley, who doubtfully tried to interest his colleagues at The New Republic: the manuscript was “diffuse,” he admitted, but perhaps they should publish it “as a picture of the state of mind of the youngsters.” The piece was rejected as “defeatist.”

ONE OF MRS. AMES'S blue-papered notes appeared in Cheever's lunch basket toward the end of July, and he returned to Boston for a week or so before moving to New York. To avoid unnecessary strangeness, he took a six-by-eight apartment