Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [404]
4 “Long before Donald Barthelme”: Walter Clemons, “Cheever's Triumph,” Newsweek, March 14, 1977, 62.
5 “Grand Old Man of American Letters”: LJC, 352.
5 “Yankees are distinguished, and tormented as well”: Cowley, “Novelist's Life as Drama,” 15.
6 “His air of seriousness and responsibility”: JJC, 346.
6 “Life is an improvisation!”: author int. BC, June 7, 2004.
CHAPTER ONE: {1637–1912}
7 “Many skeletons in family closet”: WC, 97.
7 “bound to a drunken and tragic destiny”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
7 “We were swapping dirty stories”: Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 68.
7 “a half-wit who lived up the road”: JJC, 189.
8 “his untiring abjuration of the Devil”: quoted in Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” 68.
8 “The welfare of the commonwealth”: quoted in JC, “My Friend Malcolm Cowley,” New York Times Book Review, Aug. 28, 1983, 18. 8 “Old Zeke C”: FLC Sr. to JC and family, Nov. 14, 1943, CFP 8 “Why tell me?”: SD int. Edward Newhouse, June 5, 1984, Swem. 8 “celebrated ship's master”: CJC, 89.
Benjamin Cheever as master at the Newbury North School: Essex County, Massachusetts Biographies (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com, 2002), 559.
“to make them grow”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
9 “last sailing ship to be made in the Newburyport yards”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
9 “playing dominoes with old gent”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
10 “Mother, saintly old woman”: WC, 114.
10 “If this were so”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
10 “alcohol & opium—del[irium] tremens”: Massachusetts Archives, Death Records, vol. 339, p. 195.
10 “speeches on human ingratitude”: JC to Whit Burnett, Nov. 2, 1961, Swem.
10 “[Shakespeare's] plays seemed to light and distinguish: JC, “Homage to Shakespeare,” Story, Nov. 1937, 73-81.
10 “They always begin, as most journals do”: CJC, 149.
11 “Sturgeon in river then”: WC, 99.
11 “antic, ungrammatical and … vulgar”: JC, introduction, Time Reading Program Special Edition of The Wapshot Chronicle (New York: Time, Inc., 1965), xvii. 11 “makes as little as possible of any event”: CJC, 207.
11 “Grand sunsets after the daily thunder showers”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
11 “at the tail of a cart”: JC to Tanya Litvinov, May 23, [1965].
“A competitor named Pierce”: LJC, 43.
12 “forgotten and disgraced”: JC, “An Afternoon Walk in Iowa City, Iowa,” Travel if Leisure, Sept. 1974, 50.
12 “black-mouthed old wreck”: SJC, 634.
12 “a memory I'm inclined to believe”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
14 Cheever claimed his great-grandfather was Sir Percy Devereaux: see JC to WM [c. Jan. 1968], Berg.
14 “He'd ask me if I wanted some cauliflower”: author int. SC, Nov. 11, 2004.
14 “a very well-educated English woman”: CJC, 134.
15 “There was nothing slummy about Aunt Anne”: JC to WM [c. Jan. 1968], Berg.
15 “a split personality”: CJC, 99.
16 “He persuaded her to give up her career”: author int. MC, June 19, 2004.
16 Mary Liley Cheever as “quite beautiful”: FLC Jr. to Dennis Coates, Oct. 20, 1973, Swem.
16 “He was constantly kissing my mother”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
16 “Madame President” type: Quoted in Dennis Edward Coates, “The Novels of John Cheever,” unpublished dissertation, Duke University, 1977, 19. Coates's dissertation is worthy of particular notice as its biographical material is based on a number of personal interviews with Cheever and his brother Fred.
16 like Sarah Wapshot, “had exhausted herself”: WS, 19.
17 “I was cropped”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
17 “In all the family albums she appeared”: WS, 23.
17 “Poor Coverly blamed everything”: JC, “Mrs. Wapshot,” unpublished manuscript, CFP.
CHAPTER TWO {1912–1926}
18 “I have no biography”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
18 “no memory for pain”: Jesse Kornbluth, “The Cheever Chronicle,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 1979, 29. 18 “From somewhere”: OJ, 108-9.
18 “I always felt there was a blank”: SD int. Hortense Calisher, Sept. 17, 1984, Swem.
18 “Life is melancholy”: Paul Williams, “John Cheever: Adding Luster to the Stream,” Patriot