Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [405]
18 “If you are raised in this atmosphere”: SJC, 6.
19 “He focused on the surface and texture of life”: HBD, 77.
19 “I am quite naked to loneliness”: Arthur Unger, “John Cheever's First Tele-play—a Parody of Sitcoms,” Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 11, 1982, 15.
19 “[W]ith dad our sense of his past pain”: FC to SC, June 28, 1983, CFP. “Everybody loved [him]”: WS, 19.
20 “As my mother often pointed out”: [MacDowell] Colony Newsletter 9, no. 1 (Fall
1979). 20 “I remember my father's detestation”: JJC, 342.
21 “I assume the factory had not yet been invented”: LJC, 26.
21 “They were kindly and original people”: Earle F. Walbridge, “WLB Biography: John Cheever,” Wilson Library Bulletin, Dec. 1961, 324.
22 “I and the dog walk with him”: JJC, 180.
22 “pleasant, relaxed”: CJC, 198.
22 “[W]e were always allowed to play touch football”: JC, “Thanks, Too, for Memories,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1976, C1.
23 “She gathered me in her arms”: JC memoir fragment, Berg. 23 “breakdown in service or finance”: JJC, 90.
23 “sentiments that were … too profound”: JC, “The Temptations of Emma Boynton,” New Yorker, Nov. 26, 1949, 29-31. The story is a fictionalized portrait of Anna Boynton Thompson, and recounts the same fateful Thanksgiving of 1922 that Cheever remembers in his nonfictional New York Times article (cited above), “Thanks, Too, for Memories.”
24 “the bubbling joie de vivre”: OJ, 109. 24 “truly halved”: JJC, 318.
24 “the stoniest glacial and tidal drift”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1961), 14.
25 “a red-blooded and a splendid inheritance”: JJC, 41.
25 “I've often wondered”: quoted in “Readers’ Opinions,” Patriot Ledger, July 9, 1982, 18.
25 “jollity and gloom [had contended] for an empire”: “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Random House, 1937), 882.
25 “[T]he difference between the legend and the present”: JC to Reuel Denney [c. mid-Aug.? 1934], Dartmouth.
25 “All of Dickens, from beginning to end”: CJC, 21.
25 “could be called on to recite ‘Casey at Bat’ “: ibid., 132.
25 “casting around for some way of improving”: LJC, 264.
26 “That's the way I feel about life”: “This Is My Music,” WQXR, January 12, 1980.
26 John “rose glibly to the occasion”: Florence M. Varley “My Most Famous Student: Arithmetic Wasn't His Subject,” NRTA Journal, March/April 1974, 33.
26 “exaggeration” and “preposterous falsehoods”: JC memoir fragment, Berg. 26 “not two faculties but one mega-faculty”: CJC, 29.
26 “Literature is a force of memory”: GT, 256.
27 “It's all right with us if you want to be a writer”: CJC, 208.
27 “When I was small”: Rollin Bailey to SD, Aug. 25, 1985, Swem.
27 “I did tend to see the bad side”: author int. Rollin Bailey, May 18, 2004.
27 propriety was “rigidly observed”: CJC, 189.
27 “My mother told me to tell you so”: [Thayerlands] Evergreen, Spring 1926, 26.
27 “she trashed [him] with a belt”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
28 “veered wildly into Christian Science”: CJC, 218. 28 “enchained by the flesh”: JJC, 337.
28 “a severe trial for her”: FLC Sr. to JC, Feb. 6, 1944, CFP.
28 “[T]hat boy of summer”: JJC, 235.
29 “To be an American and unable to play baseball”: JC, “The National Pastime,” New Yorker, Sept. 26, 1953, 29-35.
29 “Are you men sisters?”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
29 “sired a fruit”: JJC, 219.
30 “merry games of grabarse”: quoted in HBD, 175.
30 “the authority of an executioner”: LJC, 350.
30 “It was autumn”:JJC, 116-17.
31 “the most gratifying and unself-conscious relationship”: SJC, 685. The narrator of “The Jewels of the Cabots” is referring here to his boyhood chum “DeVarennes;” parallel passages in Cheever's journal clearly indicate that this character is based on Fax.
31 “F[ax] went home and gave it a try”: JJC, 246. In the published journal, Fax is identified by the initial “F;” his name is given in the original.
31 “When one bed got gummed up”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
31 “Weren't we happy, Johnny?”: JJC, 359.
32 “Someone called