Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [407]
48 “Have you been writing today?”: LJC, 29. Glover had made the front page: “Tired of World, Dartmouth Boy Takes to Woods,” Boston Herald, Nov. 20, 1928, 1.
49 “Personally, had I the choice”: Grace Osgood to Lillian Wentworth [c. spring 1980], Thayer.
49 “His portrait of her dazzles me”: Hugh Hennedy to SD, Oct. 9, 1985, Swem.
49 “Without Stacy Baxter Southworth”: JC to Robert Mower, Nov. 3, 1981, Thayer.
49 “[He was] wandering under some Elm trees”: JC to Hugh Hennedy, Aug. 7,
1980.
CHAPTER FOUR {1930–1934}
51 “I was some kid in those days”: Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1953, 8.
51 Howard Street—”the arse-end of the city”: JC to Denney [c. Aug. 1934], Dartmouth.
51 “It was like a love affair”: author int. J. William Silverberg, Sept. 23, 2004.
52 “the erotic romance of his life”: author int. Allan Gurganus, Jan. 16, 2005. 52 “I wept for a love”: JJC, 335.
52 “prescot [sic] townsend will very nearly give me”: LJC, 29.
53 “lunatic Swiss Family Robinson”: quoted in Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin's, 2003), 240. I am indebted to this entertaining book for background on the Beacon Hill bohemia of the twenties and thirties, as well as Cheever's friendships with Townsend, Wheelwright, and Dana.
53 “[H]e is very nice, very guarded”: JC to Cowley [c. fall 1930], Newberry
53 “those who split the monism of love”: quoted in Shand-Tucci, Crimson Letter, 114.
54 “I could not imagine a man so old”: JC to Gurganus, March 21 [1974].
54 “Everything I saw meant war”: LJC, 51.
55 “We had a funny conversation”: author int. Sarah Connoway Jan. 27, 2005.
55 “On the Quai de Louvre, we are told”: New Yorker, July 25, 1931, 7. This “Talk” item was written by E. B. White and reported by Cheever, as one learns from a visit to The New Yorker's library or from the indispensable DVD set, The Complete New Yorker (New York: Random House, 2005).
55 “On the floors and on the beams”: JC, “Fall River,” The Left, Autumn 1931, 70-72.
56 “It had rained hard early in August”: JC, “Late Gathering,” Pagany, Oct.-Dec. 1931, 15-19.
56 “[Amy] thinks about her forty-fifth April”: JC, “Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions,” Hound & Horn, April-June 1932, 411-20.
56 “One could tell it was bath-tub gin”: JC to Richard Johns, Oct. 17, 1967, Delaware.
56 Hawthorne was “one of the original beats”: quoted in Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 69.
57 “the Compleat Wasp”: Roger Skillings to author, Feb. 14, 2005.
57 “hop along”: SD int. Hazel Hawthorne Werner, July 1, 1984, Swem. 57 “Their kindness … was exhaustive”: JC to Coates, April 22, 1974.
57 “His hair was nearly gone”: quoted in Michael Janeway “Glimpses of Cheever,” Boston Globe, June 27, 1982, A22.
58 “a wood-burning locomotive”: CJC, 104.
58 “A writer is a Prince!”: JC to Laurens Schwartz, Oct. 16 [1975], Swem.
58 “Get out of Boston, Joey!”: CJC, 206.
58 winning smile and “stubborn jaw”: Malcolm Cowley, Dream of the Golden Mountains (New York: Viking, 1980), 260.
58 “You taught me to be polite”: JC to Cowley, Aug. 20, 1977, Newberry.
I was offered two kinds of drinks: quoted in Malcolm Cowley, “John Cheever: The Novelist's Life as a Drama,” Sewanee Review 91, no. 1 (1983), 2.
59 “human employer of forty-two people”: CJC, 209-10.
60 “gleaming with tears”: ibid., 189.
60 “I still remember”: JC to Denney [c. Feb. 1935], Dartmouth.
60 “I can remember night after night”: ibid.
61 “Other than Malcolm's word”: JC to Elizabeth Ames, April 24, 1933, NYPL-MSS.
61 “I don't expect to do anything worth publishing”: LJC, 32.
61 “The idea of leaving the city”: ibid., 33.
61 “Fred, I'm leaving”: CJC, 189.
CHAPTER FIVE {1934–1935}
63 “Call it Yaddo, Mama, for it makes poetry!”: Jean Nathan, “Yaddo,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 1993, sec. 9, p. 1.
64 “the romantic culmination of a rare triangular friendship”: “Historical Note,” Yaddo Records, NYPL-MSS.
64 “When a beam of light”: JC,” The Hostess of Yaddo,” New York Times Book Review, May