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By Root 3867 0

in the same rooming house, at 633 Hudson, where he'd stayed during a previous visit in 1931: “[A]cross the street from me,” he reported to Denney, “sits the same old man in the same yellowed underwear.” The place was mostly occupied by unemployed longshoremen, and Cheever's own room was so exquisitely squalid that Walker Evans would later photograph it—a quintessential Depression tableau—for the Museum of Modern Art. Cheever didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. For the time being, he was living on a weekly allowance of ten dollars from Fred; this covered his three-dollar room as well as a certain amount of stale bread, raisins (“I almost destroyed my teeth, but I needed the iron”), and a daily bottle of milk divided into five portions. As Cowley remembered, “His only capital was a typewriter for which he couldn't often buy a new ribbon”—nor could he summon much energy to write. Some days he'd simply sit in Washington Square with a friend and discuss the phases of starvation (“It was the torpor we objected to”), and once he actually collapsed on Hudson Street. On the brighter side, he liked to recall the kindly longshoremen who were always trying to help the boyish, dapper little Yankee in their midst: they urged him to get work with the government, perhaps attend an extension class or take the post-office exam. In the meantime Cheever lay on his bed dreaming—determinedly—of a wife and family, wealth and fame, while “motors and klaxons and breaks and river-whistles” clamored outside his window. Sometimes, too, a bit of gravel would clatter against the glass, and there in the street would be Fred.

“Hudson Street is a far cry from anything in Boston,” he wrote Mrs. Ames, “and so far the difference stands in favor of Hudson Street.” Except for his constant hunger, Cheever was glad to be back among people who mattered. He was seeing a lot of Hazel and Morris Werner again, which meant he was seeing Agee and Sherwood Anderson and Dos Passos, as well as a good deal of his beloved Cummings. The latter shared his dislike of Edmund Wilson—another regular at the Werners’—whom Cummings ridiculed as a secret homosexual who needed to ride a motorcycle so he could have something vibrating between his legs. The poet, said Cheever, had “one of the finest tongues of the century,” but was also “immensely considerate and just” and never mocked people who were hurting or helpless. In general, the atmosphere chez Werner was a nice mixture of New England manners and Greenwich Village irreverence. As Cheever described a typical party, “[I]t was a fine night with Morrie yelling that their food was talking while their conversation was getting cold and Hazel insisting that she hadn't raped x and that x hadn't raped her but that the bed had come up and hit them both. They are nice people, all of them with the characteristics of Cummings. Sharp tongues and patient sympathies.”

Nor did Cheever neglect his friends from Yaddo, despite the “strenuous” contrast between their humorless radicalism and Cummings's tipsy shtick (his “facetious telephone calls to the municipal offal department”). Cheever listened with an earnest deadpan while Rukeyser and her fellow poet Sol Funaroff lectured him about the necessity of using literature to elevate the proletariat, and sometimes he'd tag along to some sordid venue so he could watch them put their ideas to work. “On Saturday night Muriel gave a reading of her poetry to a group of boogies in Harlem,” he wrote Denney, observing that most of the audience was both “drunk and high”: “[M]y impression was that this was not the crowd to approach or the way or place to approach them.” Again, the miracle is that Cheever remained friends with such people—though not without a certain amount of chafing on both sides. Later he'd claim that, while still in his early twenties, he was labeled “the last voice of the decadent bourgeoisie” in The New Masses; if so, it was perhaps a bit of reprisal on the part of an exasperated Funaroff, the magazine's poetry editor.

Occupying a stolid middle ground were the likes of Cowley and