Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [413]
147 “a fairly good chance”: JC to Linscott, July 2 [1947], Columbia.
147 “eggs in the city”: GT, 38.
148 “The writing, or the surface of the book”: JC to Linscott, Dec. 16 [1947], Columbia.
149 “That's a wonderful presentation”: Linscott to JC, Dec. 22, 1947, Columbia.
149 “the only man in the East Fifties”: GT, 43.
149 “I want to write short stories”: LJC, 125.
149 “as long as there wasn't any explicit”: CJC, 74-75.
149 “It was one of the most felicitous”: “Interview with John Cheever,” Contemporary Authors 5 (Detroit: Gale Publishing, 1981), 110-11.
152 “It will turn out to be a memorable one”: Thomas Kunkel, ed., Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 308.
152 “unquestionably excellent”: Ross to JC, Oct. 15, 1947, NYPL-MSS.
153 “This story has gone on for 24 hours”: CJC, 103-4.
153 “I doubt very much if those lunches”: quoted in Francis Bosha, “The John Cheever Papers at the New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division (Part 1),” Resources for American Literary Study 27, no. 1 (2001), 83.
153 “I leafed through the Thurber book”: JC to WM, Oct. 22, 1959, NYPL-MSS.
153 Ross scribbled, “Eh? What's this?”: JC, “Why I Write Short Stories,” Newsweek, Oct. 30, 1978, 24.
154 “I think Ross's feeling”: CJC, 123.
154 “[S]he comes home with a briefcase full of themes”: LJC, 124.
154 “too late for Mary to take up a musical instrument”: GT, 34.
155 “independence and extraordinary maturity”: LJC, 132.
155 “Sue is about the same”: JC to Ettlingers [c. July 1946], CFP.
155 “[W]hen I picked her up at the party”: LJC, 136.
155 “We think he's handsome”: ibid., 133.
155 “All the people came out of a bad picture”: ibid., 121.
155-156 “This maid has a gray uniform”: ibid., 134.
156 “saying No thank you very much”: ibid., 129.
156 Peter Pan, Voltaire, and Bambi: CJC, 5.
156 “From the shelter halves of Guam”: JC, “The Origins of ‘Town House,’ “ Boston Post, Sept. 5, 1948.
156 “a sentimental and moderately funny piece of bunk”: LJC, 135.
157 “a thin, loose, mechanical whizzbang”: Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre: Gertrude Tonkonogy's ‘Town House’ Is Based on John Cheever's Short Stories in The New Yorker,” New York Times, Sept. 24, 1948, 31.
157 “I don't quite know who to blame”: LJC, 136.
157 “We are as poor as we ever have been”: JJC, 14.
157 “This is a patriarchal relationship”: ibid., 15.
157 “[s]corn, ridicule, abuse, and disgust”: JC, “The Opportunity,” Cosmopolitan, Dec. 1949, 44, 174-76.
158 “I keep telling myself that this cannot go on”: JJC, 20.
158 “Elizabeth [Ames] has closed the door”: JC to Denney [c. Jan. 1941], Dartmouth.
158 “[W]henever I heard … brilliantly red”: Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 146.
159 Yaddo was “permeated with Communists”: ibid., 115.
159 “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning”: Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 115.
159 “John Cheever was wonderful”: SD int. Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, July 10, 1984, Swem.
159 “We feel that the charge”: E. Clark, K. Phelan, J. Cheever, A. Kazin, and H. Breit to the Directors of Yaddo, March 21, 1949, NYPL-MSS.
159 “I do not know how I should have come through”: Ames to Herbst, April 3, 1949, Yale.
159 “Nothing that she ever did or said”: quoted in Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 295.
160 “found so little worthwhile”: JC to Naomi Burton, June 3, 1955, Columbia.
160 “I am writing principally to say”: JC to Linscott [c. Jan. 1950], Columbia.
161 “I have told you many times”: Linscott to JC, Jan. 20, 1950, Columbia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN {1949–1951}
162 “As decadent, I think, as anything”: JJC, 12.
162 “I can remember walking”: ibid., 11.
162 “one of those men who labor”: WS, 204.
163 “all the characteristics of a failure”: JJC, 15.
164 “Goddammit, Cheever”: CJC, 74.
165 “operated in a fantasy world”: Michael Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989), 178.
165 “I cannot,