Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [414]
165 “Tonight Ross is giving a party”: JC to Herbst [March 18, 1950], Yale.
166 “contemptible smallness”: JJC, 22.
166 “dread of falling, of loneliness and disgrace”: ibid., 32.
167 “It is supposed to operate”: JC to WM, July 22, 1953, NYPL-MSS.
167 “like magicians’ colored scarves”: Anne Tyler, in New Republic, Nov. 4, 1978, 46.
168 “the best you have ever written”: Linscott to JC, June 7, 1951, Columbia.
168 “pry a saleable story out of [his] head”: LJC, 147.
168 “ ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she shouts at them”: ibid., 146.
168 “This house is remote and quiet”: JC to Lobrano [c. Sept. 1950], NYPL-MSS.
168 “It's been sort of a fuckedup summer”: JC to Herbst [c. Aug. 1950], Yale.
169 “Mary's head was light”: JC to Cowley [c. 1953?], Newberry.
169 “This is a report on the long-delayed novel”: JC to Linscott, Oct. 13, 1950, Columbia.
169 “like some kinds of wine”: JC, “What Happened,” in Understanding Fiction, ed. Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), 571.
170 “I had spent the summer in excellent company”: ibid., 572.
172 “troublingly uncertain”: Cowley to JC, Jan. 22, 1953, Newberry.
172 “The brother story, in its bare outline”: LJC, 160.
172 “a form with which I seem unable to cope”: JC's fellowship application, Nov. 13, 1950, Guggenheim Foundation.
172 “I'm not sanguine”: LJC, 147.
173 “John seemed to have a joyful knowledge”: SD int. WM, Nov. 9, 1983, Swem.
174 “The whole of my youth is in it”: quoted in James Campbell, “Secrets of the Confessional,” Guardian (London), Jan. 11, 2003.
174 “Bill never made a secret”: author int. Shirley Hazzard, Aug. 27, 2004.
175 “very remote from [his] life now”: ibid.
175 “Mary went wild”: LJC, 305.
176 “My God, the suburbs!”: JC, “Moving Out,” Esquire, July 1960, 67.
176 “I was standing on the sidewalk [at the time]”: WM to SD, April 10, 1985, Swem.
176 “There's this chap named Marples”: JJC, 211.
176 “There was a paranoid side to him”: WM to SC, n.d., CFP.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN {1951–1952}
177 “the chicken house in Scarborough”: GT, 63.
178 “curbed with Italian marble”: LJC, 150.
178 “If I can raise six kids”: SD int. Dudley Schoales Sr., June 25, 1985, Swem.
178 “she played the meanest game of chopanose”: GT, 132.
178 “Mrs. Vanderlip passed tea and sherry”: JC to Eleanor Clark [c. 1954?], CFP.
179 “kind and gentle people”: JC to Herbst, July 17 [1951], Yale.
179 Mimi Boyer was from old money: author int. Linda Boyer Gillies, May 29, 2004.
180 “I don't think the Kaiser”: SD int. Philip and Mimi Boyer, July 8, 1984, Swem.
180 “fleeting, warm and imperious smile”: JC to Litvinov, Jan. 18, 1965.
180 “John, can't you try to be a little neater?”: LJC, 305.
180 “it wasn't too safe”: ibid., 163.
181 “Arthur is a fishing and drinking companion”: ibid., 250.
181 “Please don't vote for Goldwater”: SD int. Arthur Spear, July 19, 1983, Swem.
182 “I cringe to think how much we drank”: SD int. Virginia Kahn, June 5, 1985, Swem.
182 “It wasn't the fall”: BC, “My Life with the Bourbon Dynasty: Ben Cheever Recalls Growing Up with an Alcoholic Father …,” Independent, Nov. 27, 2000, Features sec., 7.
182–183 “without a leash”: GT, 55.
183 “[O]n the third play”: ibid., 85.
183 “charming, dashing”: author int. Joseph Kahn, May 21, 2005.
183 “There has never been a more conscientious”: JC to Cowley [c. 1952?], Newberry.
184 “a depressing place to which Jews”: JC to Herbst [c. 1952?], Yale.
184 “a man in his shirtsleeves rehearsing”: LJC, 155.
184 “the peers of Milton”: ibid., 212.
184 “When the rich people had left”: TT, 91.
185 Cheever was almost “stuffy”: SD int. Sally Swope, Nov. 8, 1983, Swem.
186 latest effort had “gone very well”: JC to Cowley, March 24 [1952], Newberry.
186 “I'd begun to think that the only way”: Cowley to JC, March 29, 1952, Newberry.
186 “an all around air of profound embarrassment”: JC to Herbst [c. March 1952], Yale.
186 “but it will probably never ring”: LJC, 151.
187 “When I reached the office”: JC to Candida Donadio