Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [46]
CHAPTER SIX
{1935-1938}
WALKER EVANS LEFT NEW YORK in January 1935 to take a long photographic tour of the South, and Cheever moved into his basement studio at 23 Bethune, two blocks east of the Hudson. If anything the studio was even more ghastly than Cheever's previous dwelling, and odd reminders of the place would forever send him into tailspins. While reading the Times in 1980, Cheever saw a photograph of a tubular chair very like the Le Corbusier in Evans's studio, where his younger self had “sat when [he] was truly lonely, hungry, impoverished and cold;” almost half a century later (and even more depressed), he wondered if that era had “introduced a strata [sic] into [his] makeup that is only now becoming apparent.”
He was still trying to make ends meet with occasional scraps from M-G-M, but the work was erratic and weeks passed without a paycheck. “I don't know how I'll get along unless I sell a story,” he wrote Denney, a few days after moving to Evans's studio. It was, perhaps, the worst time in history to be starting out as a writer. In 1934, only fifteen authors in the United States sold fifty thousand or more books, and the magazine market was even more straitened; advertising was at an all-time low, and many of the mass-market, high-paying “slick” magazines had either shrunk or folded. One night Cheever was bemoaning his fate at Cowley's house in Connecticut—where on weekends he'd often cadge a meal* —when Cowley suggested he try a different approach. “Your stories are too long for other magazines to accept from new writers,” he said. “Tomorrow, try writing a story of not more than a thousand words, say three and a half of your pages. Write another of the same length on Sunday, another on Monday, and still another on Tuesday. Bring them all to the office on Wednesday afternoon, and I'll see if I can't get you some money for them.”
For some time Cheever had suspected his work was too selfconsciously arty, not to say derivative, and he was determined to curb its “refinement, discretion, excessive detail, lack of action.” The constraints imposed by Cowley proved to be the ticket, as though Cheever were a discursive poet whose talent suddenly blossomed in the sonnet form. Three of the four shorts he'd written in as many days would find their way into print. Cowley was able to buy one—”The Teaser” (about an aging stripper)—as a “color piece,” since The New Republic still didn't publish much fiction. Another story, “Bayonne,” eventually appeared in Parade (not the Sunday supplement, but a would-be periodical that died after a single issue in 1936). The others were sent to Katharine White at The New Yorker, who met their twenty-two-year-old author a few days later at a New Republic party. As she wrote him afterward, “I thought we were taking one [story] and it turns out that I was right. I enclose our check for ‘Buffalo.’ The other one we didn't like so well.”
“Buffalo”—the first of 121* stories that Cheever would eventually publish in the magazine—didn't amount to much, though it's interesting as a starting point. Titled after the city where Reuel Denney was then teaching high school, the little sketch was much in keeping with what was then becoming known as the “New Yorker short story”: a character-driven mood piece with a slight twist at the end. Told in flat, declarative prose reminiscent of the magazine's most prolific fiction writer, John O'Hara (and therefore reminiscent, still, of Hemingway), “Buffalo” concerns a young man who develops a crush on a pretty waitress, only to learn in mortifying fashion that the middle-aged, nondescript baker behind the counter is her husband. Again, the story isn't much; comparing it to Cheever's later work is like comparing Michelangelo's David to an Olmec head.
Cheever's breakthrough had come just in time. “Things got lower and lower,” he wrote Denney, “and then I sold a mediocre story for forty-five dollars. Ever since then I've been going around like a kid with a broken bank buying scotch and sodas and dating up everyone I could