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lay my hands on.” But he didn't rest long on this modest laurel. Within two weeks, he'd hired the prominent left-wing literary agent, Maxim Lieber, who also represented (at one time or another) Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Thomas Wolfe, Nathanael West, and many others. His first act on Cheever's behalf was to rush another story, “The Cameos,” to The New Yorker. Katharine White's reply was just as swift, and suggests that Cheever had already forgotten Cowley's advice: “This story,” wrote Mrs. White, “we can't believe is for us. It is too much the routine short story, the sort of thing the monthly short story magazines use rather than the sort of thing we use. … We are anxious for more from Mr. Cheever and hope he won't go the way of most fiction writers when they try for ambitious long stories, i.e., we hope he won't just turn out conventional ‘Short Stories.’ “ In little more than a week, Cheever submitted “Brooklyn Rooming House,” a more suitable slice-of-life about a landlady's futile struggle to keep her house “respectable” despite the ravages of the Depression. The story was accepted on condition that Cheever respond to a few minor points, including a typical quibble from the editor in chief, Harold Ross: “She can't ask about her roomers’ habits every time she meets them in the hallways, can she?”

A year would pass before Cheever sold another story to the magazine, though hardly for lack of trying on the author's part. “I should be interested to know how Mr. Cheever works,” wrote Mrs. White, as the manuscripts piled up on her desk; “his stories often sound as if they were pretty hastily put together. … I wish he'd try a little editing of his own work before he submits stuff.” That was a taller order than she might have expected. Cheever's payment for “Brooklyn Rooming House” was double what he'd gotten for “Buffalo,” and fully eighteen times as much as M-G-M was willing to pay for a synopsis that often ran as long as twelve typed pages. For the first time ever, really, it occurred to Cheever that he might actually make a living as a writer, and for him the matter was especially urgent. As a high-school dropout he'd learned the hard way that he was virtually unemployable, and it was too late to remedy the matter—too late, indeed, for the world at large, as Cheever (and Walker Evans) would have it: “I've never imagined making a living out of this machine but … there isn't time for much else and there doesn't seem to be much time anyhow.” And then, why not write fast, if one could? As Gurganus put it, “John was a sprinter, not a dental technician.” As a young man he could easily write almost twenty pages a day without changing a word; “editing,” for the most part, meant tearing up a piece he deemed a failure. “Haste is a great limitation that can be traced back to my magazine experience,” he wrote in 1976. “The story was written, paid for, printed and applauded in the space of a week. Why should I have tried to make them more substantial?” It was an aesthetic choice, too, as Cheever liked the kind of movement that came from writing fast: “[G]ood prose,” he wrote Denney, “reminds me of a walking figure, preferably young.”*

At Cowley's urging he started another novel, though he suspected the form was a little passé. Such was the chaos of his own life, and modern life in general, that he wondered if he could express it in terms of a long, conventional, cause-and-effect narrative. As a kind of warm-up, he wrote “Of Love: A Testimony,” a longish but hardly conventional narrative that he sold to the less commercial Story magazine. As much as anything Cheever wrote, it reflects the fatalism he felt as a member of a doomed generation. “Before I left Hanover for the last time [1934],” he wrote Cowley thirty years later, “I spaded the vegetable garden and planted a potato patch. … I thought that I would never return to eat the potatoes I had planted (I don't like potatoes) and that in the years ahead the approach of war would trim and color most of my impulses; and in fact, pretty much from the time we sailed from Antwerp in