Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [48]
Something of the sort applies to “Of Love: A Testimony,” the most notable achievement of which is its peculiar originality—the way Cheever uses formal quirks to convey the disorder of his times. “It would be something as casual as the bartender's greeting,” the story abruptly begins, “as clear as a legal confession of murder. ‘I was born in a two-apartment house. …’ “ Without any explanation of what this odd little salvo signifies (though one is reminded that what follows will be a testimony of sorts), the characters are then evoked in a leisurely manner—young people leading unremarkable lives—with a rather heavy emphasis on the larger historical context (all but entirely absent, except by implication, in Cheever's mature work): “[Julie] was conceived four years before they shot the arch-duke in Sarajevo and while they were building battlements in the Prussian woods. It seems, for that generation of her class, as if every tradition were broken by the smoldering books, by the murdered millions, by the shattered statuary and the election of fools.” Such a hopeless course of events leads Julie, born 1911, to destroy a promising love affair with compulsive acts of infidelity. “Maybe I'm promiscuous,” she says to her stricken lover, Morgan. “But I was afraid. … It seemed as if we had too much, too much.” Expressing the vast collective nihilism in so many words, with a bit of random fornication, is bound to seem melodramatic; but then the story reverts to the quirky impressionism of its opening, until the narrator breaks frame to consider Morgan's future: “Make him employed or unemployed, put him in a strange city without money or on board a train leaving the city for some place like Niantic or South Nor-walk for a week-end …” The reader, in short, is left to choose the character's destiny, but in any case the inner result (as well as the pitiless course of history) will remain the same.
CHEEVER HAD COUNTED ON a small advance for his novel from Harrison Smith at Cape and Smith, which had published Cowley's Blue Juniata. But his chat with Smith went poorly. The man told him that “a story writer and a novelist are two different birds”: “He asked me how long I'd been writing,” Cheever reported to Cowley. “Ten years—I said; true enough. He looked at me dubiously, nearly sadly—And this is all you've done? … Ten years.”
After a while, the prospect of being a laborer at Yaddo didn't look so bad, though what Cheever really wanted was a job at Lake George, about thirty-five miles north of Saratoga, where Yaddo had recently taken over three small islands called Triuna. He pictured a long, larky summer of swimming and climbing mountains and chasing college girls. He let Mrs. Ames know that he was ready to make himself “generally useful,” particularly in an aquatic capacity: “While we were talking about Triuna, one evening last summer, you mentioned the fact that you would need someone to run the launch. … I can drive, swim well enough to be intrusted [sic] with a boat …” But Mrs. Ames was still, perhaps, a bit broody with respect to Cheever's shenanigans the summer before; she responded with gentle bemusement that Cheever (an able-bodied young man, after all) still hadn't found proper employment. “I have almost always worked,” Cheever replied, more desperate than indignant. “But about two years ago the possibility of holding these jobs stopped. I have no trade, no degree, no special training. Straightforward application for any kind of work from a bus-boy to an advertising copy-writer has been completely ineffectual.” The woman's heart was a little wrung, and Cheever was allowed to return to Yaddo for what amounted to an indefinite stay. The highlights were a very brief trip to Lake George and a few pleasant days at the racetrack; the rest of it was monastic to a fault—a great fault, as Cheever saw it. “Yaddo still goes on if anybody should have forgotten,” he noted, after several months at the Trask mansion. “At six thirty every night Emma rings the chimes