Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [49]
At last he escaped to Manhattan, returning to his little room on Hudson Street and an old dilemma. “I can't get a WPA job because I can't get on relief because I can't establish residence,” he wrote Cowley. “And there don't seem to be any other jobs.” As the holiday season drew near, he tried to get work at a department store; however, after a long day of waiting in line with other applicants, he shook so badly from hunger and fatigue that he flunked the interview. At this decidedly low point, Walker Evans hired him as a darkroom assistant at twenty dollars a week. The photographer had just been given the enormous job of filling some sixty portfolios with images from the African Negro Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He'd hired a Dutch artist named Peter Sekaer as his second-in-command, and (once the actual photo-taking was done) reinstalled Cheever in his Bethune Street studio with many, many prints to wash and hang in the bathroom. Then Evans left town (“to chase some woman in Tennessee,” as Dodie Merwin recalled), and Cheever was alone again in a dingy basement. “I'm not doing the work I should do and I feel like hell,” he wrote in mid-November. A few weeks later the electricity was cut off, since Evans had neglected to pay the bill. Cheever typed by the light of a plumber's candle. “[P]oor John can't sit over there in the dark,” Sekaer appealed to Evans; “and anyway there are something like 50 more prints to be done.”
Such privations did not affect Cheever's politics much. Over the course of the next year, as civil war raged in Spain, many of his leftist friends became even more engagé—forming Marxist reading clubs and joining the Lincoln Brigade to assist the Loyalists against Franco. Cheever was sympathetic but aloof, and in the radical atmosphere of the Village and Yaddo he was often berated for his attitude. “C'mon, Cheever, join up!” said the artist Anton Refregier, but Cheever responded to all such appeals with the same pleasant demurral, and managed as ever to keep most of his friends.
“Last night at three o'clock,” he recorded in the early pages of his journal, “I heard a drunken woman on 11th street screaming: ‘I'm the United States of America!’ “ Cheever would always care more about the lone drunken woman than he would about ideological systems one way or the other, which (he believed) failed to take account of the vagaries of human nature—particularly an all-consuming selfishness that remains constant regardless of systems or the historical moment. Shivering in Evans's dark basement studio, he wrote an almost novella-length apologia titled “In Passing” that, to his utter amazement, was bought a few weeks later by The Atlantic Monthly. (“I can't seem to figure it out,” he wrote Denney. “I guess I'll go out and buy some shoes.”) The story's narrator is a young man like Cheever who leads a hard-scrabble, itinerant life—this after his middle-class Boston family loses their money and faces eviction from the fine old house where the narrator grew up. In Saratoga for the racing season, the narrator meets a communist named Girsdansky who has come to organize the city's Negro workers. Whether speaking face to face with the narrator or addressing a bored, harassed crowd, Girsdansky gives the same canned rant about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” while the narrator observes that “his talk [has] the clarity and dryness of a book.” Meanwhile the scene at the racetrack serves as a gross but invigorating counterpoint to Girsdansky's vision—the gamblers clamoring around the bars and betting windows with “nothing in their faces but a love of money and the incorrigible dream of big money.” Cheever leaves little doubt as to which dream will prevail. Returning to Boston at the end of the season, the narrator notices a lone speaker on the Common—Girsdansky, attended by a few odd stragglers, though he addresses his speech to “the trees and the wind and the