Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [50]
“In Passing” was a nice catharsis for the author, and also helped put an end to a long run of failure that had followed those heady New Yorker sales almost six months before. Indeed, Katharine White had begun to wonder whether they'd been too hard on the young man, whose flurry of submissions had abruptly ceased toward the end of 1935. “I hope he hasn't deserted us entirely,” she wrote Lieber, who reported that his client was now preoccupied with a novel, under contract with Simon and Schuster since December. Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps and Empty Bed Blues—the book's provocative and perhaps provisional title—was a “long narrative,” said Cheever, as opposed to an actual novel (“a bad word anyhow”): “I'm doing exactly the same thing I would do with a story,” he wrote. “But it will be ten times as long as a story and I will have just that much more room to move around. It will, quite incidentally, be topical. And probably forgotten as quickly as yesterday's newspaper.” Clearly the problems of his generation continued to exert a pull, though Cheever's better instincts had already begun to militate against fiction that was merely timely.
Hoping to stretch his four-hundred-dollar advance, Cheever returned to Yaddo in February as a kind of general caretaker in the off-season. For a while, the only other guest was Josephine Herbst, who was twenty years older than Cheever and as famous as she'd ever be. Her trilogy of novels—Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939)—reflect her socialist sympathies, though she disliked being “ghettoized” as a “proletarian writer.” Shortly before coming to Yaddo that winter, she'd spent months in Germany writing about Hitler's regime for the New York Post, and she compared notes on the subject with Cheever while huddling in the kitchen drinking rum. It was the beginning of an odd but lifelong friendship. Quietly dubious of Herbst's politics and literary merit, Cheever nonetheless found her a jolly companion with an almost inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, as the woman had known practically everyone—including Hemingway, whom she'd once forced (at the point of a shark rifle) to turn his boat around in a hurricane and head for land. As a proper socialist, she gave friends the run of her rickety old farmhouse in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, which the young Cheever would come to regard as a kind of personal pied-à-terre. In turn, Herbst would spend a number of holidays with Cheever's family, becoming a beloved figure to his children. “I thought of her not as a distinguished writer,” Ben Cheever remembered, “but as a small woman in an orange serape who smoked heavily and kept saying, ‘For Heaven's sakes.’ “ By then the world, too, had stopped thinking of Herbst as a distinguished writer, whereas Cheever's star would continue to rise—a state of affairs that would lead to some interesting friction between the two.
Another writer bound for obscurity, Nathan Asch, also came to Yaddo for a few weeks that spring. Son of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, Nathan had published an experimental first novel in 1925, The Office, while living in Paris and befriending Herbst, Hemingway, and other expatriates. After a handful of well-regarded stories in The New Yorker, Asch continued to write novels that nobody would publish and quietly faded away. To Cheever he became a cautionary figure of sorts—a writer whose grandiose ambition was out of proportion to his talent. “Poor Nathan,” he wrote Herbst in 1952. “I can remember him saying in Washington: It's all running through my mind like quicksilver! What a book I will be able to write!” For the next few years, at any rate, he was a good occasional companion to Cheever, each man playing the antic role of surrogate son to Herbst, whom they sent cards and wires on Father's Day.
CHEEVER FINISHED A DRAFT of his novel in April (“I'm not as satisfied with it as I would like to be”), and a few weeks later managed to sell another story to The New Yorker. “Play a March” is a slight but artful vignette