Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [54]
It wasn't that Cheever lacked ambition. He worked hard, but still loved the world a little too much. “When I was younger,” he recalled in the midst of later fame, “I used to wake up at eight, work until noon, and then break, hollering with pleasure; then I'd go back to work through to five, get pissed, get laid, go to bed, and do the same thing again the next day.” Dodie Merwin, for one, knew the drill: when she paid a visit to Yaddo, it was understood that she took a backseat to Cheever's writing; if he managed to finish before sunset, they'd go skiing awhile before joining the others at the Worden and so to bed. Underlying Cheever's high spirits was a seething determination. “He wanted terribly to be respected,” said James Farrell's wife, Dorothy, who got to know Cheever well at Yaddo. “I have this image of him: John Cheever squaring his shoulders, confronting the world.”
Respect meant money as well as artistic achievement, and after being stuck at Yaddo for most of 1937, Cheever wrote an unabashedly trashy story for the slicks. “His Young Wife” is about a stand-up guy named John Hollis who marries a charming but “impulsive” girl much younger than he; both are “very happy” until she meets, at the track, a dissolute rogue her own age—but in the end, she sees the wisdom of staying with honest John (“crying like a young kid over the rediscovery of her own immense happiness”). Collier's bought the story for five hundred dollars, a fabulous sum, but then dispatched a troubling wire to Saratoga: they'd lost the typescript and would appreciate the author's sending a carbon. The problem, of course, was that Cheever never bothered to keep carbons, and thus had to spend another three or four hours rewriting the thing from scratch. “[W]hat's happened between now and then,” he wrote Denney, “has been pretty much the spending of that money. It enabled me to leave here whenever I felt like it, which was often and I shunted around a lot between here, Boston and New York.” Before leaving Yaddo that first time, he took Daniel and Sue Fuchs to Albany for a victory feast and then purchased a bottle of fine champagne for Mrs. Ames. Finally he came to Quincy as a conquering hero, lauded as such by a brief item in the Patriot Ledger: “A literary career which is growing quietly but steadily is that of John Cheever, son of Mrs. Mary Cheever of Spear Street …” Frederick is nowhere mentioned—almost as if his wife were wistfully casting ahead to widowhood—but then he had no pull at the Patriot Ledger.
* In exchange for which he sometimes babysat for his future son-in-law, Robert Cowley, then a toddler.
* The first one sold, that is: it wouldn't appear in the magazine until the June 22, 1935, issue, about a month later than “Brooklyn Rooming House” (May 25).
* It's not enough simply to say that Cheever wrote fast. Some stories seemed to come to him all of a piece, almost word for word, especially in the early years; but as one may discern by examining Cheever's typescripts at Brandeis, some stories—both his better and lesser efforts—were torturously worked over, often at the exacting behest of New Yorker editors. It's worth mentioning, too, that as a novelist he always progressed with the most painful difficulty—constantly making notes as he groped his way forward.
* Fred's daughter Jane had been born in 1935, and three more children would follow: David, Sarah, and Ann.
* Perhaps needless to say, Clark was another friend who gave Cheever a hard time (his entire life) over his lack of political conviction. She particularly nagged him for writing “frivolous” (apolitical?) realism, which she dismissed as a “blind alley.” Noting Clark's work in Partisan Review and two other like-minded publications, Cheever wrote Herbst: “It's the vision of those three sheets lined up on a book-shelf with their air of profound compromise, unjustifiable snobbishness, and phoney calm, that makes me so happy in my rank, blind alley.”
† The first mention of what would become, several years later, “Torch Song”—one of Cheever's best stories.