Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [55]
‡ Fuchs went on to have a very successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In Bech: A Book, Updike alludes to him as the Jewish writer who “turned his back on his three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
{1938-1939}
THE COLLIER'S money lasted until the spring of 1938, when the twenty-six-year-old Cheever finally surrendered to the inevitable. His friend Nathan Asch was an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project's American Guide Series, and was happy to recommend him to the program's director, Henry Alsberg, who took Cheever's word for it that he could manage the English language with “clarity, ease and meaning.” Hired as a junior editor at twenty-six hundred dollars a year, Cheever joined thousands of writers who would last out the Depression with a boost from the Works Progress Administration—an honorable roster that includes Bellow, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and others of like distinction.
At best Cheever was bemused by the situation. “Every time I saw a beggar in the streets [of Washington],” he wrote Mrs. Ames, “I used to wonder why anyone would choose that way of making a living; why didn't they go to work for the government?” A beggar's lot, as many saw it, was only slightly more demoralizing: those employed by the WPA (called “We Poke Along” by its detractors) bore “a stigma of the lowest order,” as writer Jerre Mangione put it, “a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.” It was especially bad for Cheever, whose family took a dim view of New Deal slackery, and whose own Yankee scruples were such that—four decades later, blessedly solvent—he'd try to return his first Social Security check. On the other hand, there was something to be said for collecting a regular salary: with his fifty dollars a week, Cheever was able to help his family, pay down his debt to Mrs. Ames, and put aside a little in the bank to finance a novel once he'd done his time. Perhaps most gratifying was slipping the odd tenner under the table to his wretched father, augmenting what must have been a very meager allowance: “Have the Bill Fold and the X [$10] enclosed—and thank you John boy,” wrote the grateful old man, who usually blew it on a big lunch at Locke-Ober.
Cheever thought Washington a dreary place. He'd taken a room at Mrs. Grey's boardinghouse, where he dined with librarians, government clerks, and “an old lady who sits at the head of the table and says all WPA workers are lazy and good-for-nothing.” Cheever found it hard to argue: his fellow employees were hopeless drones, and he kept his distance lest he be tainted by their dullness and mediocrity. Worst of all was the job itself, which wasn't quite the boondoggle he'd hoped for; as Dodie Merwin put it, “he let himself accept their pittance,” though he was “insulted” that such work was substantial enough to keep him from his writing. As for the social life, it was about as good as it would ever get in Washington. The evidence of his co-workers notwithstanding, Cheever wasn't the only talented young person who'd come to feed at the public trough, and the atmosphere was akin to that of a large college campus. Before long, Cheever was sleeping with a girl who worked in the archives and going to a lot of embassy parties; often drunk and “under the influence of Fitzgerald,” he liked asking cabdrivers to help him knot his black tie. Later he'd go so far as to claim a certain glamour for the era, though he knew it wasn't really so: he was just another “broody clerk,” the parties were third-rate, and it depressed him to chat with people about their civil-service classifications; what's more, his girlfriend had buck teeth and gave him “a bad case of crabs.” One of the only good times was a weekend spent in Maryland, alone, riding a rented horse around the countryside.
So the summer passed. The New Yorker had begun to wonder, again, what had become of one of its most promising young writers. “What