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By Root 3991 0

about John Cheever?” wrote William Maxwell, a new fiction editor. “It is almost a year since we have had a look at anything of his, and we'd like very much to have him in the magazine again.” Cheever wanted nothing better than to oblige. He tried writing at night and on weekends, but his output remained “pathetically small”: his FWP duties left him frazzled and depressed, all the less willing to forfeit valuable drinking time to punch out stories, which—even when he did buckle down—just weren't flowing with the old facility. The one thing he'd finished in five months (“like pulling a tooth”) was another racetrack yarn for Collier's titled “Saratoga,” about a boy and girl who grow up with gambling in their blood (etc.) but finally quit the horses and get married. One senses Cheever's misery in almost every line. In fact, he considered taking the Collier's money and running back to New York, then and there, but instead he moved out of Mrs. Grey's to a more private arrangement near Dupont Circle, which proved to have a bedbug problem.

The strain was such that even his vaunted affability began to fail him, and he had a final falling-out with Dodie Merwin. She was also living part-time in Washington, and the two would sometimes escape to New York in his Model A. Returning—no doubt morosely—from a weekend trip, they'd just crossed the Pulaski Skyway into the Jersey Meadowlands when the roadster was sideswiped and sent shambling off the road. Cheever got out and was pensively inspecting the flat tire, the steaming engine, when Merwin tried to lighten things up with a little laughter. “He got furious,“ she remembered. “I think he wouldn't let me back in the car. I don't know how I got back to New York, but whatever happened, we didn't go on to Washington together.” Cheever's rigid back—as he stomped off to find a garage—was the last she'd see of her old friend for many years. And once, later, while crossing the Pulaski Skyway, Cheever mentioned the quarrel to his wife, whose sympathy was entirely with Merwin.

By November, after six months on the job, Cheever had had enough. He told Alsberg that his assignments “seemed neither interesting nor useful,” and certainly not worth sacrificing his own work. But Alsberg valued his talents well enough to coax him into staying on a bit longer, in exchange for which he let Cheever return to New York and help edit the second volume of The New York City Guide. Lou Gody, the editor in chief, would later claim that the only job given to one of America's greatest writers was editing copy (“twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards,” as Cheever put it), but in fact Alsberg had canvassed his input on key points of content and given him a free hand in revising weak copy as well as generating his own. “Cheever thinks that the [introduction] ought to be somewhat condensed and be made a little less conventional,” he wrote the director of the New York office. “He thinks he can do this very quickly without spoiling the article. … Another point I took up with Cheever was the idea of having a very factual little piece at the beginning of the whole book telling a few things about the greater city.”

Though glad enough to be back in a town where he could buy liquor on Sundays, Cheever was less than enthralled by Alsberg's confidence. Skipping both Christmas and New Year's, he sequestered himself in the Chelsea Hotel and flailed through mounds of god-awful copy, the better to resign by the end of January and never look back. A year before his death, he was greeted at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters by Jim McGraw, an old FWPer like himself. “Hey Johnny,” said the jovial man, “it's a long time since I last saw you on the Writers’ Project!” “I don't want to talk about it,” said Cheever, and walked away.

THAT SUMMER (1939) HE WAS BACK running the launch at Lake George and “dreaming out a book.” Earlier he'd been at Yaddo, but had fled as soon as the summer guests began to arrive. “Yaddo, in season anyhow, has become impossible,” he wrote. “The must those