Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [58]
Like many New Yorker fiction editors—but more so—Maxwell cultivated friendships with his writers: he wrote long personal letters applauding their successes and commiserating over their failures; also, he was good about rushing payment, especially to writers such as Cheever in almost constant distress. No matter how desperate the writer, though, Maxwell was never apt to let sentiment interfere with his critical judgment. Though exquisitely tactful, and eager to help if warranted, he was rigid about rejecting work that fell below his standards. While Cheever was still at Lake George, for instance, Maxwell rejected his story “The Simple Life” because it violated an old Ross taboo against stories “concerning writers and their difficulties,” which (as Maxwell wrote Geraldine Mavor in Lieber's office) “have been the difficulties of writers since time began.” That said, Maxwell was careful as ever to accentuate the positive: “We have great hopes for Cheever and feel that even in this story there is that special quality which he gives to his things and which is exactly right for the New Yorker.”
By then Maxwell had already made it possible for Cheever to leave Lake George. A few weeks before, he'd written Cheever asking if he could come to the city and discuss “Nothing Has Happened,” a story Maxwell rather liked but thought only “half done.” Cheever replied: “This finds me stranded on an island, surrounded by deep water, without the means for a trip to New York. If you would return NOTHING HAS HAPPENED with your suggestions, I'm quite sure I could fix it up within the week.” A few days later, Cheever received a detailed, single-spaced page of suggestions and duly revised the story (renamed “The Happiest Days”); by the end of October he was back in Manhattan with money in his pocket. It was the beginning of a friendship that would prove both rewarding and deeply tortured. “I appreciate your personal interest in John,” Mavor wrote Maxwell at the time. “You have done a great deal toward helping us sell regularly to the New Yorker.” Quite so: before 1939, Cheever had published a total of five stories in the magazine; by 1940, he was averaging almost a story a month.
Thus Cheever was already launched when Maxwell resigned that year to concentrate on his own writing, and more than a decade would pass before he resumed duties as Cheever's fiction editor. In the meantime, the two occasionally met in New York. In the early days, especially, Maxwell was struck by Cheever's “immense charm”: “One of my college friends happened to be visiting us when John came to dinner,” he recalled in 1993. “And John's conversation was so pyrotechnic that my friend spoke of it all the rest of his life as something wonderful that had happened to him, that he had had dinner with Cheever.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
{1939-1941}
MORE THAN FIVE YEARS had passed since Cheever had broken with his brother—more than five years without a fixed address, drifting between Boston and New York and Saratoga, often poor and (whatever the company) more or less lonely. Now, as 1939 drew to a close, he again faced “the grey light of New York apartments”: Peg Worthington had returned to the city from Reno, and “after the usual ring-around-the-rosey” had decided “very wisely” to marry an editor at Viking, Marshall Best. “There was a wedding breakfast at Beekman Place a couple weeks ago,” Cheever reported in January, “with champagne, tears, beluga, and a German band playing the Wedding March, I saw them off to Guatemala, a light snow falling, and ended up in traffic court on a drunken driving rap. That was the end of the summer.”
More than ever at loose ends, Cheever had returned that autumn to the Chelsea Hotel and told friends to address letters care of his agent. “I don't know where to go,” he wrote Denney. “I'm not up to taking a house alone in