Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [63]
During a visit that summer to Quincy, while Cheever was listening to one of his father's spiels (“Dad's just been in telling me about Newburyport in the 70's”), a woman from the Patriot Ledger arrived to interview him for “a feature story about hometown boy doesn't make so good,” as Cheever wrote Mary, adding that he “got [the reporter] off the subject” of himself as soon as possible. Such “exceptional modesty”—so noted in the article (“Quincy Youth Is Achieving New York Literary Career”)—would remain a byword of Cheever's public image in perpetuum. “I really haven't written anything worth reading yet,” he told Mabelle Fullerton of the Patriot Ledger, conceding that he was “at work on a contemporary novel with a New England background.” Afterward he seemed chagrined that he'd revealed even that much. Despite his being declared “one of the white hopes of American literature,” Cheever ended his visit to the South Shore in a state of “great moodiness and discontent”: “I drove back to [Fred's house in] Norwell and drank a lot of Tom Collins in the kitchen, snapping crossly at everyone,” he wrote. “The evening was spent in brooding and brooding over the novel.”
The novel—about a family called Morgan—was not going well. He'd hoped to have at least a chapter and outline to submit in September, but so far he had little to show for a long summer's worth of fretting. Part of the problem was the constant distraction of money work: “Writing for the New Yorker leaves me feeling tired,” he wrote in May, after his fifth story of the year had appeared in the magazine, “tired and lazy. Tired of the language, that is.” Also, the disappointment of his previous novel lingered. Years later Cheever would recall (for the benefit of a young man writing a dissertation) that his novel for Simon and Schuster had been a highly experimental affair—”a deliberately digressive, episodic, avant-garde work with a shifting point of view.” He claimed that the publisher had been quite enthusiastic about it, suggesting, however, that a seasoned editor such as Cowley help “whip it into shape;” Cheever had been so affronted by the idea (he said) that he'd dropped the manuscript into a garbage can that very afternoon. Both the publisher's enthusiasm and Cheever's brash integrity are doubtless exaggerated (if not entirely apocryphal), though it does seem likely the work was experimental to some extent, in keeping with Cheever's view at the time that a novel (“a bad word”) had to reflect the fragmented experience of his generation.
The problem was how to apply such innovation to what was, essentially, an exercise in nostalgia. “In trying to recapture what I want to recapture I keep returning to an afternoon at the farm in Hanover,” Cheever wrote in his journal that summer. “I have been burning tent catipillars [sic] out of the apple trees. … I can hear mother working in the kitchen. Fred is painting his boat. After that I went down to the wood-shed and talked with Fred. The door stood open and I could smell the wet grass outside and hear the brook. Dad came down and told us about the boats he used to build.” The novel that would follow from this Proustian evocation was a family chronicle titled The Holly Tree, after a tree in Hanover that Cheever believed was “the largest holly in the Northeast and very probably planted by some English settler.” Cheever had once imagined his mother writing him a letter in wartime, insisting he come home and protect the holly tree—a symbol of tradition amid the modern darkness. That, anyway, was the idea. “The book is a pain in the neck,” he wrote Mary in August. “I start it and stop it about six times a day, revile and abuse myself, leer at the novels in the book-case and write long descriptions of my problem. … [A]ny conventional story or narrative seems to