Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [64]
RATHER THAN LET HER LIVE in relative sin at Rhinelander Gardens, Mary's parents had spirited her away to Treetops for the summer; Cheever had moved to Muriel Rukeyser's vacant apartment at 76 Bank Street. Mostly he hacked out stories and brooded over his novel, but when the world was too much with him, he'd take off to Yaddo and stay drunk awhile. That summer he befriended a young writer named Flannery Lewis, who, beginning in 1937, had published three books in three years; unknown to himself, one imagines, he would never publish another, and would vanish almost entirely as a writer and a man. For the time being, he staggered around Yaddo cracking up furniture and insulting Katherine Anne Porter, of all people. “Porter is wonderful,” Cheever had written at first, having observed the woman sweetly patronize some boob named Ekstrand. “What do you write? Ekstrand asks, leering. Oh, not very much, Porter says, very little really, almost nothing. I mean do you write books or what, Ekstrand asks leering.” A few days later, however, Cheever decided Porter “[wasn't] so wonderful”: “La Porter and Joffe and Flannery and I went down to the Worden last night and the great conversational style was an awful disappointment,” he wrote Mary. “[She] began with Auden, George Davis, etc. She was side-tracked for a few minutes into talking about her experiences with aviators in the last world war, but then she went back again to Auden, Davis, MacAlmon, Escott …”
Cheever would pay a valedictory visit that summer, but it wasn't the same without Lewis (banned for pissing in the atrium pool). Mrs. Ames urged him to stay on through the fall, and even offered to hire Mary as her secretary—a “very kind” but “impossible” offer, Cheever decided. For the foreseeable future, the Yaddo phase of his life was over. “If there is anything in my memory that could be called pre-war it is Yaddo,” he wrote Herbst in 1944. “Oh those fountains, oh those box lunches, oh that stained glass window at the head of the stairs.”
Though he longed to join his fiancée at Treetops, Cheever stayed put on Bank Street despite having to sleep in the bathtub to avoid bedbugs. He was eager to prove himself as a provider, and (except for his stalled novel) was doing a rather good job of it: That summer (1940) he published three stories in The New Yorker and three in the slicks—two in Harper's Bazaar and “a stinker” in Collier's—and in the meantime pursued, fruitlessly as ever, some sort of regular employment. When he got word that a junior editor at The New Republic had been “taken off to the booby-hatch,” he raced over to fill the breach—too late: “Some other ghoul” had already gotten the job. In the end he accepted an advance from The New Yorker that required him to churn out stories faster than ever, while in his journal he girded himself for the task:
It is still, even in writing for the New Yorker, a question of feeling strongly, of being alive. It can be the first thing you see in the morning; a wet roof reflecting the bleak light, the suspicion that your wife's legs under the table may be touching the legs of someone else, the happiness of burning up the road between New Haven and Sturbridge on your way home. In signing a contract with the New Yorker there are certain apprehensions as if writing were a mystery, something as chancey as a long shot on a wet track with mud all over the silks and the bums crowded in under the grandstand out of the rain. I have twelve stories