Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [67]
* Aptly included in the first anthology of New Yorker fiction, published in 1940.
† Though too ambiguous for The New Yorker, the story, oddly enough, appeared in Harper's Bazaar (September 1940) and was included in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1941.
* Harvard misdates the first journal as having been started as early as 1934; there is no evidence, internal or otherwise, to support this. A few early entries are explicitly dated from 1940; the first pages (undated) appear to have been written during the last weeks of 1939. After 1940 Cheever rarely dated his entries.
CHAPTER NINE
{1941-1943}
FOR THEIR HONEYMOON they spent a few pleasant days at Herbst's old house in Erwinna—”Venery Valley,” as Cheever named it, after the preferred way of passing time. During their first year of marriage, especially, the place was a beloved refuge for the couple; later, as an exhausted army private, Cheever would lie on his bunk and reflect on those lost, lazy days in prelapsarian Pennsylvania: “shopping in Frenchtown, building a fire to burn the damp out of the house, the first drink at four o'clock on the nose, the second drink at four-fifteen, the venery, the eating, the noise of the brook and the icebox motor at night, morning sunlight, breakfast, a walk into French-town maybe or raking hay or cutting wood.” As for their hostess, Josie, she was already on her way to becoming “a rambunctious ruin” (as Mary put it), whose constant and often peevish chatter struck Cheever, even then, as a bit much—but no matter: “I feel that the house is my own,” he wrote in his journal. “I see Mary and I living there after we have been married eight or nine years.”
In the city they rented a two-room apartment at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue—the heart of the Village and only a few brisk footsteps from the Brevoort Hotel, where Cheever did much of his drinking. Even by Village standards, it was a remarkably alcoholic time: “I feel the presence of despair,” Cheever wrote, having listened awhile to the radio news, which was getting so bad he could hardly see the point of writing anymore, much less staying sober. Night after night he found himself “spilling martinis all over the Brevoort” with regulars such as Niles Spencer and the amiable lush Coburn (“Coby”) Gilman. When their friend Dorothy Dudley decided to wait out the war at home in Biddeford, the three men “drank her out of her apartment” and so inherited bits of wardrobe left over from her various ill-starred romances (“Coburn got a linen suit, Niles got a blue serge, and I got a check”). Meanwhile his disreputable Yaddo sidekick Flannery Lewis had also married and moved to the Village; whether at Sailors’ Snug Harbor or the Lewises’ place over the Black Cat Club, the wives would sit and sigh while their husbands quaffed as much as four quarts of whiskey a night—or so Cheever reckoned, penitently, in the midst of yet another stupendous hangover.*
A more wholesome companion was the man who'd succeeded Maxwell as Cheever's editor at The New Yorker, Gustave (“Gus”) Lobrano. A tall, courtly Southerner, Lobrano preferred outdoor diversions such as badminton at his suburban home in Westchester, or fishing at an old family lodge on Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks. Lobrano was only ten years older than Cheever, who nevertheless felt a filial urge to please the man as he tried to please Dr. Winternitz and had failed (as he saw it) to please his own father. Lobrano had taught Cheever to fish, and thus introduced him to the whole rugged ethos of the sporting life: the moose head over the fireplace, the chilly outhouse, the oddball furniture, the crack-of-dawn slogs through dense woods. “The big point is this is a man's world,