Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [68]
Cheever also befriended one of Lobrano's foremost discoveries, Edward Newhouse, who would eventually publish more than fifty stories in the magazine. What the two writers had most in common, as Cheever put it, was “an inability to draw the parts of [their] lives together.” In that respect, Newhouse had come an even longer way than Cheever—all the way from Hungary, in fact, whence Newhouse had emigrated at age twelve, shed his accent, and reinvented himself as a cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon litterateur. Cheever characterized his friend's “inscrutable” persona as an “unholy mixture of Budapest and the Ivy League,” while conceding that “inscrutability has its charm”—as he knew better than most. In one form or another, the friendship would last a very long time (“To Eddie, My oldest friend in the world,” Cheever inscribed a copy of Falconer), though always a certain distance obtained, perhaps because of a mutual awareness of each other's pretenses. Neither had finished high school and yet both found themselves in the company of sophisticated, accomplished people* —this by the force of their own talent and charm, of course, such that each might have wondered who in the end would go further. But all this was mostly latent in the old days: the young Cheever, Newhouse recalled, was funny and generous and “not at all concerned with image.”
AFTER MORE THAN TEN YEARS of fatalistic anticipation, Cheever was almost relieved when war was finally declared in December. It was “very exciting” to mill with the masses in Times Square while the news of Pearl Harbor whipped around the Times Building, and afterward he and Mary “slipped out of the heavy-drinking set” and waited, with a kind of suspenseful tranquillity, for their lives to change. It wasn't that Cheever was eager to fight in a war: he promptly asked Cowley, who'd gotten a desk job in Washington, to “keep [him] in mind” if anything should open up, since he didn't rate his chances very high as a soldier. “All I know about war,” he wrote Herbst, “is what I saw in the movies ten years ago, and I still believe all of it; the screams, the amputated hand on the barbed-wire fence, and the trench rats.” But civilian life seemed absurd under the circumstances, and besides he was tired of living on advances from The New Yorker. When he had waited five months, then, he finally decided to enlist after a last idyllic week at Treetops—a last savoring of the good life that, rather miraculously, he'd managed to achieve after thirty difficult years. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, for in the Army there is no past,” he wrote in “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello,” published a month after his May 7 enlistment. “You are not married or single, rich or poor, a brilliant young man or a fool.”
John Cheever, about to be absorbed into the army, reported to Fort Dix as a slightly taller and better-educated man than before: according to his service record, he was five foot six on that day in May (rather than five five and a whisper), and had finished high school as well as a year of college (Harvard, no doubt: his wedding announcement had noted that he'd studied there). So much for personal mythology. Fort Dix was “like a Boy's Camp” where one was either working hard or “sitting on fenceposts” staring at flat vistas. After a week or so, Cheever got a typhoid shot and boarded a train bound for Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina—a land of “razor-back hogs, grits, thin-bloodedness, spindly peach orchards, poorly attended American Legion parades on hot afternoons and a cultural bleakness that gleams through all [its] adornments,” as Cheever would remember the city and the South as a whole.* On arrival, the men were given new clothes and a big meal (“The food is very good and the table-manners of my buddies are bound to