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By Root 3969 0

camp, Cheever spent a weekend with Mary at a Greenville hotel. He was in bad shape: whippet-thin and so nervous he couldn't sleep (“When I saw you in Greenville it was kind of a strain”). Sergeant Durham was in the midst of some sort of meltdown, and this made life unpredictable for his men. For hours at a time he'd stay in his room and drink steadily while an ominous silence prevailed in the barracks. One night the men were undressing, or already in bed, when Durham suddenly emerged “with his fatigue hat pulled down over his ears, fully dressed in blue denims and leggings. He had evidently fallen into a drunken stupor and he thought it was morning.” It got so bad Cheever began to feel sorry for the man. A burly private had given Durham an awful beating one weekend in town, from which he returned a day or so later with “his face sewed up and a pair of dark glasses to cover his eyes.” He seemed, at last, a broken man, announcing (“very drunk”) that his girl in Texas had just lost two fingers in a sawmill. But this proved only a lull before the biggest storm of all: On the final day of boot camp, he insisted the men fall out of barracks in fifteen seconds. “[T]his turned out to be a physical impossibility and after several men had hurt themselves falling downstairs he settled for eighteen seconds.”

Cheever was more eager than ever for a desk job, and to this end Harold Ross wrote Colonel Egbert White of Yank, an army magazine with offices in New York: “I have a nomination of a writer if you want one. He is John Cheever, who has written some of the best short stories we've run in recent years, and is one of the leading and most promising short story writers there is, in our estimation here.” Stout praise, which Cheever was “sure” would do the trick, though he was a little disappointed to learn he'd have to finish basic training first (“but Dear Jesus I hope and pray that they will be able to do something then”). Alas, it turned out he wasn't the only writer who'd had such hopes: “[Yank] simply got over-manned,” Ross explained to Irwin Shaw, “and also they faced a new order … that hereafter such outfits could not request men by name. If Yank wants a writer now all they can do is request a writer.”

IN AUGUST, Cheever and his platoon were sent further south to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, which he thought resembled Harvard of all places (“The barracks are white clapboard with small-paned windows and brick chimneys”)—an ironic resemblance for any number of reasons, including a certain incongruity of milieu. “I have never seen such poverty; in land, in people's faces, and in education,” Cheever wrote Mrs. Ames. “Sometimes I think of the dilapidated countryside the nineteenth-century Russians wrote about. Here are the idiot children, the tin-roofed farmhouses, the scrub-trees, eroded soil, religious cults, etc.” For a few days he was even “homesick for Camp Croft and Sergeant Durham,” but then some Special Service officers found out he was a writer and took him off the bayonet course for a while to work on a radio skit; Cheever hoped it might lead to something permanent in lieu of Yank. In the meantime his regular army duties included standing guard over a lot of “southern boys who run around the [prison] yard like a pack of dogs.” The delinquent rednecks (“Their offense is usually desertion”) endeared themselves to Cheever, who couldn't help admiring their shamelessness and soon became one of the more lenient guards. While presiding over “hard labor” with a loaded rifle, he'd accept and subsequently mail “the voluminous correspondence” hidden in the prisoners’ shoes, though he knew they weren't supposed to mail more than a single letter a week.

Cheever's attitude toward the South—or Southerners anyway—went from wary hostility to a sort of bemused fondness. Certainly it was a different world: “When the conductor shouted ‘Columbia’ this morning”—he wrote Mary after returning from leave—”he might have shouted Berlin or Zagreb and the ‘I reckons’ and ‘yawls,’ etc. sounded as strange as German or whatever they speak in Zagreb.