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By Root 3862 0

” For the most part, though, he found the locals a fun-loving bunch, especially the working-class soldiers, who were often blessed with a refreshing lack of inhibition. “Ain't that pretty?” a man named Calib asked Cheever in the shower, referring to his freshly painted passion-pink toenails and fingernails. Cheever—on the lookout for material, at least as a raconteur—offered his services as reader and scribe to some of the illiterate Southerners, whose letters (both written and received) were a lifelong source of delight. One man solemnly dictated a request for special leave so he could witness his brother's execution (“the first electrocution in the family”); a spurned young woman wrote—and Cheever read aloud—” ‘Don't you remember what you done to me on the floor? Didn't you mean it?’ …” In general Cheever preferred the company of regular guys—illiterate, Southern, or otherwise—whose weekend high jinks in Augusta tended to attract the notice of military police. Every weekend the city swarmed with soldiers, and Cheever was loath to miss the whole Hogarthian spectacle—the teeming juke joints and even the relatively staid places where locals tried to show their GI guests some Southern hospitality: “[We] went to a dance at the Eagle Club, Eyrie number seven, believe it or not,” Cheever reported. “I danced for about one minute with a southern beauty of about eleven who was uneasy about dancing with a Yankee.”

But a month at Camp Gordon was perhaps too much of a good thing, and Cheever was ecstatic when he was granted a ten-day furlough in mid-September. The memories would stand him in good stead for the rest of his time in Georgia, and indeed for much of his married life thereafter. “[O]h Christ what fun,” he wrote Herbst.

The Cheevers had plenty of lettuce and I took a taxi from here to the city of Columbia, South Carolina, a distance of some seventy-six miles, pulling on a bottle of sour-mash bourbon. The train for New York pulled out of Columbia at three AM and I still had some whisky left when we pulled out of Washington the next afternoon. … I hit New York about nine o'clock, sober and very, very happy. Mary was waiting, all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin, and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad greens, etc., filled the ice-box. We did exactly as we pleased for eight days which is more than a lot of people can say lying on their death beds.

And there was more: On the last day, he went to the Plaza Hotel for a meeting with Bennett Cerf of Random House, who promptly agreed to publish a volume of his stories and sealed the deal with a check for $250. Finally—after a calming five o'clock cocktail at Longchamps on Twelfth Street—Cheever went home to tell Mary and walked into a surprise party in his honor, “involving nine Winternitzes, and a lobster dinner at Charles’.” Returning giddily to Camp Gordon, he may have wondered if it were all a dream—a notion dispelled by a note from Cerf: “Just a line to tell you how pleased I was to meet you the other day and to know that you are now a full-fledged Random House author.” Cheever replied that he'd been going around camp telling everyone that he was about to have a book published—”a fact that impresses no one,” he added, “because their idea of a book is Superman or Flash Gordon.”

For Cheever, success was always a goad to work harder, and now that Durham was no longer ranting at him, he returned to writing stories for The New Yorker. “I have my schedule down now,” he wrote Mary, “so that I go into town on Friday nights and do my eating and drinking, have my hangover during inspection, and spend Saturday night at the typewriter.” One night a week (plus the odd stolen moment in vacant offices) didn't give Cheever much time to chisel his prose, but the magazine's editors were willing to be liberal: many of their finest writers were unavailable for the duration of the war, and besides they wanted as much fiction about army life as possible. Within