Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [72]
Cheever's army stories lack the stylistic flair of his prewar New Yorker fiction, but neither are they frankly trashy, like some of the stories he'd written for the slicks. Rather they stand as good conventional fiction—impressive for what they reveal of Cheever's growing versatility, an ability to modulate his prose, as it were, to suit the market. The army furnished plenty of material, which Cheever sifted for the most vivid scenes and details, as well as an eye for what was likely to fly with the Public Relations Office. He worried (for example) about his Durham story, “Sergeant Limeburner,” since he'd written it “for [his] own pleasure” and thus lovingly rendered the sergeant in all his lurid brutality. But because he needed money, too, Cheever was relieved when the censors returned his manuscript without a word changed, perhaps because Durham/Limeburner's bullying is made to seem a good thing, at least by army standards: “You'll appreciate his training when you get into combat,” a soldier remarks to Limeburner's men. “You wouldn't want him as a friend, but when it comes to the Army, he's got a good head.” Another story, “The Invisible Ship,” was based on an episode in which Cheever's company was restricted to barracks after money was stolen from one of the older men; the thief was never caught—though he is, violently, in the story—and his victim was sent home to tend the family farm in North Dakota. The actual captain who imposed the restriction had a small wart on his nose that Cheever transposed to his chin for fictional purposes; otherwise the portrait squares with the reported facts: “[The captain] was an odd-looking man with a forced composure in his oval face and a wart on the right side of his chin. Two years as an officer in the field had given him an exaggerated cant to his head and an exaggerated and springy walk, as though he were always passing in review.”*
The extra New Yorker money was needed to bolster the meager income of an army private—which Cheever remained, even as certain of his friends were promoted to corporal or sergeant, at least, while Newhouse was already a major with an office at the Pentagon. It was perhaps the first time Cheever had really regretted his mathematical ineptitude, not to mention his overall lack of formal education, since his score on the Army General Classification Test wasn't high enough (110 or above) to qualify him for Officer Candidate School. “I feel like a dope,” he wrote Mary, asking her to send a book “on easy ways to get a high IQ”: “[M]aybe I can raise myself out of the moron class. If I can't you'll have to swing along with a moron.” A year or so later, when he tried again for OCS, his friend Major Newhouse (soon to become Lieutenant Colonel Newhouse) had to pull strings to arrange for him to retake the test in Washington, and even helped him prepare—but Cheever scored “108 or something,” as Newhouse remembered, and never rose above the rank of technical sergeant. “Three stripes,” wrote his father, “good boy John. You got it the hard way—no transparent cellophane commissions, in the noncoms.”
ALL THAT AUTUMN it was rumored that Cheever's regiment would soon be sent overseas, and before that happened he and Mary wanted to start a family.