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By Root 3829 0

During a weekend pass in late October, they met at a fine hotel in Richmond that featured baby alligators in the lobby fountain, and within a month or so Mary knew she was pregnant—none too soon, or so it seemed: after Christmas the camp became a staging area for embarkation to Africa. The men were ordered to prepare their wills and assign personal power of attorney; they were inoculated with potent antitoxins and told “that the women in Africa have the old, familiar venereal diseases.” Then, suddenly, in late January 1943, emergency status was lifted and life returned to normal. It was oddly a bit of a blow. Cheever got another seven-day furlough to New York, after which Georgia seemed bleaker than ever. “On Lincoln's Birthday I went into Augusta for the first time since returning from New York,” he wrote Lobrano. “Obviously Lincoln's Birthday isn't much of a holiday in Georgia and the damned Georgia whores and the damned bad whisky are beginning to make the barracks attractive.”

Things began to look up, a little, when Cheever was transferred to Special Services a couple days later and declared editor of a weekly regimental newspaper, The Double Deucer. Paired with a cartoonist, Lin Streeter (best known for “Pat Patriot, America's Joan of Arc”), Cheever tried to make the newspaper as entertaining as possible, spoofing such hackneyed features as the Inquiring Reporter (“I don't know how the Major will take it, but I'm sure the men will like it”). Meanwhile he almost fell in the line of duty. On a cold day in February, an officious lieutenant insisted on helping him build a fire in the Recreation Hall, near the newspaper office, and ended up burning the place to the ground. With flames licking at his feet, Cheever ran out the back door with a typewriter and the stencil for the latest Double Deucer, which became “a special fire issue”: when copies arrived from the printer, he and Streeter singed the bundle with a blowtorch as if it had been yanked from the fire in the nick of time.

Cheever's first collection, The Way Some People Live, was scheduled for publication in early March, and though he was careful to pretend otherwise, Cheever had rather high hopes for the book—that it would improve his literary career, of course, but also do him some good with the army. He reminded Cerf to make sure copies were distributed among editors and officers alike, as well as to see about lining up sympathetic reviewers such as Herbst. And though he was glad to accept input from Random House on what stories to include, it was Cheever's own idea to arrange them in a kind of loose chronological order, ending with his induction story, “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello,”* thus imposing a kind of thematic scheme that wasn't lost on the book's most admiring reviewer, Struthers Burt: “The earlier stories have to do with the troubled, frustrated, apparently futile years of 1939 to 1941,” Burt would presently write in The Saturday Review of Literature. “This gives the book the interest and importance of a progress toward Fate; and so there's a classic feeling to it.” In the meantime Cheever was dismayed by his publisher's trade announcement: it was one thing to languish amid the darkness of Georgia, another to be described to the world as a “young Southerner.” As he instructed Cerf, “My family settled in Salem in 1632 and haven't strayed further east than Dedham for a long time.”† Cerf mollified the author as to his lineage, and assured him that the work at hand was “a mighty fine collection”: “I know you have no more illusions about the sale of a book of short stories than have I, [but] I think the critical acclaim will delight us both.”

He was right about the sales. Published in a first printing of 2,750, The Way Some People Live sold just under two thousand at full price; the rest were either remaindered or pulped. The reviews were mixed. Most conceded Cheever's talent and hoped for better things, while damning him as a quintessential (and therefore trivial) writer of New Yorker fiction. Rose Feld's critique in the New York Herald Tribune Book