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By Root 3904 0

Review was representative: “To the extent that in the writing world any material—sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction—is called a story, John Cheever's book … may be called a collection of stories;” such stories, however, were little more than “moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality, but inconclusive in effect.” Cheever's tone of remote pessimism was also condemned, as if he were regarding his characters with the same haughty nonchalance that Eustace Tilley fixes on that butterfly. In the New York Times Book Review, William DuBois stressed the author's connection with the magazine by way of explaining the “peculiar epicene detachment, and facile despair” of the stories. Such charges were not unwarranted: for the past eight years, ever since Cowley's advice that he shorten his work, Cheever had been training himself to write the sort of muted, elliptical “casual” that went over at The New Yorker, rarely allowing himself the luxury of longer, more ambitious stories. Reviewer Weldon Kees emphasized the difference: though Cheever's New Yorker stories (“among the best that have appeared there recently”) were similar to the point of tedium—at least when “read one after another”—the long, anomalous “Of Love: A Testimony” gave a glimpse of what Cheever was “capable of doing when he has room enough in which to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”

As for Struthers Burt, in hindsight he seems prophetic, though it's hard to figure how he could have made such extravagant claims on the basis of The Way Some People Live. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” he declared, “when this war is over, John Cheever … will become one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist.” Far from finding the stories trivial, Burt applauded their revelation of the “universal importance of the outwardly unimportant,” and thought the author's apparent pessimism was in fact a laudable grasp of human ambiguity (“a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life”). Like other reviewers, Burt noted a certain monotony in Cheever's New Yorker fiction and cautioned the author lest his “especial style” harden into an affectation: “Otherwise the world is his.”

Cheever took both praise and blame with a grain of salt—remarkably so for a first-time author. He was amused by DuBois's crack about his “facile despair,” seeing the justice of that and other complaints. As he wrote Mary, “[A]ll in all—even though they don't like me—the reviewers seem to be very diligent and earnest people, anxious to help a gloomy young writer onto the right path, and to safeguard the investments of their readers.” Ultimately the book's most bitter critic would be Cheever himself—the mature Cheever, who, improbably enough, had proved Struthers Burt to be absolutely right. “I find all this early work intensely embarrassing and wish it would vanish,” he wrote in 1968, having devoted himself to destroying every copy of The Way Some People Live that he could lay his hands on. The author of the Wapshot novels and five or six of the finest American short stories was appalled that he'd ever been capable of such lazy, formulaic work. Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the late sixties, Cheever pointed out that even the man's trashier stories “were not rueful vignettes or overheard conversations”—an apt description of Cheever's juvenilia—”but real stories with characters, invention, scenery and moral conviction.” Cheever's best work would have all that and something ineffably more.

* An intriguing aspect of one's research is learning something of the fates of forgotten writers—a sobering lesson in the evanescence of literary fame. Take the strange case of Flannery Lewis. For a few more years, he and Cheever were boon (if occasional) companions, though Lewis's behavior became more and more erratic as his drinking worsened, until one day he left his wife and daughters and simply disappeared. Hoping to locate Lewis for an interview (while