Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [75]
* Company that included their spouses and in-laws. Newhouse married (the same year as Cheever) one of the world's most distinguished violin teachers, Dorothy DeLay whose pupils included Itzhak Perlman.
* As personified by Randall Jarrell, the poet, whose beard and accent struck Cheever as having an aversively regional savor: “He reminds me of the dirt roads leading in to the garrison town of Spartenburg [sic],” Cheever wrote, and proceeded with the description given above.
* In a letter to Mary, Cheever described the man as follows: “[H]e has an up-turned nose with a small wart on it. He walks with his head way up, moving a little as though the arches of his feet had been broken.”
* The published collection ends with four additional stories—”Problem No. 4,” “The Peril in the Streets,” “The Sorcerer's Balm,” and “The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York”—but the basic idea remains the same: that is, two of the last four stories are concerned with aspects of army life following induction (and were published in The New Yorker after Cheever had initially suggested the book end with “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello”), whereas the other two are concerned with the effects of war on the civilian world.
† For what it's worth: Ezekiel—the first Cheever in America—arrived aboard the Hector in 1637, and settled in New Haven for many years thereafter.
CHAPTER TEN
{1943-1945}
IN APRIL, Cheever returned to Fort Dix, where it was only a matter of time before his regiment was shipped overseas. Occasionally he'd affect a bravura eagerness to kill Germans—as opposed to dawdling away his days at an army camp, at least—but in more lucid moments he hoped that some well-placed officer would hurry up and do something about the promising writer who'd remained an infantry private because of a low IQ. And so it came to pass. A month after his book was published, Cheever got word from Cerf that a former M-G-M executive named Leonard Spigelgass—now a major in the Army Signal Corps—wanted to see him as soon as possible. At the urging of mutual friends, Spigelgass had read The Way Some People Live and been vastly impressed by the author's “childlike sense of wonder.”* As Mary Cheever wrote her father, “Between long-distance calls to Frank Capra and Louis B. Mayer, Spigelgass told John that he considered it unpatriotic for him to be in the infantry and that he would ‘make with the General’ immediately to get him into movie work.” Both John and Mary were skeptical of what seemed a lot of Hollywood hyperbole, but a few days later the transfer went through and Cheever was whisked away from Fort Dix in a jeep while his comrades watched in awe.
The 22nd Infantry Regiment—minus John Cheever—was finally sent to England in January 1944, and a few months later suffered heavy casualties at Utah Beach. Survivors were decimated in the long European campaign that followed, and sometimes Cheever would reflect, wistfully, on their fate: “I try to remember the names of my dead friends,” he wrote on Memorial Day, 1962. “Kennedy? Kenelly? Kovacs? I can't remember.” Finally, in 1978, an old Camp Gordon acquaintance, David Rothbart, sent Cheever a journal he'd kept to commemorate the heroism of their old regiment. Cheever stayed up all night reading and remembering his comrades—name by name—as he realized that “every last one of them” had been killed. “You and I are survivors, of course,” he wrote Rothbart the next morning, “and to be survivors seems to involve some responsibilities that I find onerous.”*
WITH A BABY on the way the Cheevers needed a bigger apartment, preferably with a courtyard or patio of some sort, but of course money was a problem. Finally they