Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [85]
CHAPTER TWELVE
{1946-1949}
THE YEAR 1946 had begun on a promising note: Cheever signed a contract with Random House for a novel (still some version of The Holly Tree) and received a rather generous advance of forty-eight hundred dollars. Both Broadway and Hollywood were showing interest in the “Town House” stories. And meanwhile, advance or no, Cheever was broke again: “I got out of the army in November and the work I've done since then you could put in a pea-shell,” he wrote Herbst in January. “I want to start on a book but I still have to write three stories and God knows when I'll get those done.” According to his journal, he wrote himself out of debt by late spring, when at last he returned to the novel he'd abandoned shortly before his enlistment in 1942. “And now we face the Holly Tree again,” he noted with bleak apprehension. Reading over the thing with the vast objectivity of four years, Cheever tried hard to like what he saw (“It seems good; it seems good”), but mostly he noticed that it was, as ever, the work of a short-story writer: each chapter ended with a dying fall, a bit of provocative irony that went nowhere. “You must use suspense,” Cheever hectored himself.
His editor at Random House was the well-respected Robert Linscott, whose letters to Cheever over the next seven or eight years were rarely other than tactful and encouraging, while Cheever, for his part, always did his best to seem hopeful. “This letter is to thank you for the great pleasure I had in reading your admirable story in last week's New Yorker, and to tell you how eagerly I'm awaiting the manuscript of your novel,” Linscott wrote in July 1946, almost seven months after Cheever had signed a contract for a novel he'd started writing (as both men knew) several years before. “How goes it, and do you still expect to complete it this year?” The novel was coming along “nicely,” Cheever replied, and yes, he thought he might have a draft by late November; he repeated the deadline in a letter to the Ettlingers, almost as if to persuade himself of its plausibility, though he also confided a certain dread: “I like the story but I keep asking myself: Is there a character in this book you would enjoy meeting? … It troubles me. I love a great many people and the color of the sky, but this doesn't describe my work.” A year later, at Treetops, he was still wondering whether to inflict these characters on the world, in whatever form, while letting Linscott know there was “a fairly good chance” he'd return to the city with a draft in September. In August, however, he learned that “eggs in the city [were] a dollar a dozen,” and so he put the novel aside, again, to grind out stories.
Based on his journal notes, plus a number of surviving typescript pages and his correspondence with Linscott, The Holly Tree seems to have been composed almost entirely of scenes and people that would later find their way into The Wapshot Chronicle. This was the material Cheever was determined to “write out of [his] system,” and his perseverance in the face of repeated failure—fifteen years (or more) of tinkering and starting over—is simply astounding. The version that evolved in the forties, after the war, concerned an Ur-Wapshot family alternately named Morgan, Flint, or Field: an elderly couple, Aaron and Sarah, and their sons, Tom and Eben. The gift shop was always part of the story, as was the blithely promiscuous Rosalie and Aaron/ Leander's abandoned child who haunts him as a haggard spinster—and so forth. “All moderately dull material,” Cheever admitted in his journal. What was missing, perhaps, was the transformative magic