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By Root 3847 0

wrought by a special point of view: the tender and forgiving humor of The Wapshot Chronicle, a love of humanity and the “color of the sky,” as it were. It's telling that nothing equivalent to Cousin Honora existed in the novel's early stages—no composite, that is, of Cheever's quirky aunts and cousins and (foremost) mother—perhaps because such a character was inconceivable until enough time had passed for Cheever to view these people with a certain degree of detached loving-kindness. In the absence of such nostalgia, Cheever resorted to melodrama as a means of lifting the miserable facts of his early life above the mundane. Of the character most like himself, for example, Cheever wrote in his journal: “Tom would have tried to kill himself when he was sixteen. Perhaps out of jealousy for his brother. This and any other irregularity in his conduct he would be very anxious to conceal. The effort to present the front of a college man.” All this was certainly true of Cheever himself—minus (in all likelihood) the suicide attempt—but almost beside the point in regard to Coverly Wapshot, the benign neurotic that this character would eventually become.

By the end of 1947, Cheever still hadn't produced a manuscript, though he claimed a longish one existed, and finally Linscott suggested he write an outline, at least, to give the salesmen something to work with. Cheever reluctantly obliged, though he doubted he could convey what was best about the novel—the actual writing—and so took pains to play this up in the outline, which itself is quite cleverly written:

The writing, or the surface of the book, which has concerned me a good deal, seems to me clear and reliable. I speak of the writing since it seems very important to me … that it should appear decorous and beautiful and I sometimes think of the story as having the polish, the sentimental charms of a greeting card with an obscene message. …

The story centers on a family; the Fields. Aaron, Sarah and their two sons, Tom and Eben. There is much of a country that I love in this book—much scenery, much rain, many semi-colons—for these are bewildered children in a beautiful garden.

The story begins in 1936 and has in it's opening the appearance of something to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house.* …

Sarah Field … is stout, she has yielded her beauty without a struggle, she has attended a White House reception, dreamt of carnal relations with Padarewski and two bibles have come apart in her hands. …

Having sold the atmospherics of the book (and emphasized his own cleverness wherever possible), Cheever tried to relate the plot with similar élan. The first part of the book consisted of various threads that would later be woven into The Wapshot Chronicle. The second part was absurdly melodramatic and perhaps never written at all, except in tentative bits and pieces. Aaron was to escape the blackmail of his spinster daughter by hiding in Detroit, while Sarah “commits a dreadful murder”—the particulars of which Cheever wisely omitted in his outline, as well as whatever pyrotechnics he would perforce bring to bear in resolving such complications. The novel was to end (à la Wapshot) with Aaron's funeral.

“That's a wonderful presentation of your book,” Linscott generously replied. “You have certainly whetted my appetite for the book, and I shan't be happy until I read it.” He would not be happy, then, for a long time. Three months later, with no end in sight, Cheever felt like “the only man in the East Fifties who hasn't finished his novel;” meanwhile the usual financial setbacks made it imperative that he get back to story writing and stay there for a while. “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken.”

It was unfortunate he felt that way. Apart from the foundering progress of his novel, the late forties (and 1947 in particular) were miraculous years for Cheever. He was well on his way to becoming one of the best fiction writers at The New Yorker, and hence (when considered in the company of contributors such as Nabokov, O'Hara, Salinger, and Shaw)