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By Root 3906 0

one of the best writers in America. Cheever later remarked that the magazine had accepted almost everything he wrote in those days “as long as there wasn't any explicit sexual intercourse,” and in fact rejections did become relatively rare as Cheever's work continued to change and improve in startling ways. Though he belittled his stories, and longed to be a novelist, Cheever was almost morbidly aware of his New Yorker readership and eager to please. “It was one of the most felicitous relationships between readers and writers I think that ever existed,” he said of this golden age. Cheever loved the immediate gratification of writing for the magazine—not only the quick (if meager) paycheck, but the marvelous idea that he could communicate in print “with estimable men and women” as soon as (sometimes) a week or two after he'd written a story! And how delightful (for such a lonely man) when these same readers would write personal letters validating, in effect, his most vital feelings about life. Indeed, when he met these readers in the flesh, he was elated by their praise and stricken by any sign of indifference. When, for example, a woman at a cocktail party applauded the New Yorker work of one Robert McLaughlin—but had never heard of Cheever—the latter brooded despondently in his journal: “The stories she liked by McLaughlin were obvious and done without any talent, and I was disappointed to find that she did not remember, and had never noticed the cutting edge I work so hard to give my prose. … Who knows the difference.”

Cheever was determined to make them see the difference. Having finished the last of his “Town House” stories in March 1946—and perhaps sensing he was in danger of becoming the sort of slick writer whose proper peers were the likes of Robert McLaughlin rather than O'Hara, Shaw, et al.—Cheever challenged himself to write something with “more size and passion”: no more “rueful vignettes,” in other words, “but real stories with characters, invention, scenery and moral conviction.” What followed was “The Sutton Place Story,” which appeared in The New Yorker that June*—a somber look at the tawdry private lives of the Manhattan middle class, as witnessed by a little girl named Deborah Tennyson, who “knew about cocktails and hangovers.” Through a series of delinquencies committed by the negligent adults in her life, Deborah ends up (disastrously) in the care of a genteel semi-prostitute named Renée. The narrator casually evokes the woman's sordid nature, as if it were the sort of thing any quasi-respectable New Yorker could relate to: “She had begun to notice that she always felt tired unless she was drinking. … When she was not drinking she was depressed, and when she was depressed she quarreled with headwaiters and hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her. … She knew this instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it—among other things—from casual friends like the Tennysons.”

The story of a child who runs away from adult corruption—and is almost lost forever—certainly possessed the moral conviction to which Cheever aspired, and the contradictory impulses of his characters had rarely been so well portrayed. In the meantime, as a self-styled “spy” among the middle class, Cheever liked to imagine the secrets of his innocuous fellow tenants in that building near Sutton Place, and he continued to brood on this theme—namely, “that genuinely decorous men and women admitted into their affairs erotic bitterness and even greed,” as he put it (a little self-mockingly) in his preface to the Stories. As an early treatment, “The Sutton Place Story” would serve as a springboard to greater things, possibly leading the author to ponder a more interesting way of becoming, so to speak, a narrative fly on as many walls as possible. The solution would involve a dose of magic. “[I'm] facing the need for change in my work,” he wrote in 1947. “The physical world is very important to me but dry descriptions of the details of its beauty are not enough.”

Cheever would later invoke Kafka as