Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [89]
Ross tended to dislike any writing that smacked of the experimental or highfalutin, and one might have expected him to balk at Cheever's straying from strict realism. As an editor, though, Ross specifically insisted on an almost pathological clarity of detail, such that the reader never had to look twice at a sentence to gather its meaning, or wonder what exactly was happening in a given scene. If anything, such a quibbling passion for verisimilitude (“This story has gone on for 24 hours and no one has eaten anything”) may have contributed something to the precision of Cheever's own style, and sometimes Ross's edits were inspired: “In ‘The Enormous Radio’ he made two changes,” Cheever recalled; “a diamond is found on the bathroom floor after a party. The man says ‘Sell it, we can use a few dollars.’ Ross had changed ‘dollars’ to ‘bucks,’ which was absolutely perfect. … Then I had ‘the radio came softly’ and Ross pencilled in another ‘softly.’ ‘The radio came softly, softly.’ “
In later years, when Cheever would wax nostalgic about his early association with The New Yorker, he'd claim a close acquaintance with Ross and elaborate on the man's legend as a lovable grotesque—a “scratcher and nosepicker” who used to make Cheever jump in his chair by saying “fuck” a lot at the lunch table. “I doubt very much if those lunches ever took place,” said Maxwell after Cheever's death, pointing out that Ross kept his distance from fiction writers as much as possible. Indeed, it seems the two only spoke in person once, when Lobrano introduced them at the Algonquin. “A few days later,” Cheever remarked to Newhouse, “I saw [Ross] in the elevator and he didn't recognize me.” Still, he was fond of the idea of Ross, and liked to tell of how desolate he'd been when he got news of the editor's death—such that he could hardly bear reading about it eight years later in The Years with Ross: “I leafed through the Thurber book on Ross last night,” he wrote Maxwell, “and when I read the part where Hawley says: ‘It's all over’ I burst into tears. I couldn't stop.”*
IN THE MARGIN of one Cheever story—where a character comes home from work and changes clothes before dinner—Ross scribbled, “Eh? What's this? Cheever looks to me like a one-suiter.” He had guessed right, but then he ought to have known. Toward the end of the Ross era, Cheever was paid between five hundred and one thousand dollars a story, which meant that in a good year—with bonuses and occasional sales to other magazines—he made a little more than five thousand dollars. As he later reflected, “I think Ross's feeling was that if I was paid any more … I would get prideful, arrogant and idle.” Things were bad enough in 1947 for him to break down and let his wife take a job teaching composition at Sarah Lawrence, about which he was alternately grudging and derisive. “[S]he comes home with a briefcase full of themes written by young ladies named Nooky and Pussy,” he wrote Herbst; “but these nicknames would give you no indication of what these themes are about.” As for the pittance she was paid, Cheever reminded her that Newhouse's wife earned at least a hundred a week teaching the “fiddle” at Juilliard, but (he supposed) it was “too late for Mary to take up a musical instrument.” Nor would he allow her to console him when he was feeling hopeless about things, having learned from childhood that it was shameful to be caught without a stiff upper lip. At best