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By Root 3803 0

that the charge currently being brought arises from a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts,” they wrote. “We feel this charge involves a cynical assault not only on Elizabeth Ames's personal integrity, but also on the whole future of Yaddo. … We regard their [Lowell et al.'s] action as a thoroughly foolish and nasty performance, dangerous to the extent that it weakens any sober fight against Communism.” The group collected fifty-one endorsements and appeared personally before the directors on March 26. After five hours of discussion, the board decided to censure Lowell and absolve Mrs. Ames (who nevertheless was divested of her power to extend visits to whomsoever she pleased). Recovering in a nursing home afterward, the embattled woman wrote Herbst*: “I do not know how I should have come through these dreadful two months if that little staunch Committee of which John is a member had not sprung into action over night, working swiftly and wisely. It is all a miracle.” Almost thirty years later, Cheever wrote in his journal: “Lowell is dead and God have mercy on his soul.”

THE PREVIOUS SUMMER Cheever had finally shown a fragment of his novel to Linscott, who (as Cheever later noted) “found so little worthwhile that I was never able to look at the manuscript again.” After a long bout of story writing and other distractions, Cheever “slowly regrouped [his] forces for another trial,” but after months of effort he felt even more discouraged. The novel wasn't working. Even the prose was weak—full of “affectations” and “bad poetry,” perhaps by way of overcompensating for an absurd plot and dreary characters. “What is wrong with Aaron, a question I have asked a hundred times and may have to ask a hundred times more,” Cheever wrote. “He is not taken from life, but I did not mean him to be.” Aaron—the character that would someday become Leander Wapshot, an even more picturesque version of Frederick Cheever—was a man who suffered the same basic ills as Frederick (old age, poverty), but with neither the man's zaniness nor his benignity. As for the author's determination to demonize Aaron's wife, Sarah, simply because she opens a gift shop—well, obviously, it made no sense: “The descriptions of her enterprise make opening the shop a natural development,” Cheever reflected (with a fair-mindedness he could rarely muster in his own mother's behalf). “She also does this because they want money.”

At the end of almost ten years of sporadic work on The Holly Tree, Cheever was utterly stymied and broke as ever. Forced again to write short stories, he conceded temporary defeat in a sheepish (but stubbornly hopeful) letter to Linscott:

I am writing principally to say that I will not have a draft for you by the end of this month [January 1950]. No one regrets this more bitterly than I; but I cannot die whenever I announce another delay. … If you should feel, as Mary does, that I closet myself all day merely to take cat-naps I would be delighted to talk with you, to tell you how the book has changed over the years and to convince you that this is not a still-born project, an illusion, that my way is not hopelessly obstructed by some deep spiritual impediment and that I am not willfully tinkering with some old pages. I never read what I think of as the right, the durable chapters without some satisfaction and their number has increased steadily since fall.

Linscott replied with his usual equanimity (“I have told you many times we would rather wait for a really good novel than take an almost good novel prematurely”), but Cheever wasn't much consoled. As one decade dwindled into the next, he felt more than ever like a failure: “Sitting on the sofa, surrounded with friendly people, I kept saying: I am not doing well, I am not doing well enough. I must take a line on the novel, strong enough to get me out of bed in the morning.”

* Cheever adored this phrase, this image, and thought of using it in almost every novel he wrote. He liked to say that “fiction is our most intimate