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By Root 3827 0

its twenty-fifth anniversary with a famous gala at the Ritz, Cheever took stock of his affairs. Both his lack of money and certain limitations in his work were linked, undoubtedly, to his dependence on the magazine, and he wondered how he might improve as a writer and yet continue to support his family. His friend Irwin Shaw was now cheerfully scribbling left-handed screenplays for Sam Goldwyn—while retaining (for the time being) his reputation as a serious writer—and for Cheever it was exquisite agony to hear Shaw complain, blithely over lunch, about how much money he'd have to make this year in order to pay taxes on his earnings from last year, and so on.* Cheever, meanwhile, was momentarily pleased that he'd sold a recent story and could almost afford to take his family to Martha's Vineyard for the summer; also, his friend Lennie Field had agreed to loan him a car. But of course such contentment was fleeting: “I am tired of borrowing and hedging and living like a bum,” he complained in his journal, adding that he again felt like killing himself (“I have so little to pass on to my children”). One would scarcely have guessed that he had only to accept money from his wife, who—on the death of her Watson grandmother in the late forties—had begun to receive a modest inheritance every quarter. Only in moments of the most hopeless penury, though, would Cheever stoop to borrowing from her (“It wasn't genteel,“ she explained), and for many years, at least, he'd insist on covering household expenses out of his own pocket. Indeed, as a decent if tenuous member of the middle class, he was even loath to accept the hospitality of a grateful Mrs. Ames, who urged him to return to Yaddo after a long absence. “I cannot, in good conscience, accept an invitation,” he wrote her, “knowing that a younger and a needier man would benefit … more than I.” Instead he advised her to invite his old friends Pete and Elizabeth Collins (the latter an abstract artist), whom he knew to be poor but industrious.

“Tonight Ross is giving a party for seven hundred people to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine and I am going to wear a tuxedo which I bought in a second-hand clothing store on East End Avenue,” Cheever wrote Herbst on March 18, 1950. “I got some studs at Woolworths and a ready-tied black tie in a store in Times Square. We are going with Hazel Werner who is going to wear a night-gown and with Morrie who is also wearing a second-hand dinner jacket and I guess the city will probably never see such a concentration of hair-dye, hand-me-downs, and five and ten cent store jewelry.” The lavish bash was a landmark event for New York's literati, who packed the Ritz grand ballroom and spilled into the Oval Room amid a constant din of music and laughter and tinkling glasses. Cheever got very drunk and “skipped around the dance floor” until half past three, when he piled into a taxi with Shaw and others to pay a visit to Shaw's bedridden wife—or so Cheever dimly remembered the next day, amid a “profound physical and spiritual depression”: “A lot of people complimented me on my stories,” he noted a little doubtfully, “and I hope that I can at least take from this some confident feeling that people are interested in seriousness and that I have been able to preserve in spite of the pages of The New Yorker, many of my own characteristics.”

The magazine imposed constraints on fiction writers—of length, subject matter, and language—that, Cheever thought, had reduced his work to a “contemptible smallness;” the best solution was to finish his novel, but of course that wasn't panning out and the failure was affecting his everyday mood as well as that of his “gloomy goddamn stories,” as Ross would have it. And yet Cheever knew his work was improving and would continue to improve if only he could “achieve some equilibrium between writing and living”—less drinking, more discipline, and the rest would follow: “I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty