Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [97]
Cheever completed a draft in late 1949 and continued to revise for a few months; because of the length, however (as well as complexity and mature themes, perhaps), the story would not appear in The New Yorker until 1954. Returning galleys at last, Cheever felt obliged to explain a few points to Maxwell, who was apt to enforce a certain Rossian literality: “It is supposed to operate something like a rondo and I don't think the chronology can be too exact. … The story is intentionally sketchy—Hartley is supposed to be a good man without my saying so. … [T]he story asks a lot from the reader and repays him with the noise of the wind up the chimney.” As in Cheever's early, elliptical finger exercises—his rather simplistic Chekhov pastiches—much of the story's meaning is suggested by understatement; but in terms of sheer technical mastery, and depth of feeling, the story's relation to those apprentice efforts is that of, say, The Cherry Orchard to the jocular newspaper sketches of Chekhov's youth. “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” the Nudds are forever asking each other, and so the family members take up their familiar parts of “this chronicle of small disasters”—about a summer day long ago when the pig drowned and Mr. Nudd had to swim ashore with Aunt Martha because their boat sank and young Esther got thin and had her first affair with a poor neighbor and so forth. As the past is examined, piece by piece, the sadness of the present transpires “softly, softly,” rather like the insidious voice of Cheever's enormous radio. There is an accumulation of parenthetical asides—bits of exposition that become darker and darker: “Mr. Nudd's part in the narration was restrained (Aunt Martha was dead);” “But their memories of the war were less lasting than most memories, and, except for Hartley's death (Hartley had drowned in the Pacific), it was easily forgotten.” So the story proceeds, quite like a rondo, circling back to the past, the pig, while the present unfurls “like magicians’ colored scarves”—novelist Anne Tyler's apt phrase for the marvelous legerdemain of Cheever's best work. Finally, the entire span of the Nudds’ lives is evoked and somehow sadly transcended all at once: “There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view [Mrs. Nudd] saw from her porch.” Thinking it over, she realizes in a single sinking moment that “none of them had done well”—and rouses herself by asking the others if they remember the day the pig fell into the well. “It had begun to blow outside,” the story ends, “and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone.”
Rightly pleased with this magnificent story,* Cheever showed it in typescript to his long-suffering Random House editor, Linscott, who pronounced it “the best you have ever written” (while wondering, perhaps, how Cheever could compress the material for four or five novels into twenty-odd pages and yet not be able to complete a novel per se). With that time-consuming triumph behind him, Cheever hoped to find a little peace and quiet that summer (1950) so he could more briskly “pry a saleable story out of [his] head.” He drove to Treetops in Lennie Field's expensive-looking