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By Root 3942 0

Packard, which belied his overdrawn bank account and helped him cash (and bounce) a twenty-five-dollar check at the local grocery store. As for Treetops, he had even less luck working there than usual—the families were as combative as ever—though he thought he might make some fictional use of the cook that summer, “a crazy Pole”: “At night when the dishes are done she butters a loaf of bread and goes out to feed the chipmunks, porcupines, birds, and fishes. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she shouts at them.” Cheever stayed a month, wrote nothing of merit, and proceeded en famille to a nice rented house at Seven Gates Farm on Martha's Vineyard—more than he could afford, of course, but working conditions now struck him as “perfect”: “This house is remote and quiet and fish is plentiful and cheap,” he wrote Lobrano. “Some kind neighbors take Mary and the children to the beach in the mornings and don't return them until one or two. Then at six I take them to the beach again where we usually cook supper.”

With all the time and quiet and scenery he could possibly desire, Cheever remained morose and unproductive. “It's been sort of a fuckedup summer,” he wrote Herbst. The cliffs of Gay Head were stunning, the beaches ditto, but he couldn't help thinking the whole thing was about to “sink into the ocean.” Moreover, he looked askance at “the hosts of people with white shoes” who gathered on the island every year for softball and cocktail parties and dances; Cheever found them nice enough but scorned their frivolity and felt envious, as always, toward their rather too vivid gentility. “At the West Tisbury fair I felt lost,” he wrote in his journal.

It was last summer's feeling of being a stranger in a closely integrated community. … The dance at West Chop was a charming archaism; the old people sitting around the wall, musical chairs, the pretty girls. I walked on South Beach and tore my hair. Why? The sea was blue. … West Chop does not really interest me. It proves how insular and foolish a social group can become when they are able to isolate themselves, how this transparent illusion of superiority sustains them. It was close to high-comedy, the husbands and wives falling in love with one another; men and women of forty stealing kisses in the backs of cars.

On his desk was the beginning of a gloomy story titled “The Backgammon Game.” Cheever could hardly bear to look at it. He wanted to write something “funny, beautiful, light,” but a constant “undertow of depression” dragged him away from any such effort—hollow at any rate—and back to the beach, alone, pacing, worrying about his debts, marriage, everything. “After lunch I walked along the beach; low tide, gold beards on the rock. … I kept thinking: but it is only a summer day, these are only debts … it is only a summer day.” At length, he returned (“sadly”) to where family and friends had finished a picnic, and saw his wife swimming with a neighbor named Florrie: “Mary's head was light. Florrie's head was black. … After a little while they walked out of the waves. They were both naked. The sight filled me with great joy.”

This was a start, but only a start. Back in Manhattan by mid-October, the first order of business was imparting the usual bad news to Linscott: “This is a report on the long-delayed novel and it isn't good. Of the work I did since Christmas I sold only one story and I had to work on articles and stories all summer. It was an anxious summer and one result of this was that I wrote in a peculiar mixture of sentimentality and laconism that has meant throwing away three of the five stories I completed.” Pausing perhaps to consider this, Cheever concluded with an almost audible sigh: “It is still my principle aim in life to write novels …” That settled, he returned to “The Backgammon Game” and realized, reading it over, that, “like some kinds of wine, it had not traveled. It was bad.” The story was about a family named Pommeroy who play backgammon for “life and death” stakes: one brother wins the other brother's wife; Mrs. Pommeroy loses rights to her children, and so on.