Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  Located on several hundred acres between the Saratoga racetrack and the Northway interstate, the estate that became Yaddo was donated by Spencer and Katrina Trask. According to legend, a vision came to Mrs. Trask as she and her husband were walking around the grounds on a summer afternoon in 1899. As the prose of Marjorie Peabody Waite described it, she suddenly foresaw the estate as a place of inspiration for writers and other artists who were “city-weary, who [were] thirsting for the country and for beauty, who [were] hemmed in by circumstances and [had] no opportunity to make for themselves an harmonious environment.… At Yaddo they will find the Sacred Fire, and light their torches at its flame. Look, Spencer! They are walking in the woods, wandering in the garden, sitting under the pine trees—men and women—creating, creating, creating!”

  Actually a quarter of a century intervened before the creating started. Meanwhile Spencer Trask died in a railroad accident on the last day of 1909, Katrina Trask married George Foster Peabody in 1921 and died the following year, and Peabody fell in love with and adopted the Marjorie Waite whose enthusiastic history of Yaddo is quoted above. Marjorie’s sister was Elizabeth Ames, and another legend has it that one day as Peabody was considering who should be chosen to run the colony, a halo of light shone down on Elizabeth’s hair. It was a fortunate omen. Mrs. Ames was in charge when Yaddo opened its doors in 1926, and stayed on the job for more than forty years. The estate itself consisted of a fifty-five-room gray stone mansion, “all cupolas and porches and bay windows on the outside, stained glass and oiled floors and marble statuary within,” a garage with living quarters, three smaller houses, and several studios. In addition, Yaddo contained four small lakes, a rose garden open to the public, miles of paths through hundreds of acres of woodland, a tennis court, and eventually—at Cheever’s insistence—a swimming pool.

  Katrina Trask had originally thought of the colonists at Yaddo as houseguests, and Elizabeth Ames, a woman of considerable presence, sought to maintain an air of gentility about the place. The “guests” were expected to dress for dinner, and improprieties of all sorts were discouraged. Cheever, who had youth, good manners, and a winning wit, soon became one of her favorites. For him, Yaddo served as a refuge, almost as a home. He visited there for three full months in 1934, and for at least that long during each of the four years that followed. At Yaddo he met and talked of the profession with other, more established writers. He also learned to demand a regular daily production from himself, in conditions that could hardly have been more ideal.

  As at the MacDowell Colony and other artists’ havens, the program at Yaddo encouraged results by eliminating outside distractions. Then as now the daily routine consisted of breakfast from eight to nine, followed by seven uninterrupted hours for work. In solitude, each colonist took a box lunch back to his or her room or studio. Visitors were unwelcome from nine to four, and only emergency phone calls were put through. In the evening there was a communal dinner, with no organized social activities thereafter. Some wonderful art emerged from Yaddo under these circumstances. There Cheever produced much of his best fiction. There he formed some of his closest and most important friendships.

  James T. Farrell was at Yaddo that first summer of 1934, finishing his Studs Lonigan trilogy, and with him his wife, Dorothy, who had somehow managed to escape Elizabeth Ames’s usual prohibition against spouses. For a time, in fact, Dorothy functioned as Elizabeth’s assistant. A precocious college actress at the University of Chicago, she was seven years her husband’s junior and had eloped with him when she was only seventeen. That made her almost exactly Cheever’s age, and as the two youngest colonists they became fast friends. In the late-summer afternoons they sometimes went rowing on Saratoga Lake. In the evenings they all traipsed into town to assemble at a wonderful, now-defunct bookstore or at the bar of the New Worden Hotel, also departed. Even in those years Cheever drank a lot. Among the first things Dorothy Farrell noticed about him were the gin bottles stowed outside his door for the maids to dispose of. But he was clearly a worker too, and a charmer, with an engaging effervescence about him. He was short but walked very fast. He did everything fast, as if he were out to enjoy life and glad of companions along the way. For Dorothy Farrell, he was mostly a playmate. For Elizabeth Ames, he was immediately the star boarder.

  Cheever was at Yaddo from June 4 through July 28, 1934. When he went back to Boston, he was almost ready to break his bond to Fred. The love he felt for his brother was, as he said a hundred times, “the strongest love” of his life. Boston of the mid-1930s was “so anxious to fortify its own eccentricities” that it rather welcomed the oddly inseparable Cheever brothers. The two even made preliminary plans to buy a small house together at Boxford, whence Fritz would commute to his advertising job at the Pepperell Manufacturing Company while Joey crafted Jamesian novels. But the arrangement began to take on “an ungainly closeness.” He and his brother were “morbidly close,” John decided, and his own feelings disturbingly “incestuous.”

  Cheever portrayed this unnatural closeness in “The Brothers,” a 1937 story that is patently autobiographical. “That was a true story,” Hazel Werner testifies. Kenneth and Tom, the brothers of the title, pay a weekend visit to a farm on the North Shore to see the widowed Amy and her comely daughter Jane. Kenneth and Tom are entirely comfortable with each other. In escaping from their bitterly mismatched parents, the brothers have fallen into a routine that does not admit of quarreling. Jane, who has a yen for Kenneth, goes dancing with the two of them and senses their solidarity. “Above everything she felt how accustomed the boys were to sitting across from each other at table with no one between them.” They have shared so much as to shut out others entirely. They have even shared girlfriends, in fact. So though she tries desperately, Jane cannot succeed in wooing Kenneth to herself.

  Tom sees Jane’s frustration and begins to worry. “He loved his brother, and this love was the strongest thing in his comprehension, but it was a love that held no jealousy and no fear and no increase, and in the beginning it had been as simple as walking into the sun.” Witnessing Kenneth’s indifference to Jane, it occurs to him for the first time “that their devotion to each other might be stronger than their love of any girl or even than their love of the world.” So he decides to go away, to give up “the little certainty they had rescued from the wreck of their home. He felt the sharp thrust of responsibility for them both—they must live and not wear out their lives like old clothes, in a devotion that would defeat its own purpose.” The following night he takes a bus for New York. That is exactly what John Cheever did, shortly after returning to Boston from Yaddo in the late summer of 1934.

  “The Brothers” revealed only part of the curious relationship between Fred and John Cheever, and barely hinted at the animosity beneath the surface. It was a theme he took up repeatedly in his fiction. “The brothers story I’ve told fifty times, I guess. Sometimes I think I am not telling it, but I am.” Most of these stories contain violence. “I strike him in some, I hit him with sticks, rocks; he in turn also damages me.…” Matters were not simple between them, and at the time of John’s departure for New York—despite the disclaimer in “The Brothers”—they may have been affected by jealousy.

  John saw Iris Gladwin first. Canadian by birth, she had moved to a Winthrop Avenue house in Quincy as a girl. She was just John’s age, and they surely must have seen each other at Quincy high school during the 1928–29 year he spent there. Later she attended art classes at the museum with both brothers, as a form of relaxation from her training as a nurse. Gradually John became fond of her, and began to take her out. Then Fred took an interest too, and she chose him. It was the sensible choice. He was a reliable businessman with a good job, John an insecure artist with no visible means of support. Less than two months after John went to New York, Fred Cheever married Iris Gladwin.

  There was no open rift between the Cheever brothers, however. To begin with, Fred sent his younger brother a weekly allowance of ten dollars in New Yor
k. Once, during his first winter in the city, John awoke to the sound of a snowball plashing against the window of his tiny room, and knew at once that Fred had come to see him. When he went back to Massachusetts, he visited Fred and Iris as a matter of course. Still, he had broken free at last. When he climbed aboard the night bus that rattled down through Worcester and Hartford to the great city on the Hudson, John declared his independence. If he was to be a writer, he would be one in New York, and on his own.

  STARTING

  1934–1937

  It took courage for John Cheever to leave his brother behind and strike out at twenty-two, at the very bottom of the Depression, to gamble on a career as a writer in the metropolis of New York. Cheever’s fictional Coverly Wapshot, a youth brought up in small-town St. Botolphs, is repeatedly confounded by his first encounter with the city. Coverly has never seen a high building or a dachshund, a man wearing suede shoes or a woman blowing her nose on a piece of Kleenex, a parking meter or a pay telephone. Unwilling to betray his ignorance by asking directions, Coverly is drawn instinctively to the north, following the crowds from midtown Manhattan through Central Park to the Upper West Side, past a stickball game in Harlem and finally on the subway farther north still to the outermost reaches of the Bronx. Cheever was not so innocent as that. He had lived in Boston or within eight miles of it all his life. And he had suffered through at least one rite of passage on his 1930 trip to New York soon after The New Republic printed “Expelled.”

  On that occasion the youth went to see Malcolm Cowley, who had accepted the story. Cowley was charmed. “I hadn’t ever met before a boy … who could speak honestly about himself, and in English,” he recalled. “I never afterward met another.” He invited Cheever back to a party that he and his first wife, Peggy, were giving. “You must be John Cheever,” Peggy said, meeting him at the door. “Everyone else is here.” Cheever was offered a choice of two drinks. “One was greenish. The other was brown … one was a manhattan and the other Pernod.” Eager to appear as sophisticated as possible, he accepted a manhattan. Then he accepted several more. After four or five cocktails, he realized he was going to vomit, but his manners did not entirely desert him. He “rushed to Mrs. Cowley, thanked her for the party, and reached the apartment-house hallway” before throwing up on the wallpaper.

  Cowley continued to encourage his career during the next few years. Though he could not accept pieces—part essay, part story—Cheever sent The New Republic about the walking trip in Germany and about the deepening malaise among the young, Cowley believed in Cheever’s talent. He gave him a novel about prep-school life to review in 1931. He was instrumental in getting him into Yaddo. And in July 1934 when Cheever came to New York alone, Malcolm Cowley was one of the two people he could count on to help him as much as he could.

  The other was Hazel Hawthorne Werner, who had moved to New York from Boston with her husband and urged Cheever to follow. The Werners’ kindness to him was “exhaustive and indescribable.” When he arrived in Greenwich Village, they put him up on the sofa in their fifth-floor apartment on Waverly Place. Cummings stopped by that first night, and so did John Dos Passos. Later Cheever met Sherwood Anderson, Gaston Lachaise, Milton Avery, Walker Evans, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, and others through the Werners. Morrie Werner was also responsible for landing Cheever a part-time job almost immediately.

  M-G-M was looking for books that could be turned into successful films, and was hiring writers to read novels and make capsule summaries. Together with James T. Farrell and writer–social critic Paul Goodman, Cheever spent his midsummer days waiting around the M-G-M office for the woman who distributed the books to turn up and hand them out. The going rate was five dollars for a three-to-five-page synopsis, with carbons. That, along with the weekly ten dollars from brother Fred, was the extent of Cheever’s income.

  Three dollars a week went for rent on his tiny fourth-floor room at 633 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. The other tenants were mostly unemployed seacooks and longshoremen. Whores used the downstairs toilet. Initially the longshoremen didn’t know what to make of Cheever’s accent or his gray flannel suit and blue button-down shirts. They encouraged him to take some sort of extension course or an exam for post office work. Paul Goodman, who was “thought to be a genius,” misunderstood the situation in a different way. He conceived the idea that because Cheever lived among sailors, he must be homosexual, and made a pass that was gently rebuffed.

  The room itself was depressing and the summer heat enervating. In a photograph Walker Evans caught the miserably spare room, illuminated by the afternoon light that seeped around the blind of the single window. Cheever was no sooner settled than he wanted to get out. Within the first week he petitioned Elizabeth Ames for another visit to Yaddo. He was using so much time and energy poring over other people’s novels for M-G-M, he said, that it was almost impossible to start one of his own. That was what he planned to do at Yaddo.

  Mrs. Ames manufactured an opening at the end of August. Meanwhile Cowley helped him skimp out a precarious existence. Cheever presented himself with a number of other young writers at The New Republic offices on Wednesday afternoons. That was the day Cowley handed out books for review and, often, books that were never to be reviewed that the writers could sell. In a small way this helped impoverished young authors keep going. The notorious Joe Gould also came every Wednesday, got a dollar, and left. Bearded and unbathed, his clothes spotted with ketchup, Gould panhandled around Village bars for decades. He was, he said, writing a history of the world. It was never completed.

  That summer of 1934, Cheever reviewed Josephine Johnson’s Now in November, a novel about the Midwestern drought, for The New Republic. The author was young, only twenty-four, and Cowley may have thought that Cheever would feel a certain affinity for her work. He did and he didn’t. He admired Johnson’s “fragile and, in its way, nearly perfect” talent, but chided her for her tranquil tone and her interest in “the little things.” The drought was a national disaster. Johnson was “observing the salamanders while the fields [were] burning.”

  Cowley also sent his young protégé to talk to Harrison Smith, of Cape & Smith, about his prospective novel. Smith had published Cowley’s book of poems, Blue Juniata, in 1929. Perhaps he could be persuaded to give Cheever an advance. He could not, for a reason that was to have a continuing effect on Cheever’s reputation. The short-story writer and the novelist were “two different birds,” Smith thought. Cheever refused to be discouraged, and set off for five weeks at Yaddo, determined to bring back a healthy chunk of the novel.

  Already the estate in Saratoga was beginning to seem familiar. If the decor did not entirely suit his taste, it was certainly distinctive. Coming down the stairway from his room for breakfast—he occupied many different rooms during his visits to Yaddo—Cheever passed the brass mermaid, the Tiffany window of a woman holding a flower (this was supposed to be Katrina Trask herself), and the cast of Venus he would smack on the backside as he slid down the banister. His room invariably contained some emblem of culture—a charcoal drawing of Dante, perhaps—and was almost always in need of repairs. On one visit, a sign cautioned him to shut the shower door, lest water drip on the piano below. That turned out to be no problem at all, since the shower didn’t work. Yaddo was one of a kind, unique, sui generis. Room and board were free to those who could not afford to pay. Cheever loved it there and thought it the best place in the world to work.

  Despite Yaddo’s encouraging ambience, what Cheever wrote during his 1934 visits did not sell. His beginning-of-a-novel failed to attract an advance. Meanwhile, a couple of magazine editors were holding stories. If he could only get one acceptance, he wrote Elizabeth Ames, the other editors might loosen up. In discouragement, he went back to New York to face the hardest winter of his life. “I was cold, I was hungry, I was lonely,” he recalled. Though M-G-M gave him an occasional book to write a synopsis of, funds were so short that he subsisted for weeks on stale bread and buttermilk. There were a few hous
es and apartments he could go to for a meal, but his pride would not let him abuse that privilege.

  Cheever had plenty of company in his misery. In the Battery, drifters sat along the docks with their junk bags on mild days, sharing cigarette butts and staring into the water. As it grew colder, they huddled together over small bonfires. Some slept in doorways with newspapers for blankets. As many as twelve hundred a night slept at the Municipal Lodging House, Annex No. 2, in the old ferry shed at the foot of Whitehall Street. Farther uptown in Union Square, poor people ate in cheap restaurants that dispensed plain food for nickels and dimes and quarters, and forgot their troubles in cheap movie theaters that showed double features and gave away dishes during intermission. Cheever himself spent long afternoons in Washington Square, discussing with other hungry men the effects of not having enough to eat. “It was the torpor we objected to,” he recalled. Poverty complicated every detail of daily life. Someday when he got some money, his friend Shorty Quirt said, he was going to shave with a new blade and wear clean socks every day.

  As Cheever wrote Elizabeth Ames, it had been “a lean strange winter” so far. At least he had two acceptances to report, from The New Republic and Story Magazine. Both stories drew heavily on his own experience. The documentary-style “Autobiography of a Drummer” read like an apologia for his father’s failure. In the much longer and more complex “Of Love: A Testimony,” a story about a young woman who unaccountably shuttles back and forth as the lover of two close friends, he tried to work out his feelings about Iris and Fred. At the end he imagines a dim future for the odd man out in the triangle: