Cheever
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HBD Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University
JC John Cheever
JJC The Journals of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
JU John Updike
LC Library of Congress
Lilly The Lilly Library, Indiana University
LJC Cheever, Benjamin, ed. The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
MC Mary Cheever (JC's wife)
Morgan The Morgan Library, New York
MZ Max Zimmer
Newberry Newberry Library, Chicago
NFB Cheever, Susan. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
NYPL-MSS Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library
OJ Updike, John. Odd Jobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
OWPS Oh What a Paradise It Seems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
PJC Papers of Jane Carr (JC's niece)
PRM Papers of Ray Mutter, M.D. (JC's physician)
Ransom Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas
Rochester Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester
SC Susan Cheever (JC's daughter)
SJC The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
SD Scott Donaldson
Swem Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary
TT Cheever, Susan. Treetops: A Family Memoir. New York: Bantam, 1991.
WC The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.
WM William Maxwell
WS The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
WSPL The Way Some People Live. New York: Random House, 1943.
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
PROLOGUE
3 “John had nothing but friends”: Malcolm Cowley, “John Cheever: The Novelist's Life as a Drama,” Sewanee Review 91, no. 1 (1983), 16.
3 “the salvation of the damned”: JJC, 393.
3 “A page of good prose”: OJ, 113.
3 “There were whole areas … I couldn't go into”: CJC, 126.
4 “no more lived-in than a bird perch”: OJ, 118.
4 “My name is John Cheever”: CJC, 126.
4 “Displaying much grandiosity and pride”: “Patient Progress Notes (4/14/75)” from Smithers, Swem.
4 “Cheever's is the triumph of a man in his sixties”: quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “John Cheever Is Dead at 70; Novelist Won Pulitzer Prize,” New York Times, June 19, 1982, sec. 1, p. 1.
4 “Long before Donald Barthelme”: Walter Clemons, “Cheever's Triumph,” Newsweek, March 14, 1977, 62.
5 “Grand Old Man of American Letters”: LJC, 352.
5 “Yankees are distinguished, and tormented as well”: Cowley, “Novelist's Life as Drama,” 15.
6 “His air of seriousness and responsibility”: JJC, 346.
6 “Life is an improvisation!”: author int. BC, June 7, 2004.
CHAPTER ONE: {1637–1912}
7 “Many skeletons in family closet”: WC, 97.
7 “bound to a drunken and tragic destiny”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
7 “We were swapping dirty stories”: Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 68.
7 “a half-wit who lived up the road”: JJC, 189.
8 “his untiring abjuration of the Devil”: quoted in Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” 68.
8 “The welfare of the commonwealth”: quoted in JC, “My Friend Malcolm Cowley,” New York Times Book Review, Aug. 28, 1983, 18. 8 “Old Zeke C”: FLC Sr. to JC and family, Nov. 14, 1943, CFP 8 “Why tell me?”: SD int. Edward Newhouse, June 5, 1984, Swem. 8 “celebrated ship's master”: CJC, 89.
Benjamin Cheever as master at the Newbury North School: Essex County, Massachusetts Biographies (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com, 2002), 559.
“to make them grow”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
9 “last sailing ship to be made in the Newburyport yards”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
9 “playing dominoes with old gent”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
10 “Mother, saintly old woman”: WC, 114.
10 “If this were so”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
10 “alcohol & opium—del[irium] tremens”: Massachusetts Archives, Death Records, vol. 339, p. 195.
10 “speeches on human ingratitude”: JC to Whit Burnett, Nov. 2, 1961, Swem.
10 “[Shakespeare's] plays seemed to light and distinguish: JC, “Homage to Shakespeare,” Story, Nov. 1937, 73-81.
10 “They always begin, as most journals do”: CJC, 149.
11 “Sturgeon in river then”: WC, 99.
11 “antic, ungrammatical and … vulgar”: JC, introduction, Time Reading Program Special Edition of The Wapshot Chronicle (New York: Time, Inc., 1965), xvii. 11 “makes as little as possible of any event”: CJC, 207.
11 “Grand sunsets after the daily thunder showers”: FLC Sr. memoir notes, CFP.
11 “at the tail of a cart”: JC to Tanya Litvinov, May 23, [1965].
“A competitor named Pierce”: LJC, 43.
12 “forgotten and disgraced”: JC, “An Afternoon Walk in Iowa City, Iowa,” Travel if Leisure, Sept. 1974, 50.
12 “black-mouthed old wreck”: SJC, 634.
12 “a memory I'm inclined to believe”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
14 Cheever claimed his great-grandfather was Sir Percy Devereaux: see JC to WM [c. Jan. 1968], Berg.
14 “He'd ask me if I wanted some cauliflower”: author int. SC, Nov. 11, 2004.
14 “a very well-educated English woman”: CJC, 134.
15 “There was nothing slummy about Aunt Anne”: JC to WM [c. Jan. 1968], Berg.
15 “a split personality”: CJC, 99.
16 “He persuaded her to give up her career”: author int. MC, June 19, 2004.
16 Mary Liley Cheever as “quite beautiful”: FLC Jr. to Dennis Coates, Oct. 20, 1973, Swem.
16 “He was constantly kissing my mother”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
16 “Madame President” type: Quoted in Dennis Edward Coates, “The Novels of John Cheever,” unpublished dissertation, Duke University, 1977, 19. Coates's dissertation is worthy of particular notice as its biographical material is based on a number of personal interviews with Cheever and his brother Fred.
16 like Sarah Wapshot, “had exhausted herself”: WS, 19.
17 “I was cropped”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
17 “In all the family albums she appeared”: WS, 23.
17 “Poor Coverly blamed everything”: JC, “Mrs. Wapshot,” unpublished manuscript, CFP.
CHAPTER TWO {1912–1926}
18 “I have no biography”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
18 “no memory for pain”: Jesse Kornbluth, “The Cheever Chronicle,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 1979, 29. 18 “From somewhere”: OJ, 108-9.
18 “I always felt there was a blank”: SD int. Hortense Calisher, Sept. 17, 1984, Swem.
18 “Life is melancholy”: Paul Williams, “John Cheever: Adding Luster to the Stream,” Patriot Ledger, April 18, 1979.
18 “If you are raised in this atmosphere”: SJC, 6.
19 “He focused on the surface and texture of life”: HBD, 77.
19 “I am quite naked to loneliness”: Arthur Unger, “John Cheever's First Tele-play—a Parody of Sitcoms,” Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 11, 1982, 15.
19 “[W]ith dad our sense of his past pain”: FC to SC, June 28, 1983, CFP. “Everybody loved [him]”: WS, 19.
20 “As my mother often pointed out”: [MacDowell] Colony Newsletter 9, no. 1 (Fall
1979). 20 “I remember my father's detestation”: JJC, 342.
21 “I assume the factory had not yet been invented”: LJC, 26.
21 “They were kindly and original people”: Earle F. Walbridge, “WLB Biography: John Cheever,” Wilson Library Bulletin, Dec. 1961, 324.
22 “I and the do
g walk with him”: JJC, 180.
22 “pleasant, relaxed”: CJC, 198.
22 “[W]e were always allowed to play touch football”: JC, “Thanks, Too, for Memories,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1976, C1.
23 “She gathered me in her arms”: JC memoir fragment, Berg. 23 “breakdown in service or finance”: JJC, 90.
23 “sentiments that were … too profound”: JC, “The Temptations of Emma Boynton,” New Yorker, Nov. 26, 1949, 29-31. The story is a fictionalized portrait of Anna Boynton Thompson, and recounts the same fateful Thanksgiving of 1922 that Cheever remembers in his nonfictional New York Times article (cited above), “Thanks, Too, for Memories.”
24 “the bubbling joie de vivre”: OJ, 109. 24 “truly halved”: JJC, 318.
24 “the stoniest glacial and tidal drift”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1961), 14.
25 “a red-blooded and a splendid inheritance”: JJC, 41.
25 “I've often wondered”: quoted in “Readers’ Opinions,” Patriot Ledger, July 9, 1982, 18.
25 “jollity and gloom [had contended] for an empire”: “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Random House, 1937), 882.
25 “[T]he difference between the legend and the present”: JC to Reuel Denney [c. mid-Aug.? 1934], Dartmouth.
25 “All of Dickens, from beginning to end”: CJC, 21.
25 “could be called on to recite ‘Casey at Bat’ “: ibid., 132.
25 “casting around for some way of improving”: LJC, 264.
26 “That's the way I feel about life”: “This Is My Music,” WQXR, January 12, 1980.
26 John “rose glibly to the occasion”: Florence M. Varley “My Most Famous Student: Arithmetic Wasn't His Subject,” NRTA Journal, March/April 1974, 33.
26 “exaggeration” and “preposterous falsehoods”: JC memoir fragment, Berg. 26 “not two faculties but one mega-faculty”: CJC, 29.
26 “Literature is a force of memory”: GT, 256.
27 “It's all right with us if you want to be a writer”: CJC, 208.
27 “When I was small”: Rollin Bailey to SD, Aug. 25, 1985, Swem.
27 “I did tend to see the bad side”: author int. Rollin Bailey, May 18, 2004.
27 propriety was “rigidly observed”: CJC, 189.
27 “My mother told me to tell you so”: [Thayerlands] Evergreen, Spring 1926, 26.
27 “she trashed [him] with a belt”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
28 “veered wildly into Christian Science”: CJC, 218. 28 “enchained by the flesh”: JJC, 337.
28 “a severe trial for her”: FLC Sr. to JC, Feb. 6, 1944, CFP.
28 “[T]hat boy of summer”: JJC, 235.
29 “To be an American and unable to play baseball”: JC, “The National Pastime,” New Yorker, Sept. 26, 1953, 29-35.
29 “Are you men sisters?”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
29 “sired a fruit”: JJC, 219.
30 “merry games of grabarse”: quoted in HBD, 175.
30 “the authority of an executioner”: LJC, 350.
30 “It was autumn”:JJC, 116-17.
31 “the most gratifying and unself-conscious relationship”: SJC, 685. The narrator of “The Jewels of the Cabots” is referring here to his boyhood chum “DeVarennes;” parallel passages in Cheever's journal clearly indicate that this character is based on Fax.
31 “F[ax] went home and gave it a try”: JJC, 246. In the published journal, Fax is identified by the initial “F;” his name is given in the original.
31 “When one bed got gummed up”: JC memoir fragment, Berg.
31 “Weren't we happy, Johnny?”: JJC, 359.
32 “Someone called from Thayer last winter”: CJC, 200.
CHAPTER THREE {1926-1930}
33 “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson”: JJC, 180, 284. On p. 180, the name “Mr. Forsyth” (which appears in the original) has been deleted.
34 “match the purchase to the person”: Rollin Bailey to SD, Sept. 4, 1985, Swem.
34 “You can't sell this”: CJC, 188.
34 “the same exclusiveness and beauty”: “Open Little Shop Around the Corner: Mrs. Cheever's New Store Has Atmosphere of French Salon,” Patriot Ledger (Quincy), Sept. 30, 1929, 2.
35 “They could have their humorless Boston respectability”: HBD, 16.
35 “My underlying conviction is that any Cheever”: FLC Jr. to Sarah Cheever, Dec. 4, 1970, PJC.
36 “I have been a storyteller”: JJC, 156.
36 “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever”: Henry Allen, “John Cheever: Capturing the Splendors of Suburbia,” Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1979, B13.
36 “Unclean outcasts whose destiny”: notes on F, Houghton.
37 “I'm tickled to know that the letters still serve”: LJC, 221.
37 “the antiques … out of Cheever's Yankee past”: CJC, 204.
37 “dissipation of every kind”: Lillian Wentworth, “ … And Recalled: John Cheever at Prep School,” Parents League of New York Review, 1984, 1.
38 “a large cast of absolutely naked men”: JC, “My Friend Malcolm Cowley” New York Times Book Review, Aug. 28, 1983, 7.
38 “What future is there … ?”: Florence M. Varley “My Most Famous Student,” NRTA Journal, March/April 1974, 33. 38 “didn't take well to discipline”: CJC, 194.
38 “It made me feel good”: ibid., 103.
38 “safety-pinned tuxedo”: JC to Louis Kronenberger, May 21 [1968?], Copley.
39 “the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia”: CJC, 25.
39 “My friend, John Cheever, loves it”: New York Times Book Review, Jan. 15, 1956, 5.
39 “It must sound awfully precocious”: CJC, 21.
39 “I thought … he was a Charlus”: author int. Litvinov, Dec. 3, 2004.
39 “I remember walking down a street in Boston”: JJC, 152.
40 “some marble-shooting chum”: JC to Frederick Bracher [c. July 1964], Bancroft.
40 “What have you learned from Ernest Hemingway?”: Jesse Kornbluth, “The Cheever Chronicle,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 1979, 102.
40 “I think it's fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize”: LJC, 142.
40 “enormous confidence in their own genius”: Malcolm Cowley, “John Cheever: The Novelist's Life as a Drama,” Sewanee Review, 91, no. 1 (1983), 12.
40 Manhattan that “was still filled with a river light”: SJC, vii. 40 Fielding consumed “intravenously”: CJC, 75.
40 “Oh no, no,” he hemmed: author int. George McLoone, July 31, 2004.
41 “For Christ's sake”: JJC, 152.
41 “The beach was deserted”: JC memoir fragment, Berg; see also F, 60-62.
42 “drunken, debauched and naked”: LJC, 338.
42 “He did not even give me bus fare”: JJC, 242.
43 “I'm a businesswoman!”: Alwyn Lee, “Ovid in Ossining,” Time, March 27, 1964, 68.
43 “ ‘Polish them Dad’ “: FLC Sr. to JC, Oct. 17, 1943, CFP.
43 “Well, she did damage my father”: CJC, 235.
44 “to give some fitness and shape”: JC to Bracher, July 15, 1962, Bancroft.
45 “[E]very stranger's face”: Marian Christy, “Ben Cheever—a Son in the Shadow,” Boston Globe, Dec. 25, 1988, A14.
45 “total kook”: author int. Anne Peirce, Oct. 27, 2004.
45 “On more than one occasion”: Gordon Godfrey to SD [c. Aug. 1985], Swem.
45 “When I told her people laughed at Galsworthy”: JC, “Expelled,” New Republic, Oct. 1, 1930, 172.
45 “existed not to educate us in any way”: JC, “My Friend Malcolm Cowley,” 18.
46 “I was approached by angry graduates”: author int. Peter Benelli, Oct. 10, 2004.
46 “extremely understanding and vastly intelligent”: CJC, 237.
46 “The young man was not expelled from the Academy”: Stacy B. Southworth to Horace Thorner, Oct. 24, 1930, Thayer.
<
br /> 46 Judging from “Expelled”: for insight into Cheever's apparent research of The New Republic's pet issues, I'm indebted to Giles Y. Gamble's fascinating paper, “John Cheever's ‘Expelled’: The Genesis of a Beginning,” American Literary History 7, no. 4 (1994), 611-32.
47 “alarmingly mature,” as Updike put it: OJ, 114.
48 “It felt precisely … eighty-seven dollars”: CJC, 45
48 “Have you been writing today?”: LJC, 29. Glover had made the front page: “Tired of World, Dartmouth Boy Takes to Woods,” Boston Herald, Nov. 20, 1928, 1.
49 “Personally, had I the choice”: Grace Osgood to Lillian Wentworth [c. spring 1980], Thayer.
49 “His portrait of her dazzles me”: Hugh Hennedy to SD, Oct. 9, 1985, Swem.
49 “Without Stacy Baxter Southworth”: JC to Robert Mower, Nov. 3, 1981, Thayer.
49 “[He was] wandering under some Elm trees”: JC to Hugh Hennedy, Aug. 7,
1980.
CHAPTER FOUR {1930–1934}
51 “I was some kid in those days”: Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1953, 8.
51 Howard Street—”the arse-end of the city”: JC to Denney [c. Aug. 1934], Dartmouth.
51 “It was like a love affair”: author int. J. William Silverberg, Sept. 23, 2004.
52 “the erotic romance of his life”: author int. Allan Gurganus, Jan. 16, 2005. 52 “I wept for a love”: JJC, 335.
52 “prescot [sic] townsend will very nearly give me”: LJC, 29.
53 “lunatic Swiss Family Robinson”: quoted in Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin's, 2003), 240. I am indebted to this entertaining book for background on the Beacon Hill bohemia of the twenties and thirties, as well as Cheever's friendships with Townsend, Wheelwright, and Dana.
53 “[H]e is very nice, very guarded”: JC to Cowley [c. fall 1930], Newberry
53 “those who split the monism of love”: quoted in Shand-Tucci, Crimson Letter, 114.
54 “I could not imagine a man so old”: JC to Gurganus, March 21 [1974].
54 “Everything I saw meant war”: LJC, 51.
55 “We had a funny conversation”: author int. Sarah Connoway Jan. 27, 2005.
55 “On the Quai de Louvre, we are told”: New Yorker, July 25, 1931, 7. This “Talk” item was written by E. B. White and reported by Cheever, as one learns from a visit to The New Yorker's library or from the indispensable DVD set, The Complete New Yorker (New York: Random House, 2005).