John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson

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 houses 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:
    Make him employed or unemployed, put him in a strange city without money or on board a train leaving the city.… He is older. His face is lined. His topcoat is shabby. He stands on the platform smoking a cigarette. He has taken the wrong train and there is nobody there to meet him.
    In actuality, Cheever was working to construct a happier future for himself than that represented by the bereft odd man out. He had started a novel at Yaddo partly in response to Cowley’s suggestion that he try to write a book that would appeal to the younger generation much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise had fifteen years earlier. But now Cowley had read the completed chapters of this novel, variously titled Empty Bed Blues and Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps , and found them disappointing. They read too much like stories, Cowley thought, each chapter reaching a dead end. And they sounded too much like Hemingway—particularly the Hemingway of “Cross Country Snow”—both in style and theme. That was discouraging news, and so was the fact that most of the stories Cheever had written lately were being rejected by the magazines.
    On a Friday evening in midwinter, Cowley asked Cheever to come for dinner and a talk about his career. It proved to be one of the most momentous evenings of his life. Cheever obviously needed to make some money from his fiction, both men agreed. His novel-in-progress did not offer much promise along those lines. In addition, the stories Cheever was writing were too long, up to six or seven thousand words. Editors didn’t like to buy long stories from unknown writers, Cowley explained. The solution was to write shorter stories.
    â€œIt’s Friday now,” Cowley said. “Why don’t you write a