story a day for the next four days, none of them longer than a thousand words? Then bring them to me and Iâll see whether I canât get you some money for them.â It was a labor to daunt any writer, but Cheever agreed at once. On Wednesday afternoon he appeared in Cowleyâs office with the four stories. The New Republic took one of them, an anecdote about a burlesque performer called âThe Princess.â The other three Cowley sent to Katharine White at The New Yorker , and she took twoââBrooklyn Rooming Houseâ and âBuffalo.â (The fourth story, âBayonne,â was published in the spring of 1936 in a little magazine.)
So commenced one of the longest and most important publishing connections in American literary history. The New Yorker , barely a decade old in 1935, was looking for talented newcomers who could grow along with it and help to build circulation. In Cheever they found what they wanted. He was two days short of his twenty-third birthday when The New Yorker first printed a story of his. He was not quite sixty-nine when they printed the last one. Altogether 121 stories by Cheever ran in the magazine, more than by any other author except John OâHara. In all other periodicals he published only 54 additional stories. William Maxwell, who edited most of his New Yorker stories (usually they required very little editing), became one of Cheeverâs closest friends. Gus Lobrano, who replaced Maxwell for a time, provided conservative counsel and performed the fatherly service of teaching Cheever to fish. Even editor in chief Harold Ross, a gruff man who rarely trafficked with fiction writers, occasionally took Cheever to lunch.
The pieces Cheever wrote for The New Yorker in the 1930s bear little relation to the great stories that appeared there in later decades. Long stories like âThe Enormous Radio,â âGoodbye, My Brother,â âThe Country Husband,â and âThe Swimmerâ brought whole worlds to life and conveyed a powerful emotional charge. In contrast, most of the early New Yorker stories were brief, pessimistic sketches. âGoddammit, Cheever,â Ross swore, âwhy do you write these goddam gloomy stories?â There were reasons enough, and the young writer could hardly change his viewpoint on demand. Looking back on the decade thirty years later, Cheever could only bring the thirties into focus through a filter of grainy darkness. Everything sloped downhill, toward war.
Others more politically committed than he were madly hopeful. Cowley, for instance, has written of the 1930s dream of the golden mountains, of the invigorating sense of living in history with a chance to change it for the better, come the revolution. Cheever witnessed what seemed the last throes of capitalismâno one with eyes could have failed toâbut could not summon up the utopian vision of the true believer. His stories of the period tell of poverty and disillusionment, and of his dark belief that neither Communism nor pacifism could rescue mankind from itself.
Time after time the economic crisis forces his characters to compromise their humanity and abandon their hopes. In evocations of the working class thought by latter-day critics to be beyond his ken, Cheever glimpsed the dreary and loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, striptease artists, and sailors down on their luck. More effectively, his tales caught middle-class people trying to maintain their dignity in a time of diminished expectations. An example is âBrooklyn Rooming House,â the first of his New Yorker stories. The landlady who runs the rooming house has clearly seen better days. It is not even her own house she is in charge of, and since she cannot evict the drunks and hooligans, she pretends that they are gentlemen. In a moving finish, one of her drunken renters collapses on the stairs. At first she purports not to notice. Then she goes to him, bends over, and as
So commenced one of the longest and most important publishing connections in American literary history. The New Yorker , barely a decade old in 1935, was looking for talented newcomers who could grow along with it and help to build circulation. In Cheever they found what they wanted. He was two days short of his twenty-third birthday when The New Yorker first printed a story of his. He was not quite sixty-nine when they printed the last one. Altogether 121 stories by Cheever ran in the magazine, more than by any other author except John OâHara. In all other periodicals he published only 54 additional stories. William Maxwell, who edited most of his New Yorker stories (usually they required very little editing), became one of Cheeverâs closest friends. Gus Lobrano, who replaced Maxwell for a time, provided conservative counsel and performed the fatherly service of teaching Cheever to fish. Even editor in chief Harold Ross, a gruff man who rarely trafficked with fiction writers, occasionally took Cheever to lunch.
The pieces Cheever wrote for The New Yorker in the 1930s bear little relation to the great stories that appeared there in later decades. Long stories like âThe Enormous Radio,â âGoodbye, My Brother,â âThe Country Husband,â and âThe Swimmerâ brought whole worlds to life and conveyed a powerful emotional charge. In contrast, most of the early New Yorker stories were brief, pessimistic sketches. âGoddammit, Cheever,â Ross swore, âwhy do you write these goddam gloomy stories?â There were reasons enough, and the young writer could hardly change his viewpoint on demand. Looking back on the decade thirty years later, Cheever could only bring the thirties into focus through a filter of grainy darkness. Everything sloped downhill, toward war.
Others more politically committed than he were madly hopeful. Cowley, for instance, has written of the 1930s dream of the golden mountains, of the invigorating sense of living in history with a chance to change it for the better, come the revolution. Cheever witnessed what seemed the last throes of capitalismâno one with eyes could have failed toâbut could not summon up the utopian vision of the true believer. His stories of the period tell of poverty and disillusionment, and of his dark belief that neither Communism nor pacifism could rescue mankind from itself.
Time after time the economic crisis forces his characters to compromise their humanity and abandon their hopes. In evocations of the working class thought by latter-day critics to be beyond his ken, Cheever glimpsed the dreary and loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, striptease artists, and sailors down on their luck. More effectively, his tales caught middle-class people trying to maintain their dignity in a time of diminished expectations. An example is âBrooklyn Rooming House,â the first of his New Yorker stories. The landlady who runs the rooming house has clearly seen better days. It is not even her own house she is in charge of, and since she cannot evict the drunks and hooligans, she pretends that they are gentlemen. In a moving finish, one of her drunken renters collapses on the stairs. At first she purports not to notice. Then she goes to him, bends over, and as
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