Read Online John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson - Free Book Online Page B

to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,” her father answered. Elsewhere he spoke casually of rolling off “his last naked scoutmaster.” Such humorous hyperbole was contrived to shock and amuse, and to forestall inquiry. It also provided the mature Cheever, who like most men of his generation had been raised to despise homosexuals, with a way of confessing his inclinations. As a boy he could say nothing at all.
    Though uncertain about his sexuality, he knew very early what he wanted to do with his life. He had made the decision to become a writer at eleven, and it lasted. Books became his consolation, as he began educating himself for his chosen career by reading among authors not taught at Thayer. He found the books downtown at the Thomas Crane Public Library, a handsome Romanesque building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. There he discovered Joyce, whose explorations of human sexuality had appalled Miss Gemmel. He read Flaubert in translation (or possibly, as he later said, in the original). Madame Bovary , whose protagonist seeks to escape from an ordinary marriage in a provincial community, became his favorite book, his “Yale College and his Harvard.” He read the Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as they came out. He started reading Proust, who both enchanted and shocked him. Through John Donne he fell in love with poetry, and read Yeats and Eliot and the Romantics. He read Hemingway, and appropriated some of the taut sarcasm of his early writing for “Expelled.” He had yet a great deal to learn, but had already found out that he would have to teach himself and that his masters would be those who spoke from within the covers of a book.
    The other great solace of Cheever’s adolescence was provided by his brother, Fred, who came home to Quincy in the spring of 1926 after two years at Dartmouth. (With his father unemployed, Fred’s college tuition became a real burden.) The two years apart had changed the relationship between the two brothers. Now the difference in their ages seemed of less consequence. They began going to the beach together, and hiking into the hills for long talks about sex and art and politics. Fred reassured his younger brother that his sexual development was perfectly all right, and encouraged him to venture into Boston for the burlesque shows at the Old Howard. In effect they formed their own bond as their parents’ marriage unraveled before their eyes. As the autobiographical story “The Brothers” put it, “in trying to make something of their lives, to bring some peace and order into the household, they became deeply attached to each other.”
    Fred took a number of jobs to try to shore up the family income. When John reached sixteen and got his driver’s license, he went to work also, driving a newspaper truck for the Quincy News . He hung around the linotype room until the papers were printed, and then drove to the neighboring villages, tossing out bundles of papers at candy and stationery stores. At World Series time the News brought out a second edition with the day’s box scores, and John delighted in retracing his route by dark, bringing the news of the day’s game to the towns along the shore.
    At home, matters were worsening. It seemed to the brothers that their mother was “completely absorbed in despising her husband.” As for their father, he began to retreat into fantasy, particularly after the 1929 crash wiped out those few stocks he held as his “anchor to windward.” Frederick Lincoln Cheever “lost all of his money and some of his mind” in the crash, John said. At first he protested as his wife stripped the house clean of anything that might possibly be sold at the gift shop. Then he took to pretending that nothing untoward had happened. Their ship would come in again soon, he said, as he smoked