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Only the walking seems old-fashioned enough to be eccentric. Almost any Sunday, Cheever's small figure may be seen tramping on the back roads around Croton Dam trailed by his two Labradors. His lined, nut-brown face, like that of so many Americans of the middle class, is that of an aging schoolboy, and his clothes that schoolboy uniform—tweed jacket, khaki drill pants and scuffed loafers.
Nymph & Satyr. To the casual eye, this dog walker, churchgoer and drinker of neighborly gins could be just another exurbanite worried about taxes and with strong views on zoning. But this is an obsessed man. Re-created in his novels and stories as Shady Hill, Bullet Park or Proxmire Manor, the suburban region is subjected to terrible metamorphosis. It is not Sing Sing Prison straddling the New York Central tracks by the Hudson shore that is the worst destination of the inhabitants, but a netherworld of damnation. In Metamorphoses, one neighbor has suffered a magical transformation into Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds. In another story, his wife has become the enchantress who converted her daughter into a swimming pool. Even the A. & P. supermarket has been peopled by Cheever with a crowd "moaning and crying" as they are "reviled and taken away" to some enigmatic doom.
But in this transfigured world, there is delight as well as drama. On a quiet evening, "a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over mountains," a common citizen might see a door across the way fly open, "and out comes Mrs. Babcock without any clothes on, pursued by her naked husband. Over the terrace they go and in at the kitchen door, as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice."
Cheever's demonic quality is just beginning to emerge in his fiction from its buttoned-up Brooks Brothers carapace of realism. It has always been recognized in the private pre-Ovidian Cheever. "He is a magician," says his friend Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, recalling the old women who lurked in the back parlors of the Negro section of Oklahoma City where he grew up. "He can take a watch chain or something and tell you the whole man." Even Mary Cheever subscribes to the theory that her husband is not as other men. She recounts with some awe the story of how John, having completed a deeply painful story about his older brother Fred, became convinced that something was amiss with him in real life, rose from bed, drove through the night for three hours, and indeed found his brother in Connecticut helpless, alone and in dire medical straits.
Story Machine. Cheever is not a writer with a public personality to flourish and exploit, such as Hemingway or Norman Mailer. He has appeared on TV but