Novelists: Ovid in Ossining

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once. He is rarely quoted in the newspapers. He has no scandalous opinions, and few opinions on any public subject. "In the presence of more than half a dozen people, he shrinks to the point of anonymity," says a friend. The essential point about this complex man is made by his veteran editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell. Quoting Gertrude Stein on the absoluteness of creation, Maxwell once said: "If 'a rose is a rose is a rose,' a rose is also a rose-making machine. Cheever is a storymaking machine." To untangle the somewhat lush botanical metaphor, this means not merely that Cheever is a natural writer, who thinks best about events in the pattern of a fable, but that he himself has become his own best-realized character.

On the level of realism, the Cheever biography is just another success story —of a man reaping the modest rewards of recognition after a lifetime of devoted apprenticeship, journeyman years, and final mastery of a difficult trade. His spiritual biography is something else again, seen clearly only in terms of his own severe moral vision. He sees man not in modern terms as any individual but as the center of a system of obligations. Evasion or betrayal of these obligations may be punishable by metamorphosis into some monstrous, less-than-human form. Life, he writes, is "a perilous moral journey." The freaks are those who have fallen from grace. Piety is rewarded by full humanity. His "piety," of course, is in the Latin sense of pietas. He is pious in what Webster notes as a second meaning: "Loyal devotion to parents, family, race, etc." And his pieties have been paid as son, husband, father and brother in stories which point the moral perils of each condition.

Chosen Roots. Being so caught up, so concerned with the orderly structure of society, it is not surprising that Cheever is much obsessed with roots—particularly his own. Los Angeles, on a brief visit, horrified him as the haven of all the U.S.'s displaced persons. In a final statement of pity and contempt for one character, he wrote: "He doesn't come from anyplace really. I mean he doesn't have anything nice to remember and so he borrows other people's memories."

It is typical of Cheever, both as realist and fabulist, that his own roots are partly invented. As Novelist Ellison observes: "Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values."

Cheever's vision of a New England social and moral aristocracy can probably not be substantiated by historical research. But it is a genuine vision which he successfully imposed upon the fictional past of St. Botolphs in creating The Wapshot Chronicle. Maybe St. Botolphs is not Quincy, Mass., where Cheever was born 51 years ago, but it is St. Somebody's; its topography is drawn in Cheever's mind. As such, it has become one of the great home towns of American fiction, like Mark Twain's Hannibal, Mo., or Thomas Wolfe's Altamont, in the state of Catawba. Like Altamont, St. Botolphs, Mass., may be found not in a state of the Union but in a state of mind. In its New England fashion, St. Botolphs is as much an in carnation of the demonology of history as Faulkner's Jefferson, Miss., where the living deal with the ghosts of a