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The bony structure of many of Cheever's mature stories came from such skeletons in the family closet. Cheever today is at peace with the past; the fabulist's art has exorcised the family dead of the power to hurt the living, and Cheever now gives the impression that he could deal with a whole ossuary of colonial skeletons. "There is something very dark and mysterious about my family," he says with great relish. "My parents would never tell me much about it. Once, when I was old enough to talk to my father as an adult, we were sitting together in front of a big fire, a nor'easter roaring outside. We were swapping dirty stories, the feeling was intimate, and I felt that this was the time when I could bring up the subject. 'Father, would you tell me something about your father?' 'NO!' And that was that."
Cheever was an obviously gifted child. His mother took him to Ibsen plays in Boston, and he got nosebleeds out of sheer excitement. He was chubby then and no athlete, but he early discovered his talent for storytelling, and used to gather a crowd of his contemporaries around him on the family veranda on a summer afternoon while he held forth. In his early teens, he sneaked off to Boston, where he hung around that citadel of burlesque, the Old Howard, cadging an occasional pat from the strippers. Cheever's academic career, in which he never took much interest, ended abruptly when he was expelled from Thayer Academy at the age of 17—chiefly for neglecting his studies and smoking.
End of Learning. Being expelled from school is easy stuff—thousands of Hoiden Caulfields do it every year; as the wounded adolescent swaggers out of the gates of the old academy, he swears that when he gets around to it, he will write up the whole story and restore justice to the shattered universe. Unlike most, young John Cheever actually did write it all down and sent the story to Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic, who promptly printed it. The really astonishing thing about Expelled was not that it was written and actually published, but that there was no self-pity in it.
Wrote the boy: "The orchards are stinking ripe. The tea-colored brooks run beneath the rocks. There is sediment on the stone and no wind in the willows. Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to . . . If I had left because I had to go to work or because I was sick it would not have been so bad. Leaving because you are angry and frustrated is different. It is not a good thing to do. It is bad for everyone." The frustrations seem to have been not much more than the military traditions of the school (named for Sylvanus Thayer, the "father" of West Point), and the fact that the English teachers were running on about Wordsworth and Galsworthy while Cheever was precociously reading Proust and Joyce.
But the expulsion left Cheever alone for a long time. He and his brother Fred, older by seven years, took off for Boston in spite of their mother's bewildered tears. There and then, John Cheever, with no prospects in this world, was like