Novelists: Ovid in Ossining

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to become a spiritual vagrant—one of that vocal tribe of U.S. intelligentsia whose identifying marks are alienation and a search for identity. Cheever never had any doubt as to his identity. As an economic unit, he was a zero—apparently just a lost boy hanging around Boston. But his brother Fred, who was as convinced as John himself that writing was John's business in life, subsidized him with the midget sums necessary to keep him alive.

They fell in with a bohemian group of intellectuals led by Hazel Hawthorne, whom Fred describes as "one of the original beats," and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, a somewhat leftish drama professor at Columbia and Harvard. Dana subsidized Cheever modestly, and Hazel took him to Provincetown to visit the famed Playhouse. He was already keeping the meticulous diary in which he accumulated the incidents, sights, smells and thoughts that are the raw material for his books. Cheever even then seemed to have an infinite capacity for wonder, was constantly fascinated with how close reality came to the fantastic. He began to place an occasional story—earning him $25 in Story or little more than prestige in Hound & Horn. With such encouragement and support, he moved into New York's Greenwich Village, met Dos Passes, E. E. Cummings, James Agee, Hart Crane, Ben Shahn, Gaston Lachaise.

Bleak Time. Cheever sold his first story to The New Yorker when he was 22, and the magazine soon became a regular Cheever customer. New Yorker rates were not what they are today, and his survival as a writer during the bleak years is a mystery to his friends and even to him. But he was determined from the start not to be diverted from fulltime writing by the mere need to eat. For a while he lived on stale bread and buttermilk in a $3 room on Hudson Street. Yaddo, the writers' colony run by Mrs. Elizabeth Ames at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., became a home away from home. He stayed there off and on for several years, even through one winter when other writers had fled their literary monastery, working for his board on the woodlot, running supplies, and as general factotum.

Details of this bleak time are hard to come by from Cheever. The reason for this lies in a paradox of the fabulist's imagination. Cheever's stories enrich his life; he possesses it in a way denied to people who merely live it. Memory is important, but only memory transformed by the imagination; and to Cheever, those who have not dealt with their past and the painful realities of their origins are only half men.

Cheever's kind of imagination carries practical penalties. If it has not been engaged in any event, it ceases to exist for him. Untouched by the magic of fable, whole areas of experience have disappeared. This includes an early walking tour of Europe with his brother Fred. Today Cheever unaffectedly cannot remember the countries he was in. "I suppose I was in France or Germany or some place," he says, brushing off the subject forever.

The same blank extends to the whole decade of the '30s. Cheever survived those politically obsessed times but did not live through them. While all his friends gathered themselves into ideological camps. Cheever remained simply a writer whose commitments were to his private moral vision; he was deaf to the whole public hullabaloo about ideologies, from the New Deal to literary