Novelists: Ovid in Ossining

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("Mr. Watson, come here"). Dr. Winternitz himself was in a state of passionately transferred loyalties. Born a Jew, he had become what Freud, in his study on the technique of wit, called ante-Semitic. "When my mother died, he thought he would improve his social position by marrying a Whitney, but I don't think he did," Mary says drily, leaving no doubt as to her opinion of the high life at New Haven, Conn., which the Winternitz-Whitney family maintained.

Spacious Way. John's filial pleasure in being provided with a new, ready-made family was unaffected, as was his delight in the spectacle of his father-in-law and stepmother-in-law having dramatic lovers' quarrels in their 70s. The new family was huge. There were nine children in all, and the sense of size was enhanced by their spacious way of life. They lived in a huge baronial mansion on New Haven's best street, had an estate in the New Hampshire hills consisting of a great central house and several flanking cottages to take care of the subfamilies involved. Cheever spent long weeks at both places, found a crackling and fond relation with old Dr. Winternitz, a man of astounding energy. In some curious way, immersion in the Winternitz family released Cheever from a kind of writer's block that he had had about his own strained childhood, and led him eventually back to the Wapshots of St. Botolphs. True to the paradox of his art, he found a hope in the past and a memory in the future.

The Monogamist. The Cheever marriage is a subject of more than ordinary interest to their friends, seeing that the bulk of Cheever's work concerns somehow a vexation or a crisis in relations between husband and wife. The heart of the matter is probably best deduced from the fact that John Cheever, almost alone in the field of modern fiction, is one who celebrates the glories and delights of monogamy.

It is the destructive principle in woman that has been the subject of his most bitter domestic story theorems. The most famous of these is The Well-Educated American Woman. The fable speaks for all men who think their wives are too busy with public events to cook, look after their children and love their husbands. When Cheever gave reign to his worst fears (a child dies of fever because mother was at a meeting), Mary didn't take this too much to heart: "I did go to one or two meetings of the League of Women Voters, but I do think he should not have killed the little boy." She has a husband that will spend all the eloquence at his command celebrating woman as Venus or Venus-matrix but never as Minerva, a woman likely to put modern man through more troubles than the Iliad of misery Hector suffered under her command.

The Cheevers have three children. Susan, 20, is a junior at Pembroke; Ben, 15, is at the Scarborough School; and Frederico, 7, goes to a local elementary school. The family moved to Scarborough, a heavily wooded community just south of Ossining, in 1950, renting what Cheever describes as a "remodeled tool shed" on the huge estate of Frank A. Vanderlip Sr., onetime president of the National City Bank. After M-G-M bought The Housebreaker of Shady Hill for around $40,000 in 1956 (it was never made into a movie), the Cheevers took off for a year in Italy, returned to buy a house in Ossining, a little way up the Hudson River from Scarborough. Mornings are