Fiction was his passion and also, he was to maintain, his salvation. “Perhaps the first thing in the world that I can remember,” he told an interviewer in 1980, “is being read a story.” In those “twilight Athenian years,” reading provided the family entertainment. His grandmother read him Dickens, and he was also read Treasure Island and The Call of the Wild and some of the Tom Swift stories. As soon as he could, he tackled the books on his own. Even before that, though, he had begun to tell stories in school, without puppets or props. “If we did our class work satisfactorily then a period would be set aside during which I would tell a story.” Sometimes these were serials. Usually they were “characterized by exaggeration, moving into preposterous falsehoods.” When he walked to the front of the class, he often had no clear idea of what the story would be about. He simply started talking, and the story came.
At eleven he decided he wanted to be a writer, and told his parents. That was fine, they said, so long as he didn’t expect to win fame or fortune. No, he said, he didn’t care about such things. From the first, he found that telling stories had a therapeutic effect as relief from “a volcanic and early adolescence.” Yet art was not merely an escape from his troubles, it was also a source of joy and understanding. Both the romantic and the realistic offered epiphanies, though of different nature. He was taken to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and thought, “That’s tremendous—that’s the way I feel about life.” He was taken to see Ibsen in repertory and became almost sick with excitement at the shock of recognition. His own fiction—sometimes fantastical, sometimes virtually photographic—helped him, as he often said, “to make sense of his life.”
The capacity to be moved by art—not entertained or laved by sentiment but genuinely moved—is rare enough, and when aligned with Cheever’s still more remarkable ability to invent his own stories, it set him apart from other children. So Robert Daugherty, who was his classmate for the first eight years of school, thought of the public yarn-spinner and puppeteer as an introvert. What he meant, specifically, was that the chubby youth with the engaging manner and the stories in his head was not athletically inclined and rarely participated in such team sports as baseball and football. Baseball, especially, he avoided like a pestilence, and revealed why in “The National Pastime” (1953), another of those uncollected autobiographical stories in which he explored his origins.
The difficulty started with his father. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, who reached fifty before his younger son’s first birthday, generally made it clear that he could be expected to do very little for the boy. He had formed a bond with his older son and namesake, Fred—often taking him sailing in Quincy Bay, for example—but John was born too late. One son was enough for his father, and perhaps for his mother as well. “If I hadn’t drunk two manhattans one afternoon,” she told him, “you never would have been conceived.” But it was his father, she also told him, who wanted him aborted and who went so far as to invite the abortionist to dinner. The unwanted-child motif crops up repeatedly in Cheever’s fiction. The abortionist appears at the dinner table both in The Wapshot Chronicle and in Falconer. “Farragut’s father, Farragut’s own father,” the latter novel reflects, “had wanted to have him extinguished as he dwelt in his mother’s womb, and how could he live happily with this knowledge …?”
It cannot have been easy, either for Ezekiel Farragut or for his creator. In “The National Pastime” Cheever confronted his feelings about his father openly. Usually the fictional father figure is romanticized in his eccentricity. In this story, though, he is cruelly selfish, too wrapped up in himself to teach his son to play baseball.
“To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim,” the story begins in generalization, and then moves rapidly to the unnamed boy and his father, Leander (the story belongs to the Wapshot saga, but was not included in The Wapshot Chronicle). According to this story, he was nearly sixty when his son was born. Moreover, he has become nearly suicidal about his failure in business. Despite these extenuating circumstances, his thoughtlessness toward the boy is hardly forgivable. At nine the youth decides he will be a professional baseball player, acquires some equipment, and asks his father to play catch with him. At first he refuses, but the boy’s mother overhears, and after they quarrel, Leander comes out to the garden and asks the boy to throw the ball to him.
What happened then was ridiculous and ugly. I threw the ball clumsily once or twice and missed the catches he threw to me. Then I turned my head to see something—a boat on the river. He threw the ball, and it got me in the nape of the neck and stretched me out unconscious.…
When he comes to, his father is standing over him. “Don’t tell your mother about this,” he says, and leaves. The boy now has a problem to deal with.
In school one spring day, the gym instructor takes the students outdoors. He is carrying some baseball gear, and as soon as the boy—whose very anonymity suggests his identification with Cheever—sees the bats and balls, “the sweet, salty taste of blood” comes into his mouth, his heart begins to pound, and his legs go weak, and to escape the game he sneaks under the field house. Lying there, he feels “the horror of having expelled myself from the light of a fine day” but also feels the taste of blood “beginning to leave his mouth.” The fault, he decides, is his father’s, and he decides to ask him again. “The feeling that I could not resume my responsibilities as a baseball player without some help from him was deep, as if parental love and baseball were both national pastimes.” Leander once again fails to help his son over this rite of passage. He is asked, to be sure, after he has returned from selling some of his own father’s and grandfather’s books to help support the family. And had he looked more closely, the narrator acknowledges, he “might have seen a face harried with anxiety and the weakness of old age,” but instead he expects his father “to regain his youth and to appear like the paternal images” he’s seen on calendars and in magazine advertisements.
“Will you please play catch with me, Poppa?” I asked.
“How can you ask me to play baseball when I will be dead in another month!” he said.
Leander does not die in the following month, nor for years thereafter, and neither does the baseball phobia. The narrator hides inside a shed the next time the class goes out for baseball, neatly buries a ball to avoid a picnic game, and some years later is fired from a teaching position when, forced into playing and having struck the ball, he runs toward third base and knocks down a teammate coming in to score. Yet the story has a happy if improbable ending, when the narrator—now grown with sons of his own—takes them to Yankee Stadium and makes a one-handed, barehanded catch of a foul line drive off the bat of Mickey Mantle. The pain is excruciating, but is “followed swiftly by a sense of perfect joy. The old man and the old house seemed at last to fall from the company and the places of my dreams, and I smelled the timothy and the sweet grass again.…”
So in fancy Cheever resolved the predicament bequeathed him by an inattentive and unsuccessful father. In actuality, the resolution may never have been achieved. In The Wapshot Chronicle he tried to make his peace with his father, but he knew well that he’d touched up the picture to make Leander more sympathetic. Privately he always felt that his father had failed him and resolved to do better with his own two sons. His son Federico recalls his father spending “endless afternoons” with him, “playing catch with half-inflated footballs or chewed-up softballs.” It never did much good, Federico added: the practice did not make a ballplayer out of him. But those afternoons on the lawn were important to a father who was nearly forty-five when Federico was born yet was determined to give him the proper athletic instruction.
Aside from his bouts with tuberculosis and the national pastime, Cheever led an active boyhood life. He played with his dog, an Irish terrier that he loved. He went on summer trips to New Hampshire, and then to Cape Cod. He went to Boy Scout camp. He went to school.
His memories of New Hampshire centered on his mother. She took him to the Cutter House in Jaffrey, where one Sunday, after chicken dinner, the hotel went up in flames. Thereafter they stayed at the Monadnock Inn, named for the nearby mountain. All one July they communed with Mount Monadnock, John’s mother at a respectful distance, the boy by climbing it day after day. It was there, too, that he learned to ride horseback.
Back in Quincy, Cheever was happiest outdoors. With other boys he snuck into the woods to smoke cigarettes made of cedar bark and toilet paper. One memorable day he went to Paragon Park at Nantasket Beach in Hull, a ten-mile trip from Wollaston, and rode the bumper cars and the whip and saw himself distorted in the hall of mirrors. At twelve he was spirited off to Camp Massasoit, located on three ponds—Gallows, Long, and Little Long—eight miles below Plymouth in heavily wooded territory. There he lived in a tent for a month during the summers of 1924 to 1926, and had a wonderful time. The summer’s highlight was the appearance of a Quincy banker named Delcevare King, whose family, then as now, served as benefactors to the Boy Scouts. For the occasion, King took off his three-piece suit and, dressed as an Indian chief, led the campers in Indian songs. Cheever remembered the words all his days, and remembered too the swimming, sailing, canoe trips, and nature hikes, and the joy of friendship.
At camp he solidified his relationship with Faxon Ogden, the closest friend of his youth. The two boys played marbles together and swam together and slept in the same tent and confided in each other. In the fall they went to school together. They were together so much that they even began to look alike, people said.
Cheever’s school—his only school, after Wollaston Grammar—was Thayer Academy, in nearby South Braintree. Thayer was named for General Sylvanus Thayer, a superintendent of West Point who left a bequest for the founding of the academy. Coeducational from its beginnings in 1877, Thayer was designed to “offer to youth the opportunity to rise … from small beginnings to honorable achievement.” John’s brother, Fred, graduated from Thayer in the spring of 1924 and went off to Dartmouth that fall. At the same time John himself entered Thayerlands, the new junior school adjacent to the academy.
Thayerlands would not have existed at all without the beneficence of Anna Boynton Thompson, a distant cousin of John’s father and another in young Cheever’s gallery of impressive and eccentric women. A spinster, Anna Boynton Thompson taught Greek, history, and literature at Thayer for forty-four years, from its opening in 1877 to 1921. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Radcliffe and her doctorate from Tufts while carrying a full teaching load. On her summer travels she dug for ancient artifacts in Egypt and continued her studies at Oxford and in Greece. She brought back a collection of Greek casts and friezes from one such trip, and installed them in the halls of the main building at Thayer. She donated her salary one year to enable trustees of the school to purchase land for playing fields. And she bequeathed her home, at her death in 1922, for use as the new junior school, Thayerlands. It could be said, justly, that she devoted her life to the school.
As John Cheever reconstructed her passing, it became more dramatic. In fiction and in personal reminiscence both, he wrote that Anna Boynton Thompson starved herself to death out of sympathy for the hungry millions in Europe and the Near East following World War I. She had come to Thanksgiving dinner at the Cheevers’ and was repelled by the sight of the turkey and the ham. “How can you do this? How can you have turkey while half the people in the world are starving?” she demanded. Silence descended, the Irish terrier barked, Mrs. Cheever announced that her Thanksgiving had been spoiled, and Mr. Cheever escorted his cousin home, where she stopped eating entirely. The minister was dispatched, and the Cheevers themselves called with chowder and hot bread, but cousin Anna would not be dissuaded. “I cannot live contentedly in a world where there is famine,” she declared, and six weeks later died in her cold, classical library in Braintree, Massachusetts. Cheever added a coda to “The Temptations of Emma Boynton,” the 1949 version of this story that ran in The New Yorker:
… while everything in our power had been done, a member of our family, a member of the middle class, for reasons of conscience that even to my mother, who knew their origins, seemed eccentric and mysterious, had starved to death.
That does sound improbable, and Cheever may well have invented this account of her demise. Anna Boynton Thompson had paid for two Red Cross ambulances in France during World War I, but as Lillian Wentworth of Thayer Academy points out, her giving was both “altruistic and practical.” Bequeathing her own home for Thayerlands certainly met that standard. John’s parents were among those sponsoring the school. In September 1924 he rode the bus to South Braintree with the other children who made up the first seventh-grade class at Thayerlands.
During his two years at the junior school—now the Thayer Academy Middle School—Cheever demonstrated a talent for writing and playacting, along with a lack of interest in the customary academic pursuits. No transcript of those years survives, but Grace L. Osgood, who taught him history and geography, remembers the “chubby little fellow” as an average student with a flair for storytelling. His spelling, she recalls, was “unusual, to say the least.” Miss Osgood instructed him that if he planned to have a career as a writer, he would have to learn to spell. “His reply was that he expected to have a secretary to take care of that problem. I guess he did.” (Actually Cheever was by no means the worst speller among major American writers—about on a par with Hemingway, better than Fitzgerald.)
Thayerlands aimed to be a progressive school that encouraged its students’ creative instincts. In Miss Osgood’s class, the children were challenged to re-create historical scenes from earlier times in their own words. The seventh graders put on a Thanksgiving pageant, Cheever costumed as a Puritan, and a month later presented their version of A Christmas Carol, with Cheever decked out in long trousers and swallow-tailed coat to play Fred to friend Fax Ogden’s Scrooge. In the spring the whole class saw Marilyn Miller in Peter Pan. Mrs. Southworth, wife of the Thayer Academy’s headmaster, Stacy Baxter Southworth, brought her radio to the school early in March 1925 so that the children could listen to the inauguration of President Calvin Coolidge. As a Yankee and a Republican, Coolidge was admired. Everyone’s parents had voted for him. The Evergreen, Thayerlands’ semiannual student publication, printed an anecdote about “Johnny”—not Cheever, just any Johnny—bringing home a poor report card.
“Don’t you know,” his father demanded, “that when Cal Coolidge was your age he stood at the head of his class?”
Johnny thought for a while. “Yes,” he agreed, “and when he was your age, he was President of the United States!”
Several of Cheever’s poems appeared in the 1924–26 issues of The Evergreen. In the eighth grade he was named poetry editor. Two of these poems showed promise.
THE BROOK
Against the cold and the icy snow
Trickles a quiet little stream.
Hid in a nook where the winds won’t blow
It goes on and on like a dream,
Arched with birches in Gothic style,
Traced in crystallized rain,
Like a tall and slender window
In Notre Dame on the Seine.
Morning, noon, and night it goes,
Singing its one little song,
Tossing a laugh to the birches
As it cheerily ripples along.
Sometimes it’s golden with cowslips,
Sometimes, the deepest of blue.
It stands for the spirit of Thayerlands
So loyal, so brave, and so true.
Even assuming that the school colors were blue and gold, those last two lines are pedestrian and anticlimactic. But the nice figure of the icy birches arched over the brook, the rendering of rhymed verse in coherent sentences, the vivid verbs, above all the sensitivity to both sound and the natural world—these were remarkable in a thirteen-year-old.
The other poem, which appeared in t
he Commencement 1926 issue of The Evergreen, implicitly makes the case for Cheever’s chosen career. Called “The Stage Ride,” it depicts the stagecoach—“a ribbon of brown in the colors of fall”—making its way to a country inn where the driver alights and regales the guests with his stories.
He tells them of storms and of wrecks,
Of robbers and holdups and things,
And how a rich old lady
Lost two of her diamond rings.
The driver then jumps to his box,
And the boys look at him with dismay,
The crack of a whip and the blast of a horn,
And the stage goes again on its way.
So Cheever the storyteller left Thayerlands and moved on to Thayer Academy across the street. Beneath his picture in the commencement issue, his classmates recognized him as “one of our class poets,” ribbed him about his spelling, and concluded that “John never has a grudge against anyone, and is always a good sport.” Never a grudge, always a good sport: he must have tried hard to please. This copy of The Evergreen disclosed two other facts about him. He was author of the winning slogan for Good Posture Week, “Make it Posture Week, not Weak Posture,” but not on the Posture Honor Roll. He had also written one of the three best short stories in a school contest, but unlike the other two his was not printed. Probably he had lost it or thrown it away. The previous year, his Thanksgiving poem—one of five read at the pageant—also went unprinted in the magazine with the explanation “Unfortunately, John Cheever’s poem was destroyed.” The family custom was to dispose of all paper as rapidly as possible, and as a boy Cheever had some difficulty of his own keeping track of things. Presumably with irony, the Thayerlands Class Will predicted that he would be “head of the Lost and Found Department of Washington D.C.’s largest department store.”