John Cheever (13 page)

Years later, Cheever conjured up a romantic version of this first meeting for his Russian friend Tanya Litvinov. He was sitting in a garden outside a stately home, listening to some marvelous piano music emanating from the conservatory. Then the music stopped, and when the piano player—Mary, of course—came outside he stood there with his arms outstretched, since it was she he had been waiting for all his life. “It was pure Chekhov,” he added. It might as well have been. The actual circumstances were that he and Mary met in a Fifth Avenue office building on a rainy afternoon in November 1939. He liked to tell that story too:

I met her on a rainy afternoon in an elevator. I'd spent a very pleasant summer working as a boatman and water skiing, which had just come in. And I saw a woman in the elevator. And I thought, “that's more or less what I would like.” And then she got off the elevator at the same floor.… And she went up into my literary agent's office. And I asked who she was. And I was told she was Mary Winternitz. And I asked her for a date. And presently married her.

Cheever had come to get a check from his agent, Maxim Lieber. Fresh out of Sarah Lawrence, Mary was working for Lieber temporarily on a nonpaying basis. John, she recalls, was wearing a brown overcoat too large for him so that it came down over his hands and made him look smaller and colder and more miserable than he actually was. He looked like he needed taking care of, and that appealed to her. She needed someone to take care of her, too.

The girl Cheever saw on the elevator—twenty-one years old, five foot three, dark-haired with a tendency to freckle, and certainly pretty—was the daughter of two remarkable people, both of them doctors. Mary Winternitz's mother, Dr. Helen Watson, was one of the first women in the country to earn a medical degree. The Watsons were a prosperous, quirky, and distinguished New England family. Mary's grandmother Watson tacked the legend
WORK IS PLEASURE
on the wall of her Cape Cod cabin. Mary's grandfather Thomas A. Watson was the friend Alexander Graham Bell summoned to his side with the famous telephone message, “Mr. Watson, come here!” At Johns Hopkins, Helen Watson met her future husband, the brilliant and demanding Milton C. Winternitz, and gave up her career. Instead she gave birth to five children in rapid order while Dr. Winternitz made his reputation as professor of pathology and as dean of the Yale Medical School. In New Haven, Thornton Wilder's sister Isabel once told Mary, her mother “was legendary for her beauty and graciousness.” But she was also unwell during much of Mary's childhood, and Mary, the fourth of the five children, thought that her mother favored the others over her. She knew that her birth had disappointed her father's expectations. She was the third daughter born; her father had wanted a boy as a companion for his sole son. This inspired the conception of a fifth child, who turned out to be the second son he wanted.

Genetics might dare to make Dr. Winternitz wait. Few humans did. He was famous at Yale for his temperamental outbursts against shoddy performance by students and colleagues. In the home as well, Dr. Winternitz was a stern master. Yet he had a capacity to bring out the best in those around him. He was “electric, full of fire,” Mary observed. People either loved him or hated him. She loved him very much.

In background, Mary Winternitz was part Jewish and part Salem. At first she didn't know about her father's Jewish heritage. Her parents suppressed this information so well that she was ten before she discovered it. Dr. Winternitz was, according to the pun, ante-Semitic. He was also fiercely intellectual. Mary was born and brought up in a large Italian-villa-style house at 210 Prospect Street, on the fringes of the Yale campus. Down the architecturally eclectic street, under the tall maples, stood the massive buildings where the departments of physics (a castle, with “defenseless battlements”) and mathematics (“a lighter Italian fantasy”) and zoology (“a hulking cloister”) were headquartered. The Winternitz children played happily on the New Haven green a few blocks away, hardly aware that they were absorbing the air of serious academic endeavor. They were, of course, expected to do well in school.

In 1931, Mary's mother died. Within a year her father married Polly Whitney, a socially prominent widow with four children of her own. The ensuing ménage consisted of nine children, a few at college but most at home. Certain tensions naturally arose. “The Whitney children were nice to me and [younger brother] Bill,” Mary recalls, “but not to the older children. If you weren't attractive, forget it. They used to say, ‘Oh, he's so
attractive
,' but if they didn't say it, you were out.” Mary did not get along with her stepmother, whom she regarded as something of a snob. Polly tried to be kind to her, Mary says, “but she was one of those people who couldn't be really nice to somebody she felt was basically inferior.” Mary was sent to the International School in Geneva for the last two years of high school, and then spent an additional year in New Haven, remedying a low score on her math college boards. This postgraduate year was made endurable, she says, only by reading the fiction of Henry James.

With relief, Mary enrolled at Sarah Lawrence in the fall. She was an intense and successful student who “wallowed” in social philosophy and literature, especially poetry. The heady experience of college stimulated her political radicalism. During the summer of 1938 she tramped around northern New England for the Emergency Peace Campaign, camping out and making antiwar speeches to churches and civic groups. On the first day of May 1939, she made the short trip into New York from Sarah Lawrence to march in the May Day parade, losing her glasses in the process. That story delighted Polly Winternitz, who liked to regale her friends with the tale of her left-wing stepdaughter who'd lost her glasses in the May Day parade. After graduating the following month, Mary traveled to England and France, where she changed her mind about pacifism. The whole peace movement, she realized, was tied up with religious ideas she didn't share. Moreover, everything she saw in Europe made it clear that the United States couldn't simply sit back and avoid the fight. “You've got to help us,” a Frenchman told her on a bus in Paris. “Come over and help us.”

Her abandoned pacifism aside, Mary remained strongly liberal in her views when she came to New York in the fall of 1939. At the time, she “thought all people who indulged in commerce were wicked.” Still, literary commerce seemed the least wicked, Max Lieber was well known as an agent for left-wing writers, and so it was that she was trying to find gainful employment with him at the time she met John Cheever.

She was living then in a furnished room in an old mansion on East Sixty-seventh Street, where her landlady took to introducing her—rather inaccurately—as “Miss Winternitz of Yale.” After it became clear that Lieber was not going to pay her anything, she got a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job working for Thomas H. Uzzell, author of
Narrative Technique
and operator of a small-time version of the Famous Authors School, teaching people to write through the mail. Uzzell was a figurehead, really. His wife critiqued the manuscripts that came in, for a fee. Mary was taken on as secretary and to help Mrs. Uzzell with the critiques. One of her tasks was to type up Uzzell's standard letter to prospective clients who'd sent in a sample of their writing. “Thank you for letting us see your work, which shows real promise,” the letter invariably began. “The story line/character development is good but the character development/story line is weak. You would find my book
Narrative Technique
useful. If you are unable to obtain a copy at your bookstore, please let me know and I'll see that one is sent to you.” C.O.D.

John and Mary dated only a few times before he drove up to Quincy and Norwell (where Fred and Iris were living) for the Christmas holidays. Everything conspired to remind him of matrimony. On Christmas Eve he went to a party and saw several of his Thayer classmates “escorting pregnant wives.” On Christmas Day itself he and his parents went to Norwell, where Fred's young children “played store, played house, played tea-party” and then proceeded to “destroy the tree ornaments.” He returned to New York on December 30 to see his former girl Peg Worthington marry Marshall Best.

In the spring of 1940, Mary was fired when an efficiency expert told Uzzell he didn't need her services. In response her landlady moved her to the back bedroom—once a servant's room—and stopped mentioning her Ivy League connection. John rescued her from the back room and the landlady. He found her a top-floor one-room apartment on West Eleventh Street in Rhinelander Gardens. John himself had a hall bedroom a few steps away. There were two buildings at Rhinelander Gardens, one for famous folk and one for those who were not famous, at least not yet. John and Mary stayed among the less distinguished. Downstairs from them lived the young painter Robert Burns Motherwell, who kept a calling card with his Paris address tacked to his door. “Pretty affected,” John and Mary thought. Both were acutely sensitive to the pretentious. And they were very much a couple in love, taking pleasure in the giving and sharing of themselves.

Though the separate bedrooms demonstrated a certain respect for the proprieties, Mary's father and stepmother disapproved of her living arrangements. Polly came down to Eleventh Street and took Mary to lunch. Fixing her womanfully, Polly said serially, “Your sweater's on backwards” and “You're living in sin.” “No it isn't,” Mary answered serially, “I like it this way,” and “No, I'm not.” It was none of her stepmother's business anyway, Mary thought. Next the redoubtable Dr. Winternitz came calling and asked John what his intentions were. “Well, I want to marry her, of course,” he replied, and that settled matters. Nobody asked Mary if she was sure she was ready for marriage.

There remained the problem of finances. Actually, Mary was in rather better financial condition than John. Her grandmother Watson was supplying an allowance of one hundred and fifty dollars a month. John, meanwhile, was surviving only on checks from the magazines. These became much more frequent soon after he met Mary Winternitz. Partly this was due to his growing reputation among editors, and partly to his increasingly close ties to
The New Yorker
. But his burst of creative energy was also related, undoubtedly, to his determination to prove to himself—and Mary, and the Winternitzes—that he was ready to support a wife. In 1939, he published only two stories, both in
The New Yorker
. In 1940, he published the amazing total of fifteen stories: eleven in
The New Yorker
, two in
Harper's Bazaar
, one in
Collier's
, and one in
Mademoiselle
.

The climate for fiction was clearly improving, also. Around 1940, Cheever later commented, “there were at least fifteen magazines extremely anxious to find serious fiction—and twenty-five first-rate people were sending stuff to
The New Yorker
”—his friends Bill Maxwell and Dan Fuchs and Eddie Newhouse, for example, and soon thereafter Vladimir Nabokov and Jean Stafford, J. D. Salinger and Irwin Shaw. One of the good things about the magazine was quick publication and quick pay. Cheever could finish a story, put it in the mail on Tuesday, and by the weekend see the story in print on the newsstands, with a check on the way. As Newhouse expressed it,
The New Yorker
was “a lifeboat” for a number of young writers in those days.

The two lovers were separated for most of the summer of 1940. Mary went north to Treetops, the family compound of hillside cottages in the New Hampshire mountains above Newfound Lake. In June, John spent a week at Yaddo. It was “like coming back to a place you've dreamed about,” he wrote Mary. In New York, he took up residence for the summer in Muriel Rukeyser's apartment on Bank Street. The accommodations were not all they might have been. He was “holed up” in the bedroom trying to write over the noise of the carpenters working in the living room and the amateur musicians practicing at his doorstep. Bedbugs disturbed his sleep. The summer heat was oppressive.

On the bright side, Cheever had plenty of companionship in the Village. His mother came down from Quincy on a buying trip for her gift shop, and John gave her a short, inexpensive tour of the city. One night he dropped in at a party Pete and Lib Collins were throwing, but left when “Hungarians and abstract painters” began to arrive. Another evening he spent listening to writer-artist Charles Norman discuss the genius of Charles Norman. He went to dinner with Carson McCullers and George Davis, editor of
Harper's Bazaar
. He dined with the Bests, where “a little, drooping, small-voiced man”—William Shawn,
The New Yorker
's managing editor—played boogie-woogie.

Despite the company, John missed Mary terribly. He stayed in New York for two reasons: to try to write an outline and one long chapter of a novel for Houghton Mifflin, and to look for a job.

The novel was to deal with the people he'd known over the last four years. He set about the outline with high expectations, but these soon came crashing to earth. “The book is a pain in the neck,” he announced at midsummer. There wasn't much point in starting on something he wasn't enthusiastic about, he realized, and he didn't really know whether he wanted to write a realistic or a romantic novel. Despite these difficulties, he stuck to the project. A novel might earn some money, after all, and he'd been unable to locate a job.

What he had in mind was an editorial post on
The New Republic
, where Malcolm Cowley could be counted on to serve as his advocate. First a man named Carleton Brown was hired for the job, and then—after Brown became ill and had to resign—“another ghoul” beat him to the magazine offices to take over Brown's job. He realized he ought to have a regular position, since free-lancing wasn't enough to get married on. For the moment, though, freelancing was his only source of income, and he did it with vigor.