Novelists: Ovid in Ossining

• Share

(8 of 10)

Communism. Politics still bores him, except on the level where it might involve the school library or the new road that disturbs the kingfishers nesting in the reeds of the Croton estuary.

He wrote all the time, but in those days there was nothing much to distinguish his work from 20 other short-story writers. The tone of the time was bleak, flat, ironical. He achieved this style, but it was not really his. Nor did the times suit his lyrical temperament, which today can express itself in dithyrambic celebrations. This salute to the richness of life with all its surface shimmer is part of his faith as a writer and the central ritual of his faith as a man. In one of the few statements he is prepared to make about his religion, which is Episcopal, he says little more than "I do not think it is too much to get down on my knees once a week to thank God for the coming wonder and glory of life."

The Family. His true theme is the family and the intricate web of emotional and moral tensions which compose it, and he could not thus become a writer until he had himself become involved in the complex spiritual pieties of a family.

The family was not his own; it belonged to Mary Winternitz. As Cheever tells it, he picked up Mary in the street, simply because she was beautiful and he fell in love with her. Pressed for details, he says that it was at 545 Fifth Avenue. Actually, their meeting was rich in social comedy of the ironic kind that Cheever simply doesn't deal with or acknowledge when it is there. As Mary tells it, she was working as a sort of trainee-typist in the office of Cheever's literary agent, Maxim Lieber. It is one of the ironies of the time that Cheever, least political of men, should then have been represented by one of the busiest left-wingers of them all, with a stable of New Masses writers.

Mary was clever. The English would call her "brainy" in a way that John has never been, and she came out of Sarah Lawrence College in 1939 full of all the vague, intense, liberal left-wingery of that period. "I thought all people who indulged in commerce were wicked," she recalls.

Separate Room. On the surface, the story of John and Mary Cheever is a period piece of the '30s. John called in a taxi at Mary's rooming house and swept her off to his Village apartment, where they set up housekeeping. Actually, with vestigial New England punctilio, Mary was installed in a separate room. In any case, events shifted the story into a pattern closer to John's anachronistic traditions. With all the pomp of an outraged Victorian parent, Mary's father descended upon the pair and demanded to know John's intentions. "Marriage, of course," said John.

Father was indeed a formidable man, the redoubtable Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, dean of the Yale Medical School, spectacularly dynamic and articulate, and full of the authoritarian traditions of his profession. In short, a character to delight Cheever's heart. To Mary's faint astonishment, John immediately became a member of the family from which she herself had fled.

The family, indeed, could not have been better designed to excite the interest of a chronicler of domestic drama. Mary's mother was Dr. Helen Watson, a daughter of that Thomas A. Watson who was on the other end of Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone conversation