A wet roof reflecting the bleak light

June 27, 2009

Why am I taking so long to read Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life? Maybe because I’ve been so busy (we’ve been so busy) with unpacking in our new home. I’d like to think it’s because I want to savor every moment of Cheever’s life, want to linger longer in the anecdotes and memories and recollections of others.

Here’s what he says in 1940 about writing for the New Yorker:

It is still, even in writing for the New Yorker, a question of feeling strongly, of being alive. It can be the first thing you see in the morning; a wet roof reflecting the bleak light, the suspicion that your wife’s legs under the table may be touching the legs of someone else, the happiness of burning up the road between New Haven and Sturbridge on your way home. In signing a contract with the New Yorker there are certain apprehensions as if writing were a mystery, something as chancey as a long shot on a wet track with mud all over the silks and the bums crowded in under the grandstand out of the rain. I have twelve stories to write and they’ll be good.

and here’s another gem:

Cheever would lie on his bunk and reflect on those lost, lazy days in prelapsarian Pennsylvania: “shopping in Frenchtown, building a fire to burn the damp out of the house, the first drink at four o’clock on the noste, the second drink at four-fifteen, the venery, the eating, the noise of the brook and the ice-box motor at night, morning sunlight, breakfast, a walk into Frenchtown maybe or raking hay or cutting wood.”

**

I’m teaching a new nonfiction/memoir writing class starting this week that runs for six weeks and still teaching summer school; now that our move is over i’m eager to get back to my book, which has been on hold (except for a few notes here and there) for too long now.

Cheever photo from Vanity Fair.