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THIRTEEN UNCOLLECTED STORIESBY JOHN CHEEVEREDITED BY FRANKLIN H. DENNISINTRODUCTION BY GEORGE W. HUNT, S.J.This is the first new collection of John Cheever stories in more than fifteen years, and the first time these stories have ever been collected.Originally published in the 1930s and 1940s in magazines which run the gamut from obscure leftist literary periodicals, through The New Republic and TheAtlantic Monthly, to mass circulation glossies like Colliers and Cosmopolitan,these stories deal with themes and use techniques which are not generally considered to be "Cheeveresque." They will undoubtedly surprise those readers familiaronly with Cheever's post-1947 work. Each of these early stories bears the unmistakable stamp of the master storyteller."Bayonne" is an evocative character study of a waitress whose work serving blue-collar regulars in a diner provides her with more emotional than financial support."In Passing," which ends with the radical organizer Girsdansky haranguing a small unmoved crowd on the Boston Common at twilight, reveals perhaps more about states of mind during the Depression than standard histories of that era."Fall River" is an elegy on economic catastrophe in a backwater New England town: Cheever calls up a picture of a wasteland with abandoned factories where "the looms blocked off the floor like discarded machin ery in an old opera house.""The Autobiography of a Drummer" is a remarkable portrait of a man who has outlived his time. It anticipates Arthur Miller's Willy Loman by more than adecade.In this intriguing collection, Cheever plunges us into a stark world; the scenes are reminiscent of Edward Hopper. It is a world of foreclosures, down-and-outs, burlesque shows, desperate gamblers, and deferred hopes. It adds a newdimension to the assessment of John Cheever's considerable reputation George W.Hunt, S. J., author of John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love (Eerdman's, 1983), is Editor-in-Chief of America magazine, a Jesuit Catholic Weekly.Franklin H. Dennis has been an editor and book reviewer. He currently acts as a consultant to book publishers.It is instructive and pleasurable to read an important writer's formative work. These stories show the roots of Cheever 's career and anticipate the fulfillment of his gifts. I am gratified that they are now conveniently available.These stories are not literary curiosities; they are certainly worth rescuing from oblivion and worth republishing.In particular, the stories written during the early Thirties have an objectivity of observation not always found in Depression fiction. They will stimulate Cheever 's particular readership and will interest the celebrated mythical common reader.--Matthew BruccoliContentsIntroductionFall RiverLate GatheringBock Beer and Bermuda OnionsThe Autobiography of a Drummer
 
In PassingBayonneThe PrincessThe TeaserHis Young WifeSaratogaThe Man She LovedFamily DinnerThe OpportunityEditor's NotessIn 1979, The Stories offohn Cheever received the Pulitzer Prize. To mark the publication of his omnibus, John Cheever wrote an elegant de fense of the short story for Newsweek magazine. "Why I Write Short Stories" argued that the narra tive"velocity" of the form--its speed at rendering events and character--best recorded "the newness in our ways of life... We are not a nomadic people," Cheever observed, "but there is more than a hint of this in our great country... so long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature."In that same article, John Cheever outlined astory using wryly observedelements of "Cheever country." His suburb -illusory rather than idealized- featured houses aping Elizabethan England and the antebellum south. "Victorious domesticity" ruled the scene. One lawn even displayed a No Smoking sign.Nowhere in the Newsweek piece did Cheever mention the Depression era, foreclosures, race track touts, waitresses in diners, bleak boarding houses, or revolutionary radicalism. But, in one of American literature's best kept secrets,John Cheever had made such subjects his concern and written about them memorably.Although devotees of Cheever's celebrated "sub urban fabulism" may reactinitially as if the stories from the '30s and '40s are reports from a foreign land, critics have long known and admired them. Scott Donaldson, Cheever's biographer, comments on the range of characterization in these stories: Time after time the economic crisis forces his characters to compromise their humanity and abandon their hopes. In evocations of the working class thought by latter-day critics to be beyond his ken, Cheever glimpsed the dreary and loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, strip tease artists, and sailors down on their luck. More effectively his tales caught middle-class people trying to maintain their dignity in atime of diminished expectations.'James E. O'Hara says that Cheever's narrative instinct was compellinglyapparent more than five decades ago, and his work "continued to display an uncanny ability to discover the hidden significance in seemingly unpromising material-everything from childhood dancing class to race track romance 'In Passing'... offers persuasive evidence that Cheever at twenty-four could be remarkably sen sitive to the political realities of the time.O'Hara ends his study by expressing the hope that the stories from the '30s and '40s will become more available to students and the reading public... Ifand when that occurs, these people-the thoughtful audience that Cheever increasingly cherished as he grew older-will surely discover the full range of his storytelling abilities and his reputation as one of America's best storytellers canonly grow as a result.'Just as Cheever's celebrated novel Falconer plunged readers into the unexpected world of prison confinement, so many of the stories in this baker's dozen prove once again that Cheever's em brace of our "intense and episodic" experience is even more encompassing than we had thought. Thirteen Uncollected Stories
 
is arranged chrono logically, and each story is annotated with the name and dateof the publication in which it first appeared. The stories are reprinted exactly as they originally appeared, except that spellings and punctuation have been regularized in most cases.Notes1 Scott Donaldson, John Cheever: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1988), p .62.2 James Eugene 0' Hara, John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), pp .9-13.3 Ibid. p .85.IntroductionWhen John Cheever died in June 1982 at the age of seventy, his friend and fellownovelist John Updike com posed a short, unsigned eulogy for The New Yorker magazine. Updike recalled that: One could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without seeing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up withwonderful rapidity into fables, present sur roundings made to pulse with sympathetic magic as he glanced around him and drawled a few startlingly concentrated words in that manner ly, rapid voice of his.This present collection of thirteen hitherto uncollected stories allowsus to watch what Updike described: stories take shape. But not that only: to watch a career take shape as well. For these stories provide a synoptic glimpse ofhis formative years, those efforts (as he called them) to discover his "singingvoice," that assured, expansive, intensely personal style we associate with themature Cheever of the 1950s and the 1960s.With the exception of "The Opportunity" pub lished in 1949, these stories date from 1931 (when Cheever was nineteen years old) up to 1942. Their settings and subject matter often correspond with his continual changes of residence during his im poverished Depression years. Thus we find three New England stories("Fall River,""Late Gathering," "Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions") that re flect memoriesof vacations he and his older brother Fred took to New Hampshire and Cape Cod in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Two ("Autobiography of a Drummer" and "In Passing") recall memories of his visits home to Quincy, Massachusetts (a town near Boston, cf. "The Teaser") during the mid 1930s. There he had discovered that hissalesman father had been laid off, his parents' marriage was crumbling fast, andthe local bank was attempting to foreclose on the family home. From 1934 on (except for several months in 1939 when he stayed in Washington, D.C., working on WPA guide books), he lived in New York City-for a while in a dive near the Manhattan waterfront so dingy that the famous photographer Walker Evans immor talizedits ambience in a photograph once featured in the Museum of Modern Art.However, Cheever, an enthusiast for the outdoors and the "perfumes of life," like "sea water and the smoke of burning hemlock," was fortunate enough toescape the city for months at a time from 1934 on, after he applied and was accepted as a resident at Yaddo (where he became a favorite guest, owing to his witand good manners). Frequent trips to the racetrack at Saratoga inspired three racetrack stories ("His Young Wife,""Saratoga," and "The Man She Loved"), all of which were published in Collier's magazine, an immensely popular (and well-paying) weekly that rivaled thethen-reigning Saturday Evening Post.
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