John Cheever's Relationship with the American Magazine

JOHN CHEEVER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE MARKETPLACE, 1930 to 1964 JAMES RICHARD MONKMAN Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 Abstract John Cheever published over two hundred short stories in an array of small-, mid-, and large-circulation magazines between 1930 and 1981. One hundred and twenty of these stories appeared in The New Yorker. During Cheever’s career and since his death in 1982, many critics have typically analysed his short stories in isolation from the conditions of their production, lest Cheever’s subversive modernist tendencies be confused with the conservative middlebrow ethos of The New Yorker, or the populist aspect of other large- circulation magazines. Critics, including Cheever’s daughter and his most recent biographer Blake Bailey, also claim that Cheever was a financial and, ultimately, artistic victim of the magazine marketplace. Drawing on largely unpublished editorial and administrative correspondence in the New Yorker Records and editorially annotated short story typescripts in the John Cheever Literary Manuscripts collection, and using a historicised close-reading practice, this thesis examines the influence of the magazine marketplace on the short fiction that Cheever produced between 1930 and 1964. It challenges the critical consensus by arguing that Cheever did not dissociate his authorship from commerciality at any point during his career, and consistently exploited the magazine marketplace to his financial and creative advantage, whether this meant temporarily producing stories for little magazines in the early 1930s and romance stories for mainstream titles in the 1940s, or selling his New Yorker rejections to its rivals, which he did throughout his career. Cheever also developed strong working relationships with his editors at The New Yorker during the 1940s and 1950s. This thesis re-evaluates these relationships by analysing comparatively the drafts, archival materials that have hitherto been neglected by critics, and published versions of some of Cheever’s best known New Yorker stories. In so doing, this thesis demonstrates the crucial role that editorial collaboration played in Cheever’s writing process. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the AHRC for funding three years of my PhD studies and awarding me a travel grant to travel to New York in 2013 to conduct research in the New Yorker Records at the New York Public Library. Thanks to CLAS, my parent school, for awarding me two Travel Prizes during the course of my PhD. These prizes enabled me to examine the John Cheever Literary Manuscripts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2012, and the New Yorker Records in 2013. Thanks also to the editors of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory for publishing a shorter version of the first chapter of this thesis in the Spring 2015 issue of the journal. I am indebted to my supervisors Professor Judie Newman and Dr. Graham Thompson for their unwavering support and guidance throughout this process. Thanks to the staff that assisted me during my time in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department at Brandeis. Sarah M. Shoemaker and Anne Woodrum were especially kind and helpful towards me while I was researching at Brandeis, and have, along with their team, continued to support me ever since by answering my questions and providing me with additional archival materials. Thanks also to my partner Jen, my parents, my brothers, my closest colleague at the University of Nottingham, John Tiplady, and practically everyone else I know for supporting me emotionally, intellectually, and financially throughout this process. This work is dedicated, with love, to Michael ‘Mick’ Hall (1976-2013). Thank you for helping me to negotiate the wilderness of my mid-twenties and encouraging me to pursue my passion for literature. Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: ‘Go Left, Young Writer’: John Cheever and the Writing of ‘Fall River’, 1931………………………………………………………………………………………..20 Chapter Two: ‘And then I sold a mediocre story for forty-five dollars’: John Cheever and the Economics of Writing Short Fiction, 1930 to 1964…………………………………...58 Chapter Three: Compromised Fiction: The Editing of John Cheever’s ‘Torch Song’, March to July 1947………………………………………………………………………131 Chapter Four: The Reforming of ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ by John Cheever and The New Yorker, 1955 to 1956…………………………………………………………..162 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….223 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………239 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..249 1 Introduction For most of his professional career, John Cheever was both a literary artist and a popular writer. Cheever came to rely on writing short stories for a mixture of small-, mid-, and large-circulation magazines between 1930 and the early 1960s because of his lack of financial independence and struggle with the novel form. It was by publishing the majority of his stories in The New Yorker that Cheever was able to develop both aspects of his career. This thesis proposes that understanding the nature of the creative and financial relationships that Cheever developed with The New Yorker and its employees during this period, as well as his other interactions with the American magazine marketplace, broadens our understanding both of his sense of literary professionalism and, moreover, his approach to writing short fiction. Using a historicised close reading of mostly unpublished editorial and interoffice correspondence in the New Yorker Records, and short story typescripts in the John Cheever Literary Manuscripts, this thesis argues that Cheever was not, as some critics have suggested, a victim of the magazine marketplace, but rather a willing, if occasionally frustrated, participant in it. Cheever published one hundred and twenty of his short stories in The New Yorker between 1935 and 1981. From the late 1940s until his death in 1982, Cheever signed a first-reading agreement annually with The New Yorker which provided him with something approaching the stability and security of regular extra- or non-literary employment. This agreement was invaluable to Cheever because it enabled him to make writing his job in the absence of novel publication early in his career. Moreover, appearing in The New Yorker on average every other month in the 1940s provided Cheever with a national, primarily middle-class, audience for his stories, and within that whole, a readership for the books he began to publish with more frequency in the late 1950s and 2 throughout the 1960s. Cheever also formed strong professional and personal bonds with New Yorker editors William Maxwell and Gustave S. Lobrano. Both of these editors became, at different times, stylistically influential collaborators on Cheever’s stories during the most prolific period of his career, 1940 to 1964. When critics attempt to separate Cheever’s short fiction from The New Yorker, they often emphasise his circumvention of, or conflict with, its middlebrow literary ethos and editing system. Susan Cheever claimed that her father’s association with The New Yorker deteriorated because of his experimentation in his short stories with what his editors felt was ‘appropriate and believable’ for the magazine’s readers.1 Cheever’s first biographer Scott Donaldson acknowledged that The New Yorker was a ‘patron to […] Cheever for four decades’ but refused to accept that he consciously authored New Yorker stories, cultural products that Donaldson dismissed as being ‘elegant, charming, [and] inconsequential’.2 Agreeing with Susan Cheever’s portrayal of her father as a surrealist, Wayne Stengel argued that Cheever was ‘anything but a glib writer’ of New Yorker stories.3 Robert A. Morace posited further that Cheever practiced an ‘innovative, open, even experimental’ form of the short story that was ‘at odds with the compression of incident and tight narrative focus […] of the conventional short story’.4 More recently, Cheever’s second biographer Blake Bailey has depicted the author’s transition from short story writer to novelist as an ultimately doomed attempt to liberate himself from the constraining label of “New Yorker writer”.5 1 Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 137. 2 Scott Donaldson, ‘John Cheever’, in John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1989), ed. by James E. O’Hara, pp. 128-32 (p. 129) (first publ. in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, suppl, 1, part 1, ed. by Leonard Ungar (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), pp. 195-7). 3 Wayne Stengel, ‘John Cheever’s Surreal Vision and the Bridge of Language’, Twentieth Century Literature, 2 (1987), 223-33 (p. 223). 4 Robert A. Morace, ‘From Parallels to Paradise: The Lyrical Structure of John Cheever’s Fiction’, Twentieth Century Literature, 4 (1989), 502-28 (pp. 505, 506). 5 Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 222. 3 Much of this criticism draws on the enmity that Cheever himself felt towards writing for The New Yorker during his career, which he recorded in the journals he kept from the 1940s until a few days before his death in 1982, and in his correspondence with friends and family. Portions of Cheever’s journals and letters were excerpted for the first time in Home Before Dark in 1984 before being collected for

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