John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947

Modern Language Studies

John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947Author(s): James O'HaraSource: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 50-59Published by: Modern Language StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194810 .

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John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947

James O'Hara

In May of 1947 John Cheever turned thirty-five; he had reached the midpoint of his life. After a slow and very frustrating beginning as a writer during the Depression Thirties, he had begun to hit his stride in the latter half of that decade, and published an impressive twenty-six stories in the prewar years 1940-41, mainly in the New Yorker. In the sense that his writing was up to New Yorker standards, he had already proved himself. But now, six years later, he was ready to become his own man. This paper will show that between May and October of 1947, with the publication of three remarkably diverse stories, he managed to do just that.

Cheever had been discharged from the Army in November of 1945 after three and a half years of honorable if undistinguished service, first in the infantry and then with the Signal Corps. He had not seen combat, but had observed its aftermath during a brief visit to the Phillipines in 1945. While in the Signal Corps he had worked on a morale-building film series produced in Astoria, Long Island.

Despite the "ordinariness" of his service, the fact that he was an enlisted man with literary credentials gave him a valuable perspective on military life in wartime-one that the New Yorker was more than willing to share with its readers. And Cheever took advantage of the opportunity to sharpen both his artistic viewpoint and narrative voice, gradually breaking out of the hard-cased shell of objectivity he had earlier favored. A handful of his Depression stories ("Expelled," "Fall River," "In Passing," "The Shape of a Night") had revealed a simmering anger at the shallow- ness of American values, and an interest in radical politics that never quite became a specific commitment to any cause. But during the war Cheever seems to have confronted the questions of whether or not his country was worth defending, and fascism worth fighting against, and he settled both of them in the affirmative. This is consistently evident in the dozen Army-based stories he wrote while on active duty.

Reasons for the change in attitude are not certain, but on the evidence of the stories it appears that Cheever genuinely admired most of his fellow soldiers and was impressed by their simple decency and cour- age. The pervasive cynicism of his earliest work faded quickly from his tales of service life. With the end of the war, however, the question of what emotional stance he would adopt with regard to his fictional subjects became more difficult. There could be little doubt that he would continue to treat the foibles, failures and idiosyncracies of the middle class from which he had sprung (as well as those of the fringes of society's upper and lower echelons). But he was not inclined to do so from a position of old-fashioned patriotism, as he had during the war. And the face of American society, to say nothing of its soul, was changing.

Within the space of a year, Cheever remade himself as a writer and

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started to establish himself as an American classic. From May to October of 1947 the New Yorker published three remarkable stories: "The Enor- mous Radio" (May 17), "Roseheath" (August 16) and "Torch Song" (October 4).1 Each in its own way broke new ground, venturing into realms of fantasy and comedy that Cheever had merely skirted early in his career, with disastrous results.2 While he had never been predictable as a writer, he had learned the hard way that sallies into impressionism like the youthful "Late Gathering" (1931) were slow to gain editorial acceptance, no matter how aesthetically satisfying they might be. He had continued to experiment with the choice of material for his stories, and gradually won over editors with a combination of solid structural technique-he had always known how to put a story together-and Hemingwayesque understatement. That (together with his military pay) had been his meal ticket from 1935 to 1945, and his decision to turn it in is little short of mystifying. The most logical explanation is that Cheever was both dissat- isfied with the largely derivative work he had done so far, and confident enough (as a result of his performance as a soldier-writer) to experiment with his technique in more radical ways than he had previously attempted.

In personal interviews, Cheever's wife, Mary, and his New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, have verified the significance of this change. Mrs. Cheever observed that "The Enormous Radio" marked a definite turning point in her husband's career, although she views the change as a natural development for someone with his ability. Maxwell told me (as he had also indicated to Susan Cheever) that he recognized in "The Enor- mous Radio" a departure from the strict realism Cheever had favored previously, and that he opposed it.3

Apparently few readers-even informed ones-understood what Cheever was attempting to do, and this is not surprising given his reti- cence (in those years) concerning his work. According to his friends and Mrs. Cheever, John almost never discussed his work in progress, except with his editors. Thus in a sense this rather momentous change was very much a private matter, except for Maxwell's opposition. A survey of later critical reactions to The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, the 1953 collection containing the "breakthrough" pieces, shows that few critics were even familiar with the kind of fiction Cheever had been writing since 1930. In his Commentary review, Morris Freedman called Cheever "a product of the Hebraic New England conscience implacable as a Kafkaesque judge" (390); in the Spectator, Penelope Houston claimed that he made too much of his "talent for the macabre"--probably a reference to "Torch Song" (610). As pertinent as these comments are, they fail to recognize that prior to 1947, any detection of either explicit judg- ment or macabre effects in Cheever's work (after his first story, "Expelled") would have been virtually impossible. As a committed realist, he had simply and deliberately avoided them.

Other readers, like William DuBois for the New York Times and Arthur Mizener of the New Republic, missed the point altogether. It was their view that Cheever in the late Forties and early Fifties was continuing to jump through the New Yorker's rusty hoops of clever construction and

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cold objectivity. This may be true of some of the stories in the collection, but both reviewers were wearing blinders that prevented fair-minded appraisal of the crucial 1947 pieces.

In these stories Cheever returns to the experimental tendencies of his late teens and early twenties with the confidence of a proven performer; he knew that his was a recognized talent, if not a fulfilled one. Struthers Burt had predicted in the Saturday Review, after the publication of Cheever's first collection (The Way Some People Live, 1943) that he would "become one of the most distinguished writers" (26). For that prophecy to be fulfilled Cheever knew he would have to move beyond objective realism into forms of fiction that would allow him to "instruct" his readers in the meaning of "reality." After thirteen years he had mas- tered the mechanics of his storytelling art; now it remained for him to use them in the service of an emergent moral vision.

"The Enormous Radio" is one of the most frequently anthologized of Cheever's stories, and has become a certifiable classic. It set the pattern for most of the realistic fantasies that would follow, and certainly for stories like "Roseheath" and "Torch Song," with its unlikely combination of ultrarealistic and bizarre effects. Its two main characters, Jim and Irene Westcott, are described in the opening lines as "the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respect- ability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins" (33). They are outwardly as normal as possible: productive, law-abiding, the parents of two young children. The narrator merely hints at a mocking stance (he may even be parodying himself) when he records that they go to the theatre "on an average of 10.3 times a year."

The only significant difference between the Westcotts and the other young couples in their set is their intense interest in music. When their old radio suddenly gives out in the middle of a Schubert quartet, Jim decides to buy a replacement. This could serve as the stuff of comedy pure and simple, and in fact Cheever was supporting his own young family in the late Forties by working on scripts for situation comedies. A less experienced writer might have succumbed to the story's comic potential, but Cheever had more serious intentions.

The Westcotts soon discover that the new radio is able to garner sounds and conversations from any- and everywhere in their apartment building. At first Cheever suggests that this is due to some technical oddity in the radio or the building itself, but it quickly becomes apparent that no logical explanation will suffice. The radio tunes in quite accurately on the private lives of the building's tenants; the Westcotts overhear "a mono- logue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank" (37). For awhile this incredible addition to their home strikes the Westcotts as funny, a source of free entertainment beyond their wildest imagining. But the reference to a family quarrel should warn the reader that the story is not simply a comic sketch. The radio takes on tremendous symbolic value when we realize that the particular form of voyeurism the Westcotts have fallen into is really no different from the "normal" reader's own, supposedly more

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respectable vice: looking over the narrator's shoulder into the turmoil of his characters' lives. Cheever, or any storyteller, is our enormous radio, and we are the Westcotts.

Thus "The Enormous Radio" converts a comic premise into a powerfully serious narrative engine. In one brilliant stroke, Cheever had both fully exploited and utterly transcended his own cleverness. Almost forty years later the idea seems so obvious, and the writing so effortless, that it is easy for us to make the same mistake as some of the contemporary critics by overlooking the great advance this story represents both for its writer and, I think, for the short story as a narrative form. It is an amazingly compact blend of fantasy and stark realism. In the following excerpt, for example, Cheever manages to 1) move Irene from a restau- rant back to her apartment, 2) establish the powerful hold of the radio on her consciousness, 3) reinforce the terrible truthfulness of the radio, and 4) advance the theme of pervasive, inescapable duplicity:

Irene had two Martinis at lunch, and she looked searchingly at her friend and wondered what her secrets were. They had intended to go shopping after lunch, but Irene excused herself and went home. She told the maid she was not to be disturbed; then she went into the living room, closed the doors, and switched on the radio. She heard, in the course of the afternoon, the halting conversation of a woman entertaining her aunt, the hysterical conclusion of a luncheon party, and a hostess briefing her maid about some cocktail guests. "Don't give the best Scotch to anyone who hasn't white hair," the hostess said. "See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars? I want to tip the elevator man." (38)

Cheever had achieved economy of style after his first few stories, but he had rarely demonstrated this kind of smooth, assured balance even in his Army stories. Having released himself from his addiction to reality, he was clearly enjoying himself. How many of his readers had at some time or other wanted to eavesdrop on their neighbors? Having drawn them in this far, he could now compel them to overhear an ecletic catalogue of human folly, by turns humorous and frightening. We finally share in the psychic pain of the Westcotts when, too late, they realize they have heard too much:

"Of course we're happy," he said tiredly. He began to surrender his resentment. "Of course we're happy. I'll have that damned radio fixed or taken away tomorrow." He stroked her soft hair. "My poor girl," he said.

"You love me, don't you?" she asked. "And we're not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?"

"No, darling," he said. (40)

But the following day, after the radio has been "fixed" and dutifully tunes in classical music, the Westcotts have a terrible argument-about their own problems with money and dishonesty-as the radio news reports disasters from around the globe. In a masterful demonstration of his

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storytelling art, Cheever has quietly yanked us out of our fascination with a "cute" idea into an awareness of what we should have known all along: all those Westcotts parading up and down the supermarket aisles of America are every bit as normal and abnormal as we are. The story needs no explicitly stated moral; awareness is the beginning of understanding and sympathy for our fellow humans, and in that direction, Cheever knew, lies salvation.

"Roseheath" is a startling contrast to "The Enormous Radio." Because the New Yorker has traditionally held back publication of some pieces for seasonal and other reasons, it is impossible to date the writing of these stories, but "Roseheath" appeared in mid-August, three months after "The Enormous Radio" and two weeks after a more prosaic (and more seasonal) tale called "The Common Day." "Roseheath" is one of the funniest pieces Cheever ever wrote. In a few of the stories from the Thirties and earlier Forties he had hinted at an interest in comic twists of plot and dialogue, but with few exceptions these were rarely indulged in, the business of a realist having to do with loftier purposes than amuse- ment. One point of similarity between this and "The Enormous Radio" is found in Cheever's deceptively bland beginning; one suspects that he had come to know his New Yorker readers by this stage of his career, and derived a mischievous pleasure from surprising them. In this case however, in the manner of O. Henry, the deception is maintained until nearer the story's end.

"Roseheath" has no serious point to make, even though for its author it represented a serious break with the past. I would suggest that the sense of playfulness found in much of Cheever's best work of the Fifties and Sixties is given full expression for the first time in this story. It is also prototypical in that its two main characters, the Wilcoxes, are the first of Cheever's postwar suburbanites.

Ethel and Dana Wilcox are a young married couple cheated by time and circumstance (or so they feel) out of a particular happiness. A neighborhood home where Ethel had spent many pleasant afternoons as a young girl swimming and playing tennis has been sold, and is presumably lost to the Wilcoxes forever. A short distance into the story, however, they are delighted to meet the Fields, the family that has just bought the home, and to discover that they seem quite conventional. The family consists of an older couple, their son and daughter-in-law.

Naturally enough, when they are invited to the Fields' for a swimming party, the Wilcoxes are overjoyed. To this point the only hint Cheever has offered that something unusual is afoot appears when Dana meets Mr. Field's son, Roger, at the train station one morning and learns more about the family than he had expected:

"I go in to the city only three days a week now," Roger said. "I'm not working. I'm being analyzed. We've all been analyzed. That is, everyone but my wife.... Mother's been analyzed twice. She plays the violin now." (29)

Roger also informs Dana that the Fields have moved East to follow their

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psychoanalyst. But Dana is not the most perceptive of men, and he fails to sense the potential for trouble ahead. The Wilcoxes arrive at the Fields' on the appointed afternoon, and join their hosts at poolside. There follows some amiable chit-chat, the point of which seems to be everyone's relief at finding everyone else so agreeable. Then without warning Mr. Fields takes off his shorts and prepares to dive into the pool.

Instead of immediately registering the Wilcoxes' shock or dismay, Cheever is content to have Mrs. Field observe that the pool water was changed the previous day, in spite of a local water shortage, because she "can't stand a warm pool." Only then do we find out that Ellen realizes her eagerness to reclaim the past has backfired:

"The Heywoods used to feel that way," Ethel said. Her voice was strained. "Mrs. Heywood used to say," she went on nervously, shrilly, conscious of the naked man at her side, "Mrs. Heywood used to say that she'd rather have her garden wither than swim in tepid water." (30)

Ellen struggles to keep her composure as one after another, the Fields enter the pool undressed. But when Dana decides to follow their example, she suddenly remembers a dinner engagement. The story ends wistfully, moments before their departure:

Ethel massaged her face, so that her smile would appear natural when she said goodbye to the Fields-goodbye and thank you and goodbye to Roseheath forever. (31)

The story material is somewhat less fantastic than that of its prede- cessor, and Cheever is here more interested in comic effects achieved through understatement than he had been in "The Enormous Radio." But once again his concern with accurate depiction of human behavior- especially Ellen's inner turmoil, in this case-is very evident. Ellen has done nothing wrong, yet to the extent that acute embarrassment can be a form of suffering, she suffers. The question of whether she is too prudish for her own good is not strictly relevant. Cheever's disdain for psycho- analysis and its results has now been documented,4 and the fact that our final focus in the story is on Ellen's position suggests that we should sympathize with her. The situation loses none of its humor if we do.

In stark contrast, the final narrative in the breakthrough trilogy, "Torch Song," is one of the most oppressively unfunny tales Cheever produced. It appeared almost two months later in October of 1947 and was followed by a string of more conventional stories, all of them appear- ing in the New Yorker. (From mid-1948 to late 1949 Cheever published only twice, and was probably working on a novel.) "Torch Song" is also quite long, and almost invites the kind of misunderstanding that could do considerable damage to Cheever's reputation as an original storyteller. The potential for such misunderstanding centers on one of its two main characters, the unfortunate, ghoulish Joan Harris-a woman who re- directs the evil that has befallen her onto a long line of even more unfortunate men. One of these is the other main character and the story's protagonist, Jack Lorey.

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Once again the story's plot is patiently developed, so that only toward the end will the reader be able to grasp the full significance of what he has read, something the narrator has clearly known from the beginning: Joan is a female vampire, who lives by feeding on the death agonies of men. The delayed triggering of that realization is quite remarkable given the length and general coherence of the story, and can be explained by noting that in several of her relationships, as chronicled by Jack, she appears to be more victim than victimizer. Initially we imagine that Jack follows Joan's progress, such as it is, because he is "fond" of her, the two of them having come to New York from the same town in Ohio. But as their paths cross and recross, and as each meeting yields another story of horror, it becomes inevitable that Jack-whose own marriages and divorces are scarcely reported-will eventually have more than a passing interest in her, and she in him:

In the darkness, Joan began to talk about her departed lovers, and from what she said Jack gathered that they had all had a hard time. Nils, the suspect count, was dead. Hugh Bascomb, the drunk, had joined the Merchant Marine and was missing in the North Atlantic. Franz, the German, had taken poison the night the Nazis bombed Warsaw. "We listened to the news on the radio," Joan said, "and then he went back to his hotel and took poison

... ." (98-99)

Bald recitation of the story's "facts," however, lends itself to the false notion that this is an exercise in misogyny. Nowhere does Cheever state or suggest that Joan consciously seeks out men to destroy. She takes them as she finds them, and if anything, it is her passivity that seems to draw out the worst in them. In fact, by the time he finally glides into a deeper connection with her, Jack has made a thorough mess of his life, and Joan has had nothing to do with that. She is no diabolical sorceress, although Jack implies as much when, having fallen seriously ill himself, he finally comprehends the morbidity of her existence:

"Does it make you feel young to watch the dying?" he shouted. "Is that the lewdness that keeps you young? Is that why you dress like a crow? Oh, I know there's nothing I can say that will hurt you." (102)

Following the outburst that sends Joan away, Jack pulls himself together and moves out of the apartment in which Joan had threatened to nurse him through his illness, presumably to start a new life. And there the story ends, so it might appear that his assessment should be the reader's, and a feeling of relief after suffering does seem appropriate. But if Joan is not a witch or diabolical force, what does the story mean?

By some standards, perhaps anything the reader wishes it to mean. I would suggest, however, that Cheever removed the idea of deliberate evil from his portrayal of Joan for a thematic reason. He chose not to oversimplify her, I suspect, to drive home the point that evil does not depend on human volition for its existence. Its origins are so ancient and its lineage so tangled that it lives in the marrow of saint, sinner and ordinary mortal alike. And what is an ordinary mortal after all but some combina-

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tion of saint and sinner? If Jack is, so must Joan be. For a conventional moralist this may be a repellent notion; but for Cheever (if I am correct) essentially it means that an ostensibly good behavior (nursing someone who is ill) can in a given context be a serious perversion-and vice versa. "Torch Song" disturbs us precisely because it refuses to simplify the moral universe.

I realize that any attempt to locate a crucial "moment"-even one extending over several months-in John Cheever's fifty-two-year career must in itself seem simplistic. Actually it can be shown, as I have attempted to clarify elsewhere, that the pivotal year of 1947 was strenuously prepared for by Cheever: first, with a protracted apprenticeship extending from 1930 to 1942, and subsequently by a dramatic maturing that occurred after his marriage and during his Army service from 1942 to 1946.

In this light Cheever's flowering forth as an imaginative, even brilliant writer of short stories might almost appear inevitable. It was anything but that. As we have seen, Cheever was taking a risk, and it is to the credit of William Maxwell and the New Yorker that they were willing to accept such unusual new material, albeit from an established performer.

Whether or not Cheever had read Struthers Burt's prediction of future success for him, I am positive that early in 1947, following his military service, he became determined to impose a higher order of reality-what is usually referred to as fantasy-on his story material. Hitherto that material had been largely the stuff of life as he observed it during the Depression and the war years, selected and reassembled to serve as good naturalistic realism in fiction. But with the appearance of "The Enormous Radio," "Roseheath," and "Torch Song," it became compellingly clear that he was capable of drawing on a much greater imaginative range, and determined to do so. While he is not an intrusive presence in these stories, it is obvious in each of them that behind the prism of observation there is an informed intelligence sorting out events, a critical eye analyzing and connecting details, a moral architect building sophisticated themes into the story's architecture.

In "The Enormous Radio" he ventured into something approach- ing existential awareness and raised serious ethical questions about the meaning of personal involvement and self-delusion in the lives of his characters-people disturbingly like those who stare out at us from behind the bathroom mirror every morning. In "Roseheath" he finally gave full rein to an impish sense of humor that he had deliberately suppressed in his earlier work. He also managed to evoke sympathy for the victim of his comic situation, by carefully establishing the absurdity of its perpetrators. And in "Torch Song" he turned his hand to full-blown, macabre fantasy reminiscent of Poe, skillfully describing the pathology of a poisonous relationship that takes years to develop, then ripens and dies overnight. In this case his depiction of his principal female character can be criticized as primitive, but it is much more interesting than that given her near-victim, and far from stereotypical. As with "The Enormous Radio," any attempt to "solve" the story is simply inappropriate. In fact,

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all three stories seem more concerned with narrative possibilities than neat solutions. In the flowering of time, those possibilities would again branch out and bear such diverse, remarkable fruit as "Goodbye, Mr. Brother," "The Country Husband," "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," and "The Swimmer."

The younger John Cheever of the 1930's had not demonstrated much interest in such possibilities, although as an aspiring writer and occasional critic5 he was constantly faced with questions of narrative technique. John Cheever the thirty-five-year-old husband, father and ex-soldier was ready to resolve them for himself, and if a period of self-doubt followed because the world had not quite understood, that was only natural. In the long run, the risk proved worth the taking.

The Pennsylvania State University, York

NOTES

1. Another story, "The Common Day," New Yorker, 23 (2 August 1947): 19-24, followed "The Enormous Radio" and preceded "Roseheath." It is typically well-made and interesting on its own terms, but otherwise unremarkable.

2. See for example "Late Gathering" in Pagany, 2 (October-December 1931): 15-19. In the Preface to his 1978 Stories Cheever professed some embarrassment over his youthful efforts. Several of these are surprisingly good, but it is not difficult to understand editors' reluctance to take a story so carelessly experimental as this.

3. Interviews were conducted in Winter 1985. A good friend of Cheever's, Mrs. Virginia Kahn (formerly married to Cheever's New Yorker colleague, E. J. Kahn) told me in another interview that she recalls a conversation with Cheever-she is uncertain of the date but thinks he was about forty when it took place (i.e., about 1952)-in which he expressed concern about the possible failure of his career. Specifically, he feared that he would not achieve anything of significance as a writer. According to Mrs. Kahn, Cheever felt that his life would be effectively finished by the time he was forty-five, as he claimed his father's was. At that point Cheever had yet to publish a novel, and he may have felt the literary world had not taken note of his experiments with combining fantasy and realism.

Actually Cheever's father was still a fairly successful businessman when he was forty-five. It was Cheever's grandfather, Aaron, who had been the family's black sheep. In family legend a seaman who roamed the world (See Chapter Two, Home Before Dark by Susan Cheever), in actuality Aaron was (according to an anonymous researcher) a patternmaker who died of alcohol and opium addiction at the age of sixty-six in 1882, a century before the death of his famous grandson. The parallel and the contrast with John's career are striking. The grandson would also succumb to drugs and alcohol in his maturity, but would then make an heroic recovery and resume his career, achieving international recognition in the twilight of his life. The information concerning Aaron is contained in an unsigned letter to Susan Cheever from the Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, available in the John Cheever file at the Quincy Historical Society, Quincy, Massachusetts.

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4. This is clear enough in several stories, but see also the conclusion of Chapter Sixteen in Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984.

5. Between 1931 and 1939 Cheever wrote five book reviews for the New Re- public. For a complete listing see Dennis Coates' "John Cheever: A Checklist, 1930-1978" in Bulletin of Bibliography, 36 (January-March 1979): 1-13, 49.

WORKS CITED

Burt, Struthers. "John Cheever's Sense of Drama." Saturday Review, 26 (24 April 1943): 9.

Cheever, John. "The Enormous Radio" and "Torch Song." In Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, 33-41, 89-102.

. "Expelled." New Republic, 64 (1 October 1930): 171-74.

. "Fall River." The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimen- tal Art, 1 (Autumn 1931): 70-72.

. "In Passing." Atlantic Monthly, 157 (March 1936): 331-43.

. "Roseheath." New Yorker, 23 (16 August 1947): 29-31. Du Bois, William. "Books of the Times." New York Times, 1 May 1953, 19. Freedman, Morris. "New England and Hollywood." Commentary, 16 (October

1953): 389-90, 392. Houston, Penelope. "Short Stories." The Spectator, 191 (20 November 1953):

609-10. Mizener, Arthur. "In Genteel Traditions." New Republic, 128 (25 May 1953),

19-20.

A Call for Papers

Harvard University, the House of Seven Gables, and the Essex Institute join the Hawthorne Society in sponsoring the Cambridge/Salem Hawthorne conference scheduled for June 16-18, 1988. The theme of the meeting-Recreating New England: Hawthorne's Romantic Imagination -emerges from a special feature of the conference, a joint exhibition at the Houghton Library and at the Essex Institute, which will display manuscripts and rare editions of Hawthorne's works in the context of contemporaneous artifacts, documents, and photographs. Focal points of the exhibit will include:

Hawthorne and the Periodicals Hawthorne and Politics Hawthorne's Landscapes and Portraits of Places Hawthorne and the Puritan Past Hawthorne and Childhood Hawthorne and the "New Science" Papers about the relationship of Hawthorne's writings to these

aspects of his cultural environment are solicited and should be submitted to Lea Newman, North Adams State College, N. Adams, MA 01247 by January 1, 1988.

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John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947

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