John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson Page A

feelings. He did not long for his youth, ever. And it was not by accident that he had helped to burst the balloons and had sailed around the dance floor in an exhibition sure to elicit the dressing-down he got. He could not change his family’s circumstances, nor even talk about them. What he could do was to act out his frustration, to rebel not against his parents but against surrogate authority in whatever form it presented itself: the black-clad figure of his dancing instructor, and still more obviously, the teachers and administrators of Thayer Academy.
    The most dramatic fact about Cheever’s prep-school experience is that he was expelled in the spring of 1930, during the second term of his junior year. A long history led up to the expulsion, for the academic promise he had shown at Thayerlands seemed to vanish in the upper school. Louise Saul, who taught him freshman English, remembers him as a student who was “sloppy” about punctuation and who “didn’t take well to discipline.” The sloppiness extended to his appearance as well. He looked so shaggy that at least once his classmates collected a few pennies and escorted him to the barbershop.
    His grades ranged from mediocre to terrible. In the 1926–27 school year, he got Cs and C-minuses in English and ancient history, but flunked both Latin and Algebra. (“His math was horrendous,” classmate Robert Daugherty remembers.) The next year followed a similar pattern. He earned Cs in English, Latin, and medieval history, and flunked French and math. During 1928–29, whether because of family finances or Thayer Academy policies, he went to Quincy High School, where his grades were 55 in English, 45 in French, o in Latin, and 63 in plane geometry, with a D in physical education. In the fall of 1929, he was back at Thayer as a “special” student on probation, and at the time of his expulsion he had a B-plus/C-minus in an English literature course, a C in grammar, and a D in German, and was once again failing French. This 1929–30 course schedule, without any math or science or Latin, was most unusual and probably designed to give Cheever a chance to shine.
    Grading standards were strict at the time, and it was possible for a C student at Thayer, like John’s brother, Fred, to be admitted to Dartmouth, but a failing grade was a failing grade, and eventually the school asked Cheever to leave. He was in his own words “an intractable student” who did the assigned work when and if it pleased him. “John was not happy at Thayer nor was Thayer happy about his lack of achievement or his attitude,” teacher Grace Osgood recalled.
    The roster of brilliant people who have failed in school is a long one—Churchill comes to mind, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and every year, hundreds of students are dismissed from American prep schools. But Cheever was probably the only one to use such a rejection as a way of launching his career. He sat down and wrote a story about it, applying a thin veneer of fiction to his own experience. Then he sent the story, called “Expelled,” to Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic and had it accepted for publication.
    Surely this was one of the most unusual across-the-transom acceptances in magazine history. A youth in Quincy, Massachusetts, barely eighteen, is kicked out of school and writes a story about it that justifies himself by attacking the dullness and lockstep curriculum of the college preparatory system in general and his own institution in particular. In 999 cases out of a thousand, such a submission would have turned into a political harangue and been rejected without a second glance. But Cheever’s tale was different. There was something about it that caught Cowley’s attention and held it.
    He knew how to start, for one thing: with a promise of revelations to follow and an economy of language and incisive wit reminiscent of the early Hemingway