John Cheever by Scott; Donaldson Page B

stories Cheever had been reading. “It didn’t come all at once,” “Expelled” begins. “It took a very long time.… The first signs were cordialities on the part of the headmaster. He was never nice to anybody unless he was a football star or hadn’t paid his tuition or was going to be expelled.”
    The eighteen-year-old author also understood that it would be wrong to issue any diatribes. Instead, he drew a series of portraits that illustrate the school’s problems far more effectively than he could possibly describe them. A former army colonel comes to make the Memorial Day speech. Usually a politician did the job, and told the boys that theirs was the greatest country in the world, and they should be proud to fight for it. But the colonel has seen his friends die in the Great War and cannot supply the expected sentiments. He describes the terrors of battle, then breaks down and begins to whimper. Everyone is embarrassed. Next Memorial Day, the school will be sure to invite a mayor or governor to speak. The charismatic Laura Driscoll, a history teacher who refuses to acknowledge that history is dead, is dismissed for speaking out in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. English teacher “Margaret Court-wright was very nice,” but she “pulled her pressed hair across her forehead” to hide the fact that she was slightly bald; her interpretation of Hamlet “was the one accepted on college-board papers,” so that no one had to get a new interpretation.
    As for the headmaster himself, his is the inside world of the office, with chairs arranged in a semicircle and “gravy-colored” brocade curtains. When he tells Cheever of his dismissal, the youth gazes longingly out the window. “I was tired of seeing spring with walls and awnings to intercept the sweet sun and the hard fruit.… I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows.” The tension is strong between the confinements of school and the freedom of the natural world. The pull of the outdoors, “elegant and savage and fleshly,” would stay with Cheever always, and nearly always it would be opposed in his mind to the limitations imposed by ordinary existence, by house and workplace, commitment and duty.
    Finally, the writer of “Expelled” knew how to win the sympathy of his audience. It is August now, he writes, and he is At Home as the fall approaches:
    Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to.
    I am not sorry. I am not at all glad.
    It is strange to be so very young and have no place to report at nine o’clock.
    When the story appeared in the October 1, 1930, issue of The New Republic , a left-wing periodical rarely consulted by Thayer students, their parents, or the faculty, it outraged the sensitivities of all three groups. Cheever had not been fair to the school, they felt. He had distorted the truth, they insisted: there was no crying colonel, and the history teacher had not been fired for political reasons. He had been cruel to Harriet Gemmel (Margaret Court-wright) and Stacy Baxter Southworth (the headmaster), they maintained. The only good thing was that he had not mentioned Thayer by name. The school’s partisans were right to object, perhaps, that Cheever had taken liberties with the truth, and exaggerated the school’s stagnation. But it was a story he was writing, after all, and a remarkable one coming from a student who had been expelled in his junior year. Without Stacy Baxter Southworth, Cheever was to say many years later, he might have ended up pumping gas. And “Expelled” might as well have been called “Reminiscences of a Young Sorehead,” he also observed. But that was to minimize the accomplishment of the story, an achievement so unusual as to make one wonder whether the failure in the classroom was his alone.
    The evidence of “Expelled” and of Cheever’s transcripts