Here, John Cheever writes close friend Josie Herbst, a radical writer with communist leanings, thanking her for the doll she had sent for his daughter, Susie. He goes on to update her on his writing, briefly mentioning Hollywood’s potential interest in his “Town House” series, a collection of short stories published in The New Yorker the previous year.
Friday [January ’46]
Dear Josie,
The doll arrived today and Susie was delighted. The doll also completes a representation of the social structure that we’ve been building up in the nursery. She has a negro doll, a worker-type doll, a rag doll (lumpen), a good assortment of middle-class dolls and now the party with the silk dress and waved hair completes the picture.
I hope your own picture is as broad as Susie’s or at least better than mine. I got out of the army in November and the work I’ve done since then you could put into a pea-shell. Hollywood has been nibbling fitfully at the Town House series but nothing has happened in that yet and it’s very possible that nothing will happen. I want to start on a book but I still have to write three stories and God knows when I’ll get those done.
We had a political discussion with Bill Maxwell last week and he said that governmental checks on the inflationary spiral were abortive because roses were fifteen dollars a dozen. A lot of fairly conservative people (and the inflation has made a lot of people fairly conservative) speak continually of Communism; but I’m going all out for some form of sun worship.
John
From The Letters of John Cheever. Cheever, John, and Benjamin Cheever. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.