‘Go Left, Young Writer’: John Cheever and the Writing of ‘Fall River’, 1931

Abstract

In late 1931, John Cheever temporarily stopped producing work for large-circulation magazines and began writing formally and stylistically experimental stories for various little magazines. This article examines the first of these stories, ‘Fall River’, an ostensibly proletarian story about mill closures and mass lay-offs in an economically depressed textile city. Cheever published ‘Fall River’ in the second issue of The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art, a communist little magazine published in Davenport, Iowa, in late 1931. Cheever's most recent biographer, Blake Bailey, claims that the author's turn away from the large-circulation magazine marketplace towards an emergent Midwestern literary radicalism in 1931 was a short-lived political digression by an otherwise apolitical middle-class writer. This article contests this view. Re-evaluating Cheever's professional relationship with the New Republic (the first large-circulation magazine to publish his fiction), his personal experience of left-wing politics and his reading of little magazines between 1930 and 1931, it argues that Cheever made this decision for professionally pragmatic, rather than political, reasons. In short, it was easier for Cheever to publish his work in little magazines in the early 1930s because they were more receptive to the work of younger writers than were their mainstream counterparts. This is not to say that ‘Fall River’ was not an apolitical story, however. The article argues further that, far from being a political digression, ‘Fall River’ is in fact a self-reflexive critique of the politicisation of middle-class writers during the Depression. It uses close analysis of the text to demonstrate the extent to which Cheever's ambivalent relationship with American communism influenced some of the formal, generic, and thematic properties of the story.