The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, November 16, 2025

Byblos: John Cheever is one of the three or four greatest American short story writers of the 20th century. He died in 1982 in Ossining, which means I was very close to him on several occasions, as I used to visit a friend there in those years (it is also where my mother and my second father met), though I did not know Cheever existed back then anymore than he knew I did. Like most I discovered him through The Stories of John Cheever, the collection of 61 stories he published between 1946 and 1975, starting with “The Sutton Place Story” and the wonderful “Enormous Radio” which, once you’ve read it, will never stop playing in your mind, sometimes playing tricks with your mind. A few years ago the Library of America published his collected stories, along with a few uncollected ones, and all his published novels (he destroyed a few). It’s only when I read an Updike review of a Cheever biography a few days ago that I learned that there are some 60 stories he published, most of them in The New Yorker, some in The New Republic and other magazines, that have never been collected. He refused to republish all 45 or 47 stories he published between 1935 and 1946 in The New Yorker. But if you have a subscription to the magazine, you have access to its archives–and to all those stories, listed kindly by  date of issue, with page numbers, by the unfortunately defunct HTML Giant. I picked up the very first one: “Brooklyn Rooming House,” about a Mrs. Moreno, landlord of an apartment building she doesn’t own and has never earned enough to buy in 15 years as landlady. Her one obsession is to run a respectable rooming house. She will not tolerate drunkards. “I may starve myself, I may not have enough to pay the coal bill, but I’m going to have a respectable house,” she tells one of the tenants, the narrator. But it’s the Depression (written with a small d in those days), and people drank. It was around the time that Mrs. Moreno had wanted to throw a pair of tenants out for drinking, but she’d also discovered that because of the depression, she couldn’t afford to. “It was a situation she had never been in before.” So she rationalized: “She was not tolerating them as drunkards. She was forcing herself to believe in their respectability, and even to deceive herself as to the amount they were drinking.” One day a tenant comes home drunk, stumbles all over the place, cusses everyone, the unknowing landlady included, and crashes on a landing, passing out. Cheever sets up the scene with the one classically Cheever–if then still rough with baroque edges–line: “Late one Sunday afternoon I was sitting in my room reading the newspaper. It was foggy over the water, and you could hear the broken, fugitive cries off the river, and the damp air in the corridor smelled like a breath staled with beer. I heard the front door slam and heard someone start to come up…” He hears the drunk man crash his way upstairs, sussing all the way, then collapsing as the building returns to silence: “You could hear people closing their doors and picking up their newspapers again.” The line reminded me of Mark Twain’s takedown of Fenimore Cooper for his leapy lack of realism: “It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around.” How Cheever’s narrator could hear readers return to their newspapers across walls and ceilings, I don’t know. The Enormous Radio wasn’t even on. In 1935 Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s editor at the time, must not have had William Shawn’s OCD-like prickliness for versmilitude. When the landlady returns, the narrator somehow meets her and they both discover the man passed out. What will she do? She rationalizes: “Can’t you find your key?” she asks the–as they say in our local sheriff’s report–unresponsive man. There is an undercurrent of pain, a parallel pain between the old lady and the drunkard, in the simple unfolding of the story, and as the lines merge. It works because it’s the depression, and maybe it works even better, with time, because we now know it as the Depression, and lending hands came in all sizes: the landlady is lending a hand as much as the drunkard is lending one, by giving the landlady an out while still paying the rent. The cruelty Cheever would display toward some of his characters was not yet in embryo, though the Cheever style was, as was the deceptive simplicity of a directness that would disarm an ICE goon.

—P.T.

“It used to be a respectable house. That’s what recommended it and that’s what Mrs. Moreno, the landlady, worried about above everything. Even if she needed tenants badly, she was always at first rude and suspicious to people who applied for rooms. They were usually longshoremen or unemployed sailors or people from upstate looking for work. “Do you drink?” she asked them sharply. “Now, I don’t mind if you take a little drink now and then, but I’m not going to have a lot of drinking going on in my house, and I’m not going to let you have a lot of friends in drinking. I don’t care what you do outside. That’s none of my business as long as you can get up the stairs yourself. But I want you to know that this is a respectable house.” She asked nearly everyone this question and she gave them this warning. Fifteen years as a landlady had not heightened her ability to discriminate between good and bad tenants at first glance, and had only resulted in heightening her suspicion of everyone. She was an old woman, stooped and broken with work and indifferent to everything in life except the cleanliness and morality of her house.

–The opening of John Cheever’s “Brooklyn Rooming House,” The New Yorker, May 25, 1935.

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