Synopsis: “The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head” is a short story by Patricia Highsmith, published in 1979, which narrates the peculiar life of E. Taylor Cheever, an aspiring writer who, after the failure of his first novel, decides to devote himself to writing only in his mind. Throughout his life, Cheever created a vast body of literary work but never managed to put it down on paper. The story reflects his growing isolation and the repercussions this decision had on his family, especially on his son Everett, who oscillates between frustration and admiration for his father. With subtle irony, Highsmith weaves a moving tale about the power and fragility of the imagination.
The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head
by Patricia Highsmith
(Full story)
E. Taylor Cheever wrote books in his head, never on paper. By the time he died aged sixty-two, he had written fourteen novels and created one hundred and twenty-seven characters, all of whom he, at least, remembered distinctly.
It came about like this: Cheever wrote a novel when he was twenty-three called The Eternal Challenge which was rejected by four London publishers. Cheever, then a sub-editor on a Brighton newspaper, showed his manuscript to three or four journalist and critic friends, all of whom said, in quite as brusque a tone it seemed to Cheever as the London publishers’ letters, “Characters don’t come through . . . dialogue artificial . . . theme is unclear . . . Since you ask me to be frank, may I say I don’t think this has a hope of being published even if you work it over . . . Better forget this one and write another . . .” Cheever had spent all his spare time for two years on the novel, and had come near losing the girl he intended to marry, Louise Welldon, because he gave her so little attention. However he did marry Louise just a few weeks after the deluge of negative reports on his novel. It was a far cry from the note of triumph on which he had intended to claim his bride and embark upon marriage.
Cheever had a small private income, and Louise had more. Cheever didn’t need a job. He had imagined quitting his news-paper job (on the strength of having his first novel published), writing more novels and book reviews and maybe a column on books for the Brighton newspaper, climbing up from there to the Times and Guardian. He tried to get in as book critic on the Brighton Beacon, but they wouldn’t take him on any permanent basis. Besides, Louise wanted to live in London.
They bought a town house in Cheyne Walk and decorated it with furniture and rugs given them by their families. Meanwhile Cheever was thinking about another novel, which he intended to get exactly right before he put a word on paper. So secretive was he, that he did not tell Louise the title or theme or discuss any of the characters with her, though Cheever did get his characters clearly in mind—their backgrounds, motivations, tastes, and appearance down to the color of their eyes. His next book would be definite as to theme, his characters fleshed out, his dialogue spare and telling.
He sat for hours in his study in the Cheyne Walk house, indeed went up after breakfast and stayed until lunchtime, then went back until tea or dinnertime like any other working writer, but at his desk he made hardly a note except an occasional “1877 + 53” and “1939–83,” things like that to determine the age or birth year of certain characters. He liked to hum softly to himself while he pondered. His book, which he called The Spoiler of the Game (no one else in the world knew the title), took him fourteen months to think out and write in his mind. By that time, Everett Junior had been born. Cheever knew so well where he was going with the book that the whole first page was etched in his mind as if he saw it printed. He knew there would be twelve chapters, and he knew what was in them. He committed whole sequences of dialogue to memory, and could recall them at will. Cheever thought he could type the book out in less than a month. He had a new typewriter, a present from Louise on his last birthday.
“I am ready—finally,” Cheever said one morning with an unaccustomed air of cheer.
“Oh, splendid, darling!” said Louise. Tactfully she never asked him how his work was going, because she sensed that he didn’t like that.
While Cheever was looking over the Times and filling his first pipe before going up to work, Louise went out in the garden and cut three yellow roses, which she put into a vase and took up to his room. Then she silently withdrew.
Cheever’s study was attractive and comfortable with a generous desk, good lighting, books of reference and dictionaries to hand, a green leather sofa he could take catnaps on if he chose, and a view of the garden. Cheever noticed the roses on the small roller table beside his desk and smiled appreciatively. Page One, Chapter One, Cheever thought. The book was to be dedicated to Louise. To my wife Louise. Simple and clear. It was on a gray morning in December that Leonard . . .
He procrastinated, and lit another pipe. He had put a sheet of paper in the typewriter, but this was the title page, and as yet he had written nothing. Suddenly, at 10:15 A.M., he was aware of boredom—oppressive, paralyzing boredom. He knew the book, it was in his mind entirely, and in fact why write it?
The thought of hammering away at the keys for the next many weeks, putting words he already knew onto two hundred and ninety-two pages (so Cheever estimated) dismayed him. He fell onto the green sofa and slept until eleven. He awakened refreshed and with a changed outlook: the book was done, after all, not only done but polished. Why not go on to something else?
An idea for a novel about an orphan in quest of his parents had been in Cheever’s mind for nearly four months. He began to think about a novel around it. He sat all day at his desk, humming, staring at the slips of paper, almost all blank, while he rapped the eraser end of a yellow pencil. He was creating.
By the time he had thought out and finished the orphan novel, a long one, his son was five years old.
“I can write my books later,” Cheever said to Louise. “The important thing is to think them out.”
Louise was disappointed, but hid her feelings. “Your father is a writer,” she said to Everett Junior. “A novelist. Novelists don’t have to go to work like other people. They can work at home.”
Little Everett was in a day nursery school, and the children had asked him what his father did. By the time Everett was twelve, he understood the situation and found it highly risible, especially when his mother told him his father had written six books. Invisible books. This was when Louise began to change her attitude to Cheever from one of tolerance and laissez-faire to one of respect and admiration. Mainly, consciously, she did this to set an example for Everett. She was conventional enough to believe that if a son lost respect for his father, the son’s character and even the household would fall apart.
When Everett was fifteen, he was not amused by his father’s work any longer, but ashamed and embarrassed by it when his friends came to visit.
“Novels? . . . Any good? . . . Can I see one?” asked Ronnie Phelps, another fifteen-year-old and a hero of Everett’s. That Everett had been able to bring Ronnie home for the Christmas hols was a stupendous coup, and Everett was anxious that everything should go right.
“He’s very shy about them,” Everett replied. “Keeps ’em in his room, you know.”
“Seven novels. Funny I never heard of him. Who’s his publisher?”
Everett found himself under such a strain, Ronnie became ill at ease too, and after only three days went down to his family in Kent. Everett refused to eat, almost, and kept to his room where his mother twice found him weeping.
Cheever knew nothing of this. Louise shielded him from every domestic upset, every interruption. But since the holidays stretched ahead nearly a month and Everett was in such a bad state, she gently suggested to Cheever that they take a cruise somewhere, maybe to the Canaries.
At first, Cheever was startled by the idea. He didn’t like vacations, didn’t need them, he often said. But after twenty-four hours, he decided that a cruise was a good idea. “I can still work,” he said.
On the boat, Cheever sat for hours in his deck chair, sometimes with pencil, sometimes not, working on his eighth novel. He never made a note in twelve days, however. Louise, next to him in her chair, could tell when he sighed and closed his eyes that he was taking a breather. Towards the end of the day, he often appeared to be holding a book in his hands and to be thumbing through it, and she knew he was browsing in his past work which he knew by heart.
“Ha-ha,” Cheever would laugh softly, when a passage amused him. He would turn to another place, appear to be reading, then murmur, “Um-m. Not bad, not bad.”
Everett, whose chair was on the other side of his mother’s, would tear himself up grimly and stalk away when his father gave these contented grunts. The cruise was not an entire success for Everett, there being no people his own age except one girl, and Everett announced to his parents and the friendly deck steward that he had no desire whatever to meet her.
But things went better when Everett got to Oxford. At least his attitude towards his father became once more one of amusement. His father had made him quite popular at Oxford, Everett declared. “It’s not everyone who’s got a living limerick for a father!” he said to his mother. “Shall I recite one I—”
“Please, Everett,” said his mother with a coldness that took the grin at once from Everett’s face.
In his late fifties, Cheever showed signs of the heart disease which was to kill him. He wrote on as steadily as ever in his head, but his doctor counseled him to cut down on his hours of work, and to nap twice in the day. Louise had explained to the doctor (a new doctor to them, a heart specialist) what kind of work Cheever did.
“He is thinking out a novel,” Louise said. “That can be just as tiring as writing one, of course.”
“Of course,” the doctor agreed.
When the end came for Cheever, Everett was thirty-eight and had two teenaged children of his own. Everett had become a zoologist. Everett and his mother and five or six relatives assembled in the hospital room where Cheever lay under an oxygen tent. Cheever was murmuring something, and Louise bent close to hear.
“. . . ashes unto ashes,” Cheever was saying. “Stand back! . . . No photographs allowed . . . ‘Next to Tennyson?’ ” This last in a soft high voice. “. . . monument to human imagination . . .”
Everett was also listening. Now his father seemed to be delivering a prepared speech of some kind. A eulogy, Everett thought.
“. . . tiny corner revered by a grateful people . . . Clunk! . . . Careful!”
Everett suddenly bent forward in a spasm of laughter. “He’s burying himself in Westminster Abbey!”
“Everett!” said his mother. “Silence!”
“Ha-ha-ha!” Everett’s tension exploded in guffaws, and he staggered out of the room and collapsed on a bench in the hall, pressing his lips together in a hopeless effort to control himself. What made it funnier was that the others in the room, except for his mother, didn’t understand the situation. They knew his father wrote books in his head, but they didn’t appreciate the Poets’ Corner bit at all!
After a few moments, Everett sobered himself and walked back into the room. His father was humming, as he had often done while he worked. Was he still working? Everett watched his mother lean low to listen. Was he mistaken, or was it a ghost of Land of Hope and Glory that Everett heard coming from the oxygen tent?
It was over. It seemed to Everett, as they filed out of the room, that they should go now to his parents’ house for the funeral meats, but no—the funeral had not really taken place yet. His father’s powers were truly extraordinary.
Some eight years later, Louise lay dying of pneumonia which had followed flu. Everett was with her in the bedroom of the Cheyne Walk house. His mother was talking about his father, about his never having received the fame and respect due him.
“—until the last,” said Louise. “He is buried in Poets’ Corner, Everett—mustn’t forget that . . .”
“Yes,” said Everett, somehow impressed, almost believing it.
“Never room for the wives there, of course—otherwise I could join him,” she whispered.
And Everett forbore to tell her she was going to join him in the family plot outside Brighton. Or was that true? Could they not find another niche in Poets’ Corner? Brighton, Everett said to himself as reality started to crumble. Brighton, Everett recovered himself. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “Maybe it can be arranged, Mummy. We’ll see.”
She closed her eyes, and a soft smile settled on her lips, the same smile of contentment that Everett had seen on his father’s face when he had lain under the oxygen tent.
THE END
