New York Daily News Because it's such a fascinating family, it's a fascinating book, but it's not always a pretty story, and one has to admire Susan Cheever's courage in telling it....Her greatest gifts come across in her memoirs....Home Before Dark and Treetops have established her as a very accomplished writer.

Autorentext
Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.

Klappentext

In this companion volume to "Home Before Dark", Susan Cheever once again gives an insider's glimpse into her famous family, whose secrets and eccentricity are only paralleled by their genius and successes.

Zusammenfassung
In this compelling companion volume to her acclaimed memoir Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever once again gives readers a revealing look into her famous family, whose secrets and eccentricities parallel their genius and successes. Set against the backdrop of Treetops, the New Hampshire family retreat where the Cheevers still summer, and going back several generations, this powerful remembrance focuses on Susan Cheever's mother's family, and includes portraits of her great-grandfather, Thomas Watson, who invented the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell, and her grandfather Milton Winternitz, a brilliant doctor who built Yale Medical School. And of course there is her beloved and talented father John Cheever, the accomplished author who became one of the most well-known writers of the century, often using his family as material. Perhaps most riveting about Susan Cheever's second biographical masterpiece is its exploration of the lives of the Cheever women. At once a unique family portrait and the tale of every family, Treetops draws us effortlessly into a fascinating yet endearingly familiar world.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER ONE

TREETOPS was built out of my great-grandfather Tom Watson's dreams. Born grit poor in a Salem, Massachusetts livery stable, Watson got rich and famous in the 1870s, when he and his friend Alexander Graham Bell invented and developed the telephone. Watson was an inspired technician, a clever storyteller, a driven adventurer, and a man who lost a lot of money banking on the innate goodness of human nature. He spent the bulk of his Bell millions building a shipyard which employed most of eastern Massachusetts during the depression of the 1890s -- he joked that it would have been cheaper to pension off every ablebodied man in the state. His unorthodox management methods -- Watson liked to bid on huge navy battleships his Fore River shipyard wasn't equipped to build, figuring that if he won the bid he'd expand -- sent the shipyard's treasurer into a sanatorium with a nervous breakdown, but Watson managed to produce five of the cruisers and battleships in President Theodore Roosevelt's navy, and two of his ships went around the world with the proud Great White Fleet. When the shipyard's creditors finally foreclosed, Watson had saved enough to five on if he supplemented his income with writing and lectures, and to buy the fifty acres on a hillside in New Hampshire which is still the geographical center of his family.

Watson believed that the rich owed the poor. With his friend Edward Bellamy, the American writer and socialist, he founded the Nationalist political party He also panned for gold in Alaska, studied classical music, committed most of Shakespeare's plays to memory, and became a geologist who had a fossil -- Watsonella -- named after him. In his fifties, Watson joined Frank Benson's traveling company of Shakespearean players and toured the small towns of England. Fully costumed in armor or togas, he proclaimed his lines -- "Ave Brutus!" was one -- from the ramshackle stages at Bath, Birmingham, and Liverpool.

In my family, conventional success at formal education has always been taken as a sign of a dull, law-abiding nature. My father was expelled from school at seventeen and wrote his first story about it. My grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz graduated at fifteen. Watson quit school in Salem when he was fourteen. By the time his classmates were getting their degrees, he was chumming around with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm and trying to decide how to invest his personal fortune. He believed in reincarnation of the soul after death, the curative powers of daydreaming, and taxing the rich -- and he
loved a good story. At Treetops he enthralled his grandchildren with tailor-made tall tales about a boy named Tom who invented a car that ran on milk-and that made ice cream, a boy named Bill who was taught to swim in the lake by a talking and a girl named Mary who discovered underground tunnels which enabled her to chat with the carrots and potatoes Watson's hose tops were growing in the vegetable garden. Watson's most skillful and enduring story is the one he made up about the first words spoken over the telephone wires, on the evening of March 10, 1876, in the attic rooms Bell rented in Boston.

According to Watson, writing in his 1926 autobiography, Exploring Life, the historic words were Alexander Graham Bell's shout for help after he knocked over a beaker of battery acid. Bell was always clumsy. "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" he called in pain, and Watson, standing in the next room, heard the words transmitted through the wire. Since then, this story of the birth of the telephone has been repeated in thousands of biographies, history textbooks, and educational films, and even in a movie, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, starring Don Ameche.

The fact that it didn't happen this way has not diminished the story's dramatic impact.

There was no accident, there was no spilled battery acid. "The first recorded message was commonplace," Watson complained in a letter soon after the event. "There was little of dramatic interest in the occasion," he wrote to another correspondent. There is no reference to the accident with acid in any log or letter of Bell's or in Watson's log for the day.

It wasn't until Watson sat down to remember this historic moment in his autobiography, fifty years after the fact, that the spilled acid was invented. Watson was an old man, and the past had become dim and malleable. Bell was dead and couldn't contradict him. Watson was living in retirement in a fisherman's cottage on the Florida beach, and his impulse to tell a good story finally became irresistible.

"I was astonished to hear Bell's voice coming from [the receiving telephone] distinctly saying, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"' Watson wrote in Exploring Life. "He had no receiving telephone at his end of the wire so I couldn't answer him, but as the tone of his voice indicated that he needed help, I rushed down the hall to his room and found he had upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. He forgot the accident in his joy over the success of the new transmitter when I told him how plainly I had heard his words, and his joy was increased when he went to the other end of the wire and heard how distinctly my voice came through."

Like all inspired storytellers, Watson altered the facts just slightly, drawing what should have happened out of what did happen. In remembering my father's stories about his lifedecades after Watson`s -- I often noticed that this was exactly what he did. If a moment in his career was triumphant, like the moment when an editor bought his first novel, my father would fashion a triumphant moment out of the mundane available facts. A rowboat would become a yacht, a chance meeting at a …