The Lee Shore

It is a cherished fictional device to build a story around the discovery of a previously unpublished text. The stratagem is used by Henry James in The Aspern Papers. A.S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel, Possession: A Romance, is also built this way. The Lee Shore is not an invention, but an actual flesh-and-blood manuscript. I only know about the book, because its author, Loyd "Pete" Collins, was a colleague and a close friend of my father, John Cheever.

In 1935 Collins published a well-thought-of novel titled Call Me Ishmael. He then stopped publishing books, but he didn't stop writing. He worked for 30 years on The Lee Shore, and was fiddling with the manuscript almost until he died in 1966. Loyd's widow, Lib Logan Collins, kept the pages in a bank vault for 35 years. Her desire to see the book out before her own death prompted two of Loyd's nephews to produce a typescript. Here it is then, a first-class story, but also an artifact. The Lee Shore hails from the time before the invention of memoir, but reads with the force of living history. The romance begins in upstate New York when everybody smoked, and the streams were thronged with gigantic trout.

--Benjamin Cheever
May, 2004