WRITING about writers is, in many ways, far more difficult than telling the stories of kings, politicians, bankers or bums. For the man who is putting the story down on paper often sees a great deal of himself in the subject. "We have many things in common," muses Writer Alwyn Lee about the subject of this week's cover story, Writer John Cheever.

What they have in common, is not necessarily their background. Alwyn Lee was born in Australia, only a few months from the time that John Cheever was born in Massachusetts, and put down his roots in that rough-and-ready land. He graduated with honors in philosophy from the University of Melbourne, became a newspaperman, and with his wife, Essie, came to the U.S. in 1939. They are a rare husband-wife combination on the TIME staff; she is chief of editorial researchers.

Writing about life is the main thing that Cheever and Lee, whose short stories have been widely published, have in common. But there are also similarities in the way they live. Lee lives and writes at his home outside Croton, N.Y., only a few miles from Cheever's home at Ossining. He cleared five acres of woodland, wearing out five axes in the process, and built much of the house himself. Woodsmanship is a skill that Cheever and Lee share, and it reached a danger point on one neighborly occasion at the Lee place, when the two held a woodcutting contest after a fine lunch, Lee with an ax and Cheever with a chain saw. In the heat of the competition, the axman came perilously close to clipping the sawman.

The special problems of doing a story about a writer were also impressed on Correspondent Andrew Kopkind, who did a major part of the reporting. "Like many people who write for a living," said Kopkind, "Cheever doesn't really like to talk about himself but about other people. When I would say, 'Now we really must talk about you,' he would leap up and say something like 'Let's go tobogganing.' " For Artist Henry Koerner, who painted Cheever in the room where he works, the assignment had no more than the usual subjective aspects. Koerner studied his man, and soon selected for the background the Cheevers' two Roman doves because they seemed to him to symbolize "the peaceful world with which Cheever surrounds himself-the early American furniture, his pets and the quiet."

When the cover story, edited by Senior Editor A. T. Baker, was on press, Alwyn Lee summed up the collective feeling in an admittedly subjective observation on Cheever's writing: "His way is the way we should think about ourselves."

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