March 12, 2021

"The Swimmer" by John Cheever

"Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?"

Yesterday, Z (whose much-anticipated newsletter launches today) sent me a short story by John Cheever, “The Swimmer” (1964), which deranged me ideally.

Having not read any Cheever I’d thought of him as the kind of fellow who would share a cigarette with Richard Yates outside a vaguely northeastern bar in the year 1957, a.k.a. my type.

The opening of “The Swimmer” promises just that sort of domesticated American suburbomelancholia:

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering form a terrible hangover.

To start us off, Cheever keeps his characters at a hazy, plural distance, and keeps us (“you”) close, implicated already in the gossip of the neighborhood, whose community coheres chiefly, covertly, around drink (and of course wealth).

Like Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools,” “The Swimmer” is a drinking tale whose central image is the pool. After the initial eagle-eye view of the suburb, we zoom in on the Westerhazys’ pool, which, “fed by an artesian well with a high iron[y] content, was a pale shade of green.” There, apart from Lucinda Merrill and the Westerhazys, Neddy Merril sits, “one hand in it, one hand around a glass of gin.” Like any good suburbanite hero, Neddy wants out: “His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.” He is eight miles from his house in Bullet Park, where he imagines his daughters frolicking on the tennis court. At whim, he decides to return home; this decision marks our first lurch into the absurd: “it occurred to him that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water.” Neddy will swim there.

It is not a continuous swim through some underground water system, as one might imagine—the story is more subtle in its surrealism. Rather, Neddy follows a route of his own memory, walking barefoot in his trunks to the pools of his neighbor-friends (many of whom, we learn, he and Lucinda chronically stand up); swimming the length of their pools (whether they are home or not); and proceeding to the next. It is only as he makes this journey that the apparent realism of this world—its adherence to “consensus reality”—is thrown into question. Neddy’s journey, we discover, constitutes a sort of time travel, one in which his clock runs the same while the rest of the world runs in time-lapse. In the span of what appears to him a single day, he sees the leaves start to turn, smells a bonfire nearby, chrysanthemums or marigolds, “some stubborn autumnal fragrance—strong as gas.” Each neighbor along the way behaves as if aware of some history (or future) that Neddy himself can’t remember, a history that feels increasingly fraught and dubious. He asks a friend for a drink and discovers that his friend hasn’t drank in three years; another friend offers condolences for misfortunes he can’t remember. A journey born of whimsy and boredom—I’ll swim eight miles home because why the hell not—turns into a grueling tale of loss (of memory, of family, of home): “The worst of it was the cold in his bones and the feeling that he might never be warm again.”

Neddy—simply Ned by the story’s end—is a fairy tale’s hero, one who traverses the universe with the innocent belief that it will serve him, armed with a curiosity that lures him to its darkest corners. “Pilgrim” that he is, he finds himself swept up in a dream of conquest, pulled across town by some force he does not understand. “Why did he love storms,” Cheever writes, “what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stairs…why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings?” Ned is tender, naive, bored—excited by chaos and unable to handle it. One gets the sense that he is journeying both backwards and forwards at once, that his past returns to haunt him at the same time that he fast-forwards through his own life, as if outside it.