"The Swimmer" by John Cheever

 The Swimmer (1964)

by

John Cheever (1912-1982) 

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John Cheever, known as "The Chekhov of the Suburbs for his ability to capture the drama and sadness of the lives of his characters by revealing the undercurrents of apparently insignificant events” (source here) braids, in his well-known short story, “The Swimmer,” first published in “The New Yorker” in 1964, the quintessential epic of self-quest with harsh criticism of the American bourgeois way of living.

Neddy is heading back home, after a party, at the Westerhazy’s, through swimming all the swimming pools of his neighbourhood.

    Neddy Merrill feels himself to be an explorer, a pilgrim, a legendary figure, as research scholar Nasrullah Mambrol explains in “Analysis of John Cheever’s The Swimmer,” and he will embark in a “diurnal, seasonal and biographical journey.” Neddy will call the new streak of water “Lucinda,” like his wife, a territory to be conquered in the fashion of explorers, yet the battle is lost from the very beginning. Rather than swimming home, he flees from the embodiment of his home, his wife and family. He abandons Lucinda / Penelope at the Wasterhazy’s and only swims to a material idea of home. Neddy transitions from a blissful, energetic, full- of -vim state in day time, bracing and immersing himself in clear-water swimming pools, to aging, decline, social descent as midsummer touches an end, swimming through darker and murkier waters.

    The short story opens up with one of those “midsummer Sundays,” in which parishioners, tennis players, wildlife watchers, even the priest are all pervaded by the haziness of a hangover. Alcohol will be indeed omnipresent: Neddy stops at each of the swimming pools to have a drink. The word “stupefaction” appears frequently in the short story. This haziness or stupefaction that alcohol brings about runs paralell with Neddy´s inability to remember. Indeed, Neddy departs from the Westerhazy’s swimming-pool, whose name is illustrative of omens to be fulfilled, “West,” associated with “death” as the sun dies in the “West” and “hazy” (blurriness), cloudiness of thoughts, not being able to remember.

    The narrative voice deflates Ned’s prospects of heroic deeds. “He was far from young,” the narrator’s voice points, and “he might have been compared to a summer’s day,” but “particularly the last hours of one.” Shakespeare’s sonnet, echoed in these words,  constitutes a reverse of what Neddy represents. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (click on the number if you want to listen to it), where the beloved competes, transcends, and overcomes the beauty of a summer day, Neddy does not outdo the summer day with his infatuated airs of being young, but, contrary to that, the passage of time and the passing of the season will leave furrows in his body’s field, echoing another sonnet by Shakespeare (Click here if you want to listen to it: Sonnet 2): “When forty winters shall beseige thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.” He will be driven into physical deterioration through exhaustion and disillusionment.

    Mambrol describes the first swimming pool which Neddy traverses as a simil of his being born, of his early stages of life, those green waters in which he “crawls” echo the maternal womb and the amniotic liquid. Everything is blissful and eden-like at this stage “embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much as pleasure as the resumption of his natural condition.” Later, there is also an allusion to an apple-tree blossoming (reminiscent of Eden).

    As he traverses hedges, even a highway, and immerses himself in his neighbours pools, strewn pieces of his life come afloat: bankruptcy, marital issues, a mistress, debts, abandoned friends ... His pilgrimage equally showcases the flaws and superfluousness of American bourgeoise society. He starts to feel feeble and tired with the swimming, yet he struggles till the end. Dried pools interrupt his chain of swimming, abandoned houses, houses for sale… At the public swimming-pool, there are rules and regulations, but he still fights his sense of belonging to a certain status by being deprecatory of a crowd that jostles him (comment indebted to Marián). He has no identification disc, and the guardians of the public pool chase him off. This literal lack of identity dovetails with his efforts to remember. When he finally reaches his home, he seems to be an old man, who can barely walk on his legs, and he finds his house empty and dark with nobody inside, yet, he is still resistant to come to terms with his social descent and loneliness by calling out the cook or the maid (comment indebted to Cándido).

The Swimmer / TV ad 1992: “Mad about the Boy” by Dinah Washington / (Courtesy of Cándido)

The Swimmer (1968). with Burt Lancaster and Janet Landgard, directed by Frank Perry