"Save
me the Waltz"...beautiful title, isn´t it?. It conjures up
pictures of glamorous high class couples dancing in spacious saloons
with luminous chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. However, during
the Roaring Twenties , it was Jazz music
not classical music that was fashionable and was listened to in
clubs. The novel is not concerned with parties although there are
some of them in the novel and Alabama, the protagonist, appears at
the end emptying ashtrays after the last party is over. Indeed, It
all comes to an end. All ashes. Her father´s death, her broken dream
to become a ballerina and her love for her husband are at the end of
a long journey . Only the vivid image of Nature can be
cathartic ...or not.
Alabama’s
hard struggle to have her own identity ( there are mirrors
everywhere) is also Zelda‘s
struggle to find her own voice and style away from the shadow of her
husband and escape patriarchal and patronizing behaviours.
That
fight can be seen in the language. It ranges from the baroque and
flamboyant language of the beginning of the novel to the more simple and plain
style at the end , when she gets rid of the superflous in her life.
In addition to that, the luxuriant colourful depictions of lanscape (
above all The South)the surrealist, oneiric images and
symbols show that her voice was unique, although her husband, Scott,
derided her talents.
In
the same way , Alabama´s husband, David, is clearly defined in two
sentences "David, David, David, Knight, Knight , Knight and Miss
Alabama Nothing". Narcissistic. Equally, she gives her beloved
daughter some advice. "Never be a back-seat driver".
Controlling
Alabama
( the author’s alter ego ) is well aware of the
reasons of why theirs was a broken marriage. She must have felt alone
many times (Both). Part bildungsroman, part autobiographical. The
novel is insightful and deeply moving. ...Only a bit rambling. I
liked it a lot.
John
Cheever, known as "The
Chekhov of the Suburbsfor
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
