THE SWIMMER
by John Cheever, 1964

Masterful as so many of John Cheever's stories are, none quite matches the compressed power and inexorable logic of "The Swimmer." The story's greatness derives in large measure from its being distilled from 150 pages of notes for and manuscript of a novel Cheever had originally planned to write. The origins of "The Swimmer" also can be traced to a story titled "The Music Teacher," published five years earlier: "The night was dark, and with his sense of reality thus shaken, he stood on his own doorstep thinking that the world changed more swiftly than one could perceive—died and renewed itself—and that he moved through the events of his life with no more comprehension than a naked swimmer."

The story that developed from that image begins in a deceptively beguiling comic-realistic manner: a number of well-off suburban couples are seen sitting around a backyard pool on a sunny Sunday afternoon, accounting for their present malaise in terms of having drunk too much the night before. The tone here is gently satiric, as typically Cheeveresque as the suburban setting modeled on the author's own Westchester. The titular hero, Neddy Merrill, seems equally familiar: youthful (though not young), athletic, well-to-do, yet also somewhat aloof, yearning for something more. In Neddy's case this longing takes the curious and clearly comical form of deciding to swim home, eight miles and fifteen pools to the south. Humorous as his prank seems, it is also imbued with a mythic resonance. One is reminded of the similar though more ambitious method that James Joyce employed in Ulysses: as T. S. Eliot explained, the author's "manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

The unity of "The Swimmer" depends less on Cheever's version of the modernists' mythic method, however, than on the incremental repetition that typifies folk ballads and many of Cheever's stories and novels. Thus the structure of "The Swimmer" proves surprisingly and deceptively simple. Playing the role of legendary explorer, Neddy sets out for home; an odyssey back to innocence, purity, and youth. The story's plot follows Neddy from pool to pool and is paced in a way that allows the reader not just to read about but actually to experience Neddy's initial exhilaration and subsequent exhaustion. After two pages of exposition the story gets off to a fast start: five pools in the next half page. Obstacles such as sharp gravel underfoot and a thorny hedge seem at this point more like realistic details than ill omens.

As the pace begins to slow over the next few pages, the signs of Neddy's growing separation from familiar natural and social worlds begin to increase, and when halfway through he tries to cross a divided highway his odyssey comes to a momentary halt. The tone here, like the day, turns darker, even colder; from this more detached point of view Neddy seems no longer boyishly enthusiastic and sympathetic but pitifully unprepared and exposed, unable to turn back and unsure when and where his little game began to turn so deadly serious. Once across a highway drawn in part from Greek myth (the rivers Styx and Lethe), Neddy enters the hell of a public pool. Here he is assaulted by loud noises and harsh smells and is jostled by the kind of people he has spent his well-todo suburban life successfully avoiding. Yet even here Neddy finds himself excluded; lacking the proper identification tag, he is ordered to leave. With each new "breach in the succession"—finding that his former mistress has a new lover, being snubbed by a couple he had formerly dismissed as social upstarts—Neddy's alienation from all that is familiar and therefore reassuring increases until, dispossessed in various ways, he arrives at his home, now dark, empty, and locked.

The mythic parallels deepen and dignify a story that might otherwise have been little more than one more social parable about the dark side of the American dream. Indeed, "The Swimmer," for all its density of social fact and examination of the suburban experience, proves as dreamlike as the stories of Poe, Hawthorne, and Kafka. Cheever transforms a comedy of manners into dream fantasy and ultimately into nightmare. Just as it is impossible to tell exactly where and how the real turns into the fantastic or how a single summer afternoon lengthens to become months, even years, it is impossible to say whether at story's end Neddy Merrill finally confronts his past and present—waking to reality as it were—or only confronts a future possibility in the form of a dark dream. What is clear is that in "The Swimmer" Cheever manages to transform realistic details, myths (especially those of Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle), and his very personal fears of financial and emotional ruin into a masterwork of twentieth-century literature.

—Robert A. Morace