John Cheever and Swimming Pools

With their air of obligatory collective fun, there’s a sadness peculiar to swimming pools. This feeling accompanies some of my earliest memories, when my mother was a swimming instructor at a municipal pool in suburban Cleveland. I was five or six and I sat on the concrete deck beside the pool, reading comic books and watching storm clouds. I remember nothing of the kids she taught, the inevitable sunshine and laughter, focused as I was on my own boredom and misery, but I remember the mingled smells of chlorine and the limestone damp of the concrete.

This recollection came back Tuesday morning when I took my younger sons, ages 3 and 5, to their first swimming lessons of the summer, at our neighborhood YMCA. The instructors are polite, college-age girls uncertain of their authority over young children, especially with parents seated nearby. The kids jump in the water and splash or stand on the deck and cry. Mine are jumpers.

Inevitably I think of “The Swimmer” – the story by John Cheever, not the awful movie adaptation of it, starring Burt Lancaster as the title character, Neddy Merrill. Merrill decides to swim home from a friend’s suburban house, eight miles away, using “that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife.” These are not the swimming pools I knew as a kid. In fact, no one in our working-class neighborhood owned a pool. Cheever works another economic stratum, another world entirely, though the gin consumption in both worlds, as I recall, was comparable. Also comparable is the visceral sense of unhappiness and unease associated with both sorts of pools:

“Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds – some stubborn autumnal fragrance – on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.”

In eight miles, Merrill ages, unravels. Merrill’s journey begins as a lark, the romp of a boy-man, but soon darkens and grows mysterious. His home is no longer his home. Rust from the garage door handles comes off on his hands. A rain gutter has come loose and hangs in front of the front door “like an umbrella rib.” Merrill’s dawning realization that something is wrong, is deftly paced by Cheever. It is almost but not quite melodramatic and I find it devastatingly sad. The final sentence:

“He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.”

Guy Davenport, of all people, had a fine understanding of Cheever. He reviewed Cheever’s final, slender work of fiction, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, published shortly before the writer’s death in 1982. In “John Cheever in Paradise,” later collected in The Hunter Gracchus, Davenport compares Cheever to his great precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne:

“The resemblances between these two scions of New England Puritanism are seductive. They both put Italian paganism and American innocence in an ironic and heartbreaking contrast. They shared symbolic vocabularies of light and dark, old and new, spiritual deprivation and fulfillment, nature and civilization, man and woman. Cheever saw life as a process of impulses whose power to shape our destiny becomes apparent only when we can no longer extricate ourselves from them. The world is beautiful and fun; what we don’t know in our joy of it is that what feels so good is addictive and the hangover bitter. All Cheever plots are about good intentions plunging with energy and verve into a trap. The older he got, the more he liked to think that the trap is purgatorial, is, in fact, good for us. Life has no other shape.”

How I love Davenport and his all-seeing intelligence. His verb “plunging” is perfect for describing Merrill’s descent. Davenport helps define some of the reasons why reading Cheever has always seemed both pleasant and important. Those who read him as a minor-league satirist of suburban angst do Cheever and themselves a foolish injustice. “The Swimmer” doesn’t fit Davenport’s purgatorial scheme, as some of the earlier short stories do not. It starts with forced joie de vivre, shifts into muted comedy and ends in hell.