A friend recently bought the fat red collection of John Cheever’s stories published in 1978 that revitalized the writer's alcohol-corroded reputation. He asked me for a list of the stories I would recommend, and I suggested six titles including “The Swimmer.” It was the only story he didn’t like: “I don’t generally go for unreality in fiction, except in touches. In ‘The Swimmer,’ the unreality is front and center.” I too don’t go in for most “unreality” in stories and novels. While admitting that “realism” is a slippery term, I happily detest entire genres – science fiction, ghost stories, horror, swords-and-dragons fantasy – rooted in its opposite. I have no use for what Philip Larkin dismissed as “a common myth-kitty.”
Here’s where it gets interesting.
It had been years since I last read “The Swimmer” (or seen the cringingly bad Burt
Lancaster film adapted from it in 1968), but I recalled no elements of
unreality in the story. I figured Neddy Merrill, the title character, has had a psychotic
episode, a breakdown of personality, complete with delusions and
hallucinations, and Cheever shares them with us. As Neddy swims home across the county, reality seeps in. Along the
way there are hints of financial ruin, alcohol abuse and promiscuity. When
Cheever writes that Neddy “was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he
was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a
legendary figure,” I see a delusional figure given to grandiosity, similar to characters
in Richard Yates’ fiction. When I explained this to my friend, he replied:
“Our understandings of the story are dramatically different. I read it as a kind of time-travel story. Neddy’s swim is a journey into his ill-fated future. The pools represent stages of his life. As the story progresses, he ages—his swimming trunks become too large for him; he loses strength in his limbs; he enters a pool by the steps for the first time in his life instead of diving in; and at the end he's stooped and has to hold on to a gatepost for support. Cheever telescopes time in another way. In the course of a single afternoon, midsummer turns into autumn--the constellations of summer disappear, leaves change color, there’s an ‘autumnal fragrance’ in the air--and on the final page the water in a pool is ‘icy’ . . . ‘The Swimmer’ is metaphorical, not to be taken literally.”
Everything my friend says
is accurate, and his understanding of the story is consistent with everything
Cheever tells us, yet it had never occurred to me. The story was first
published in The New Yorker in 1964, and I must have first read it
within a few years, certainly by 1970. I read the story yet again on Thursday
with my friend’s interpretation in mind. He’s “right.” And so am I, though I
had forgotten certain details. For instance, Lucinda, Neddy’s wife, is present
at the poolside gathering at the start of the story, before he begins his swim home.
Once there, he learns the house is empty, locked up and in disrepair. His wife
and four daughters are gone.
What do these variant
readings of Cheever’s story reveal about the two readers in question? Mutual
respect for one thing. No name calling or contempt. “Let’s leave it there and
agree to disagree,” my friend writes. Agreed.
[The other stories I recommended: “The Country Husband,” “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow,” “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” “Reunion.”]
5 comments:
I endured a similar, indeed rawer experience, when I shared my enthusiasm for Cheever’s “ The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” with a close, well-read friend. He angrily dismissed the story and Cheever generally as “ misogynistic”. To me the story is a tear-evoking family saga in which everyone comes off badly, but human, and the women indeed do suffer. But events, not the writer, impose their suffering. This is a story to read aloud.
Your blog will of course reflect your sensibilities and your tastes and there's no need to apologize or justify, but simply as a matter of curiosity I would be interested to know just why you despise (very strong word!) the mentioned "fantastic" genres. I myself love ghost stories, for instance, and even if I didn't, I might be willing to acknowledge some grain of value in a form that has been thought worthwhile by Henry James, Edith Wharton, L.P. Hartley, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, V.S. Pritchett, W.S. Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc. etc.
Muriel Spark, Gustaw Herling, A.E. Coppard, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Richard, Alexander Pushkin, Robert Frost, etc. etc.
Thanks for posting this. I hadn’t read The Swimmer for years, and your post caused me to dig out my collected Cheever, & read it again - which has probably set me up for a month or so of more Cheever. That sort of thing is one of the benefits of reading your blog.
I don’t see the problem with either your reading or that of your friend, As Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says, embrace the power of “and.” Both are good and enlightening readings. I wonder whether your dislike of fantastical stories pushed you in the direction of your psychological interpretation.
My own interpretation is that the story is a commentary on the human disaster existing as potential in the kind of life Neddy is living when the story begins. The swim is just a way of seeing what is already inherent in Neddy’s life.
There is no need to agree to disagree about this sort of thing. It’s just an illustration of how much truth is in the observation that what the author writes is not necessarily the story the reader reads, and that different readers read different stories from the same page. There are many views of Mt. Fuji.
BTW what were the other 5 stories you recommended? And, if you have the time & inclination, why?
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