'Let’s Leave It There and Agree to Disagree'

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.”]