“The Swimmer”
by John Cheever
John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” opens with a flowing description of alcohol and its effect on those whose Sunday mornings are particularly trying because of it:
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vesitarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’”[1]
This one paragraph—this one innocent paragraph describing something we have all most likely been subject to—sets up the short story perfectly. Because not even a mere paragraph later, the story’s main character, Neddy Merrill, has decided in his drunken haze to swim to his house via all of the swimming pools that lie in between where he is currently at, the Westerhazy’s, and his home roughly eight miles away. He even decides to name this route he is about to follow the Lucinda River, named for his wife.
After planning for the best path to take (“The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups [...]“), Neddy embarks on his new man-made journey back to his house. When he arrives at some pools there is a party in full swing, whereas other pools are either empty or are in poor condition because the homeowners have moved away. As the story progresses Neddy finds that the weather has gotten colder, that he has become weaker to the point of having trouble just getting out of the last few pools, and that the trees have lost their leaves. When Neddy finally arrives at his house he finds that it is empty and has been sold.
While “The Swimmer” is founded firmly in surrealism (even Mickey Mantle in his drunken prime on a summer day would have made it to his home eight miles away before Autumn set in) it is a surrealism that is identifiable. You may not have yet met someone like Neddy Merrill—a man who overindulges in alcohol, holds social rank as an important virtue, and has had an affair with a younger woman—but it is very easy to picture him as a real person if only in segments. For instance, Neddy arrives at the Biswanger’s house (the third to last pool on his route) while a party is in full swing and he walks over to the bar, completely unaware of the gravity of Grace Biswanger calling him a gate crasher as well as being unable to decipher why the bartender at this party gives him condescending glares. It is quite simple to think of this scene and assimilate it to someone we know, or to a friend or relative of a friend.
As for the story in a contextual whole, is the life of Neddy Merrill ultimately one worth reading about? Is there any redemption to his story? What is the message of the story? At nine pages in length, “The Swimmer” primarily exists as a story that provides a shard of a man’s life. And while there is no redemption here per se, “The Swimmer” acts a well-crafted metaphor and cautionary tale about how quickly one’s life can be derailed by their own doing.
We are not given the full background of Neddy’s life leading up to the days of his “swimming” odyssey (as opposed to, say, how Willy Loman is rendered for us) but the story is nonetheless tragic in its short portrayal of a man who is completely unaware of the insulated world he has created around him. He mentions his daughters but he never speaks to them in the story. He is completely unaware that at least two different people have told him that they will not loan him any money as soon as they see him.
“The Swimmer” is an excellent foray into one of the greatest faults that can plague and consume anyone—fooling yourself into a series of bad choices and not even being consciously aware that everything has fallen apart around you.
[1] For what it’s worth, this opening passage reminded me immediately of the lines in “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground that go “Sunday morning/And I’m falling/I’ve got a feeling I don’t want to know.”
