John Cheever’s the Swimmer, Essay Example

This short story was first published in 1964 (and filmed in 1968). It is a story that outwardly takes place in a single mid-summer Sunday, although by the end of the story the season has apparently changed to autumn. The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, is initially described as a happy and financially successful family man who lives among his peers in a wealthy Maryland suburb well-populated with swimming pools. But like the apparently changing season, the reader learns that Neddy’s personal and professional success is not initially what it seemed. In this paper I won’t attempt to survey its many critics and their own more comprehensive interpretations. Instead, I offer my own studied perspective, with an emphasis on the role of alcohol in the story. I do this knowing that I am not the first (Johnston). My hope is that my own idea will be both original and intelligent enough to warrant reception. My thesis is that the importance of alcohol in Neddy’s personal life is made clear from the opening scene, but thereafter its absence plays the decisive role.

Donald and Helen Westerhazy, and Lucinda Merrill, the three initially speaking characters, are complaining aloud that they each drank too much the night before. In so doing they are lumped together by the narrator with a presumably local priest and his parishioners; tennis players, golfers, and a specific but unnamed leader of an Audubon group, all of whom also drank too much. However, the only one described as still drinking is Neddy Merrill, who sits by the pool with his hand around a glass of gin. And he isn’t complaining about hangovers at all. Indeed the introduction dwells on how good he feels, and how beautiful the day is, and how wonderful his life is. All of these mark him as an alcoholic. For an alcoholic, the hangovers never come because alcoholics never really stop drinking. Their metabolism is dependent on the drug. They literally cannot live with or with it. Neddy is an alcoholic.

Having established this point and for the rest of the story, alcohol is actually no longer an active ingredient. It has done its damage and left the scene, which Neddy wanders through and the reader observes. None of the other characters are describable as alcoholics themselves. With the exception of a beer-can thrown at Neddy from a passing car, alcohol is a polite member of society. His own apparent consumption continues until, not getting enough, he is compelled to politely beg for it as the story approaches its conclusion. But we learn nothing about alcohol and Neddy’s drinking of it that we didn’t know or could not infer before. Instead, we learn that there is more wrong with Neddy than just alcohol, and we are left to wonder exactly what it is.

I take it that the only events that actually occurred were the non-drinking ones. The problem in presenting this idea is to select what to believe from the narrator. Putting aside the four parties uncaringly held simultaneously by (mostly) the same circle of friends, consider the opening scene and the final one. In the former, Neddy is described as having earlier that day slid down his banister on the way to coffee in his dining room. But by the final scene that same house is closed and empty. Which version shall we believe? One of them must be wrong.

It is certainly reasonable, and perhaps mandatory, to accept the ending as reality. But if it is reality, than the opening scene is false. Neddy is either remembering an earlier time in his life, or is imagining the start of his day which actually began somewhere else (the distinction having no importance). Either way, Neddy’s day didn’t start the way it is described. But if that’s the case, how real was the scene at the first pool, with the Westerhazys and Lucinda, Neddy’s wife? And how real the drink in Neddy’s hand? Indeed how real are the swims? If, as we learn, Neddy’s house is actually empty and his family dispersed, his friends would act like the former friends they must be. In the drinking scenes, that doesn’t happen. That’s our starting point.

I view all of the swims and parts of the connecting narrative as real. But with two exceptions the conversations are Neddy’s delusions, as are all his drinks. He swam in the Westerhazy pool alone and then went on to the second pool of the day. There Neddy supposedly encounters Mrs. Graham, who greets him vehemently, and then cheerfully offers him a drink, and says she has been trying to reach him by phone all morning. This makes little sense, as Mrs. Graham’s house is immediately next door to the Westerhazy’s, separated only by a hedge.

Next, Neddy swims in the Hammers’ and the Lears’ pools, but without encountering them, and so no drinking takes place. Here we have no choice but to trust the narrator, which is to say, the story would be scarcely worth reading if we could not trust the narrator in outwardly plausible cases. We are simply told as fact that they heard or saw a swimmer in their pools, and there is no obvious reason to doubt it, nor the statement that the Howlands and the Crosscups were away. But at the Bunkers’ party, I believe the reader is back in Neddy’s fantasy. “When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come I thought I’d die,” Enid Bunker screams in delight. Eddy is delusional again: just as at the Westerhazys’ and the Grahams’, he drinks. But I think Neddy did swim at the Bunkers’ because he “heard the noise of a radio from the Bunkers’ kitchen, where someone was listening to a ball game.” The hired help (if any) wouldn’t have it on so loudly during a party. Why would the narrator lie, or why would Neddy lie to himself about it? The answer is that there was no party at all. Eddy’s encounter with the Bunkers was similar to his non-encounters at the Hammers, Lears, Howlands, and Crosscups.

At the Levy’s, Neddy confronts evidence that they have just left. They probably did, having been warned in advance by their own friends that poor Neddy was swimming in his former friends’ pools. Continuing on, I accept the narrator’s account of the non-swimming encounters at the empty houses of the Lindley’s and the Welchers. Again, why doubt it?

The interval from there is also real, tracing Neddy’s journey across the highway where, clad only in swimming trunks, he is mocked and exposed to traffic, dirt, and the thrown beer can. The swim in the public pool is also real. And the encounter with the Hallorans. Here in fact we learn the true state of affairs: Neddy is nuts and everyone knows it. Being odd but caring, they greet Neddy in a sympathetic manner, as does their daughter, Helen. There he has another brief but real conversation: “I’m sure you can get a drink at the Biswangers’,” Helen said. “They’re having an enormous do. You can hear it from here. Listen! ” But she’s playing to his psychosis: there is no party to be heard. And from neither mother nor daughter does he get a drink.

At the Biswangers’ he gets no welcome but he does get an imagined drink. We also overhear Grace Biswanger say “They went for broke overnight—nothing but income—and he showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars. . . .” And so it is confirmed what we learned at the Hallorans’: Neddy lost his money, lost his family, and lost his mind. But was there a party at the Biswangers’? I don’t think so. They had extended many such invitations to Neddy in the past, and he had never accepted them. A party big enough for a hired bartender would be big enough to invite Neddy Merrill in his prime. Grace would have been surprised but validated to see him for once. Instead, she was illogically irate when he finally showed up, as if his appearance was a worse affront than his absence. No, I think Eddy is remembering his drunken attempt to borrow money from her.  Finally, Shirley Adams, his former lover, gives him neither alcohol nor money. The Gilmartins and the Clydes are no-shows. We know that alcohol definitely played a big role in the life of the author of the story. But unlike the unfortunate Neddy Merrill, John Cheever overcame his drinking and went on to become a highly respected author (Kakutani). But that shouldn’t matter to the reader. The story’s the thing. We must each accept it or reject it as literature, standing apart from its author. Cheers!

Works Cited

Kakutani, Michiko. “John Cheever is Dead at 70. Novelist Won Pulitzer Prize.” New York Times. 19 June 1982. < http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/19/obituaries/john-cheever-is-dead-at-70-novelist-won-pulitzer-prize.html>.

Johnston, Bret Anthony. “Our Ovid of Suburbia, Reconsidered.” New York Times. 26 March 2009. < http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/books/27book.html>.