SHORT STORY REVIEW JOHN CHEEVER THE SWIMMER 1964

Somewhere between the American Dream in despair world of Arthur Miller and the existential surrealist nightmares of Franz Kafka stands this sad but haunting short tale of crushed hopes and ambitions.

Starting on a glorious idyllic summer morning, the story has Neddy Merrill enjoying a poolside picnic with his wife and a few rich friends.

Neddy hits on a wild idea. He can cross the county from this house to his own over some twenty miles away by swimming through every swimming pool in the county. He immediately puts his idea into action, plunging into the pool (he always dives in, and always hauls himself up the poolside – he feels it is a sign of weakness to use the steps to enter or vacate a pool.

His wife has not been made a party to his plan, and only hears of it from him as he sets off.

At first, he meets people who are happy to see him, offer him drinks, food, etc, and don’t object to his use of their pools, though he never asks permission first.

As the day darkens, so does the story mood. While it seems to be the same day, the summer turns to late autumn, with a chilling storm closing in. Merrill finds that people start to laugh at him as he moves across a wide dangerous highway from pool to pool. He finds a crowded public open-air pool repulsive, and full of chlorine.

He them find that even the attitudes of friends and former lovers he meets is changing. Tiring to the point of having to enter the water and leave it again via steps, he finds that people seem convinced that he owes them money, and that his wife and daughters have left him. He dismisses this as fanciful, until he arrives at his own home to find it derelict, and abandoned, and that he has nothing left.

It is a story about how a self-obsessed vision blinds a to the realities of his life. He has not noticed what has happened to go wrong for his fixation on a short-lived transient dream. His own day of happiness and conquest has blinkered him to a whole changing season of change (mostly for the worst) in his life. It’s a powerful, dark allegory of intense strength.

A 1968 film version was presented with Burt Lancaster as Merrill, but it lacks the raw power of the story itself.

The full text of the story is online here – http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html

Arthur Chappell