The Swimmer By John Cheever - Into A Suburban Darkness

One of the more surreal journeys in literature takes place over the course of a single afternoon, covers a distance of approximately eight miles, and was first published in the New Yorker magazine in July, 1964. John Cheever's The Swimmer begins inauspiciously - if not quite innocently - enough, on "one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying 'I drank too much last night'." Ned Merrill (a man with the "vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure") is sitting in the garden of his friends, the Westerhazys, a glass of gin in his hand, "breathing deeply, stertorously, as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure". On a whim Ned decides to swim home via the pools of his neighbours: "that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county". He names this route Lucinda after his wife and sets off feeling like a "pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny", confident that "friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River".

In his journals Cheever wrote of the "powerful eroticism of travel" - adding, a little more bluntly, "one travels with a hard-on" - and the opening stages of Ned's journey appear to bear this out. Ned's mood is buoyant ("his heart was high and he ran across the grass"); he is greeted warmly at the next party he comes across ("look who's here!"); is kissed by the hostess (as well as "by eight or ten other women"); is offered, and accepts, drinks, seeing that "like any explorer. the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever to reach his destination". And, while the tone here is still playful, already there are premonitions of darker things to come: the sound of distant thunder is noted, and the conceit of Ned-as-explorer suggests a slight condescension on his part towards his neighbours.

As Ned's journey continues, small notes of uncertainty are sounded, a sense of the uncanny creeps into the text, and the reliability of Ned's memory is called into question. Taking shelter from a sudden storm Ned notices "the Japanese lanterns that Mrs Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year before that?"; and after the rain he observes that "the force of the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn."

Cheever leaves the reader to fill in the gaps in the narrative as Ned's sense of self wavers a little with each passing pool, as he is drained of his strength, his vigour, his virility, and time becomes telescoped so that a year dies in the space of a single afternoon. Somewhere around the halfway point, while forced to endure mockery when trying to cross a busy road ("He was laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at him"), Ned realises that he is unable to turn back, and wonders hopelessly to himself when it was that "this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?"

John Cheever admired F Scott Fitzgerald's skill as a writer as much as he empathised with his failures as a man (both were alcoholics), and there certainly seems to be some of the same "foul dust" that floated in the wake of Gatsby's dreams to be found clogging up the filter systems of the Lucinda River. Without wanting to give away the ending for new readers, it is hard to read The Swimmer without recalling the Gatsby who was forced to look upon "an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely collected grass".

But whereas Gatsby's wilful self-deception indirectly cost him his life (his body found floating in his pool, no less), the character and fate of Ned Merrill seems closer to that of another tragic Fitzgerald hero: Tender is the Night's Dick Diver. Both are aging lotharios whose weakness of character and drinking have estranged them from friends and family; both are financially ruined; and both suffer the arguably more tragic fate of being exiled from the kingdom they once ruled. (While on the subject of kingdoms and exiled rulers, there are more than a few references to King Lear hidden in the text of The Swimmer: another man who "hath ever but slenderly known himself".)

But as fun as it is to play spot-the-allusion - and as tempting as it is to view The Swimmer as a Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man - Cheever's greatest short story transcends its influences and any autobiographical frisson to emerge as a quietly devastating journey into one man's heart of darkness. And as a piece of prose it is as near-miraculous as the journey it describes, standing as a perfect example of Cheever's descri ption of fiction as "the telling of lies . a sort of sleight-of-hand that displays our deepest feelings about life."