The Swimmer by John Cheever – into a suburban darkness

This classic tale has echoes of many other great stories, but stands on its own as a portrait of a disintegrating man

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 Westerazys, 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.

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