SOURCE: “John Cheever: The ‘Swimming’ of America,” in Critical Essays on John Cheever, edited by R. G. Collins, G. K. Hall & Company, 1982, pp. 180-91.

… the story of Rip Van Winkle has never been finished, and still awaits a final imaginative recreation.

—Constance Rourke

Indeed, the central fact about America in 1970 is the discrepancy between the realities of our society and our beliefs about them. The gap is even greater in terms of our failure to understand the possibilities and potential of American life.

—Charles A. Reich

I

More than a century after Washington Irving described the Catskills as “fairy mountains” with “magical hues” produced by seasonal and diurnal atmospheric changes, John Cheever has taken that enchanted vicinity as the setting for some of his best fiction. In this continuation of Hudson River mythology, Cheever's territory, like Irving's, is somewhere between fact and fantasy, the mundane and the marvelous, “modern” life and ancient legend. And while both writers mix comedy and sadness, Irving's vision gravitates towards the first pole, Cheever's towards the second. They are both in the company of American writers who suggest the existence of a level—mysterious and mythic—beyond the middle range of experience and find “reality” at the crossroads of actuality and myth. In addition, Cheever's magical transformations have cultural roots in Ovid and Cotton Mather as well as in American Romanticism. Like Irving, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Faulkner, Cheever has taken a region and a time and, without diminishing their importance, has made them stand for the larger meanings of American experience; he can see the meaning of the country in the way ordinary people live their daily lives.

In a career spanning five decades Cheever has published over one hundred short stories (most of them in the New Yorker), six story-collections, and four novels. A conscious craftsman and a brilliant stylist, he has encountered substantial success but only spare attention by academic critics. “The Swimmer,” a fifteen-page tale which will be the focus of the present study, is, according to its author, the product of two months work and 150 pages of notes.¹ He is, I think, the most underestimated—and sometimes misunderstood—of contemporary fictionists: Cheever's mastery of art and theme places his best work in touch with basic forms of existence as well as in the center of our culture. He charts the peregrinations of American life—from town to city to the suburbs to Europe to “America.” His special theatre, however, is suburbia where the metamorphosis is not of Irving's sleepy Dutch into busy Americans but of work-day city businessmen into weekend “country gentlemen.”

On one level, Cheever's fictions are comedies of manners recording the objects and occasions of suburban life: supermarkets, swimming pools, commuter trains, thruways, cocktail parties. Behavioral nuances function as in manners fiction; for example, a “loss of social esteem” can be discerned when a hired bartender gives rude service at a party.² In spite of satiric possibilities too numerous to be resisted, Cheever's primary impulse is not to ridicule the silly surfaces. He suggests and sometimes depicts loneliness and despair as well as mysterious and sinister realities. Suburbia is built over the abyss from which disaster and darkness occasionally emerge. For example, in Bullet Park a commuter waiting on a station platform is sucked under the wheels of the Chicago express; Cheever's reality here and elsewhere is closer to Kafka than O’Hara. He exposes the nightmare behind Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post “America.” Though Cheever's alma mater is the Romance-tradition, his vision (though not his style) resembles William Dean Howells's depiction of the troubled day-to-day existence of the middle class: people living on the thin surface hiding terror and violence and pain attempting to plug along with honor in a chaotic world.³ Cheever depicts the “more smiling aspects of life,” which (according to Howells) were the more American—and sometimes the more terrifying.

Cheever's people are ordinary, weak, foolish, shallow; for the most part lonely, sad, disappointed, inarticulate, they muddle through after barely avoiding catastrophe. But since they have a capacity for love and goodness, to their creator their lives are finally worth saving. Cheever has sympathy for his people but contempt for their false values. Life, he writes, is “a perilous moral journey;” the freaks along the way are those who have fallen from grace.⁴ William Peden calls Cheever “a wry observer of manners and mores [who] is more saddened than amused by the foibles he depicts with understanding and grace.”⁵ Cheever attempts to define “the quality of American life” or “How We Live Now.” His stories, according to Alfred Kazin, are “a demonstration of the amazing sadness, futility, and evanescence of life among the settled, moneyed, seemingly altogether domesticated people in [Suburbia].”⁶ John Aldridge finds Cheever “extraordinary in his power to infuse the commonplace and often merely dyspeptic metaphysical crises of modern life with something of the generalizing significance of myth.”⁷ Cheever's people, latter day neighbors of Irving's and Edith Wharton's, in class and consciousness closer to Howells's and Sinclair Lewis's, are revealed in the mode of Hawthorne, with the insight of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

II

One of Cheever's most famous, striking, and original stories, “The Swimmer,” elucidates his characteristic artistry as well as his version of American existence. The basic situation is well known: Neddy Merrill's impulsive decision to swim eight miles home via a series of pools. But by the time he has finished, years have passed and his house is deserted. Neddy's arrival home is an example of Cheever's suburbanite, here falling through the surface into the abyss over which his life has been precariously structured, while in other stories there are magical transformations. This abyss is the gulf between the fantasies Americans live by and the actualities they live in. Neddy makes the once-in-a-lifetime discovery that he has won the race but lost his “life.” The apparently self-confident conformist whose life-style is identified with his environment, he is a thorough creature of his culture. Neddy is, moreover, athletic in a culture that admires the summer of youth and innocence and suppresses the winter of age and decline. He has “the especial slenderness of youth. … He might have been compared to a summer day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather” (54-55). The purpose of his swim is to enhance the beauty of the summer day, but his experience turns out to be closer to Housman's Athlete Dying Young than to Shakespeare's young man. His newly discovered route home will be named the Lucinda River (to honor his wife), but it is actually to be a celebration of his own fading youth and an expansion of diminished possibilities.

The narrative begins on “one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying: ‘I drank too much last night.’” Sunday, an exception to the weekly routines and rituals, is a day of special peril in Cheever's fiction. It is the day people fall through the cracks in their lives.⁸ Like Irving in “Rip Van Winkle” Cheever describes” magical hues”: “It was a fine day. In the West there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance—from the bow of an approaching ship—that it might have a name. Lisbon. Hackensack” (54). Cheever's protagonist, along with Rip, is an avatar of the amiable good fellow, the shallow American who drinks too much and “lives” too little. He is first seen with one hand in the water of a pool and the other around a glass of gin. Not the lazy dropout, Neddy is an escapist and a dreamer (and part-time “pool bum”). He has material abundance, but that, he finds, is not enough; he shares with many of Cheever's protagonists a vague discontent. His escape from cares and responsibilities and from time is similar to Rip's, the cocktail party Ned's equivalent for Rip's pub. Rip's dream of a perpetual men's club has its correspondence in Ned's dream of a permanent poolside party. Both go on to have extraordinary experiences in the “enchanted mountains,” in a dream world of the past, the unconscious, and the imagination. There both men meet regional “natives” whose “hospitable customs and traditions … have to be handled with diplomacy” (56). Rip's overnight sleep covers two decades; Ned's long day's journey compresses several years. The Big Sleep becomes the Big Hangover, each signifying the central hollowness of each man's middle years, that American emptiness between Pepsi-Cola and Geritol.

Rip's encounter and sleep and Neddy's suburban swim are mythic experiences that have indexes in both psychology and reality. On one level, Rip's afternoon in the mountains and Neddy's swim saga epitomize their lives, each experience significantly initiated with drinking. While Rip has an aversion to all profitable work, Ned represses all unpleasant facts from his consciousness. Both time-travellers desire escape because of similar psychological inabilities to face adult responsibilities and to commit themselves to dull actuality. They want to leave behind everyday existence, domestic troubles, loneliness, advancing age. Like generations of Americans they have taken to the woods—to hunt, to fish, to camp out, to contemplate the wilderness, and/or to find the “real America.” Neddy's swim is obviously just a more domesticated form of woodcraft. He leaves Technopolis for Arcadia, the suburban for the sylvan, history for pastoral; but now the machine itself has been set up in the garden (in the form of the pool filter).

Irving's storied Hudson is replaced by the fantasied Lucinda, a “river” of swimming pools. Both “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Swimmer” contain mythic thunder storms and cyclic seasonal imagery. For Ned the starting point is a fine midsummer day at the Westerhazy's. Cheever, like Irving, moves from the mimetic to the mythic, managing subtle and skillful shifts from actual time and place to the world of nature and the imagination, time measured by sun and season instead of clocks and commuter trains. But the key to meaning in Nature's rhythms and rituals is lost to Ned as it had been to Rip. At the first pool where the apple trees are in bloom, Ned has already gone back even further than spring—to Eden which had been a “world of apples.” From here he progresses to the Bunkers' party where he is welcomed, to the Levy's where the party is over and the maple leaves are red and yellow, to the Lindley's riding ring overgrown with grass. Then the Welchers' pool is dry, the bathhouse locked, and the house “for sale,” prefiguring the end of his journey. Ned's most difficult portage is the highway where the motorists harass and ridicule him, but by then he has reached the point of no return. His desire for a drink is mocked when he is assailed by an empty beer can. To mobile Americans (as H. L. Mencken prophesied) Nature has become a place to toss beer cans on Sunday afternoons. But all those cars on the Turnpike are—if we believe Paul Simon—looking “for America.”

At the crowded, regimented Recreation Center the pool reeks of chlorine (in contrast with the pure waters of private pools) and Ned is subjected to the lifeguard's rebukes. America's natural resources have become crowded, polluted, and “collectivized,” trout-streams cut up and sold by the yard (as at Richard Brautigan's Cleveland Wrecking Company). Next, at the Hallorans, the beech hedge is yellow; Ned is cold, tired, depressed, and his trunks feel loose. It is definitely autumn with falling leaves and woodsmoke. At the Sachses he barely finished his swim and, desperately needing a drink, he heads for the Binswangers. The Merrills had always refused their invitations, but now Ned finds that he is the one to be snubbed. In addition, the dark water of the pool has a “wintry gleam.” Then after his former mistress refuses his request for a drink, he is exhausted and for the first time he has to use the ladder in getting out of a pool. Moreover, the flowers and constellations are unmistakably those of autumn (66-67). He is unable to dive into the last pools. Miserable, cold, bewildered, he weeps. He has been “immersed too long.” The temporal drift is ever downward, with summer, the time of physicality and material prosperity, giving way to the season of decline and decay. During his odyssey Ned loses a sense of time just as “his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend [Eric Sachs] had been ill” (64). His affair with Shirley Adams had been terminated “last week, last month, last year. He couldn't remember” (66). As he progresses only the journey itself has immediate reality.

During Neddy's swim, he loses everything—wife, children, home, friends, mistress, job, investments, youth, hopes, self. At the end he “had done what he wanted, he has swum the country” (67), but his house is dark, locked, and empty, recalling Rip who discovered his house abandoned and in decay and found himself alone in the world, puzzled by “such enormous lapses of time.” The Lucinda River, like the Hudson, represents time and change; the waterway of “light” and new beginnings becomes the river of darkness and despair. Cheever has carried the identity-loss, which Irving ultimately averted, to its finale. The constituents of actuality have slipped away. All that he thought he had is lost; all relationships have come to naught. He is left with emptiness. “Everything” was never enough: now it is nothing. While Irving's tale ranks not only as a classic but as a national resource for cultural reference, “The Swimmer” is no less rich and includes areas beyond Irving's attention.

Neddy is the depthless dreamer and organization man, but he also acts out the frontier myth of exploration, independence, endurance, and self-reliance. He even sees himself “as a legendary figure” (55). “Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny” (56). Another Columbus, he has only imaginary charts to follow. A pioneer, he confronts the challenge of nature alone. And as a pilgrim, his journey recalls Bunyan's figure who has numerous American facsimiles. His journey takes him westward, that most American and symbolic of directions. Neddy, however, faces not the primitive forces of the wilderness but pools, gardens, and highways. His pool expedition is a Madison Avenue packaging of Emerson's call to “enjoy an original relation to the universe,” his naturism just as ersatz as the nudist Hallorans reading the Times. By the 1960s the Frontier is something not lived but read about, a vision enriched by memory. Ned desires to go back in time and space, to move outward and inward, while an onerous world moves forward and downward.

Cheever omits the final movement of the archetype (Rip's reconciliation with the new life of the town), but he plays out the full, darker implications. The everyday world, re-established at the conclusion of “Rip Van Winkle,” is irretrievably lost at the end of “The Swimmer.” Irving created a legendary past (based on European myths) to enrich the texture of a raw, new present. Cheever imagined a mythic alternate to explode an unreal present. Irving's dream-world is, finally, not believed in, while for Cheever myth, dream, and the unconscious have more “reality” than objective existence. After 140 years, Cheever has replaced history, Irving's primary allegiance, with mystery. According to Richard Poirier the most interesting American writings are an image of the creation of America itself: “They are bathed in the myths of American history; they carry the metaphoric burden of a great dream of freedom—of the expansion of national consciousness into the vast spaces of a continent and the absorption of those spaces into ourselves.”⁹ By taking his protagonist outside of society and by moving his fiction into myth, Cheever has earned a place in the major tradition of American literature. Through action, image, and allusion he creates a literary, mythic, and cultural context. The Hudson, Concord, Mississippi, Thames, Rhine, Nile, and Ganges mingle in the creative consciousness.

III

In his fiction Cheever presents the symptoms of contemporary anxiety and ennui but only implies the causes. His men suffer from that American inability to make sense out of life that derives from a failure to recognize the unreality of their lives. They are, however, evidently tired of an existence that does not fulfill, of living without imagination. All of their life-pursuits—success, status, sex—ignore reality and are in fact fantasies. Freedom, happiness, achievement, and popularity are illusions. Substance is frittered away through absorption in detail. The suburbanite, above all, dwells in cultural deprivation, in a synthetic environment, with “neither the beauty and serenity of the countryside, the stimulation of the city, nor the stability and sense of community of the small town.”¹⁰ Ned has the civilized man's psychic need to rebel against his plastic surroundings and the organized world of logic, reason, and technology. Wanting to escape the familiar routines that have shaped his life, he seeks adventure, freedom, and peace in nature. Filled with euphoria and wanderlust, a need to expend energy and experience a richer mode of response, he wants to re-establish contact with life. “To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition” (55). His attempt at renewal is analogous to mythicized sex, “the supreme elixir, the painkiller, the brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart” (66). His swim, moreover, expresses an artistic impulse, the attempt to do something unusual, to create an alternate reality. It illustrates the subconscious knowledge Cheever described in “The Seaside Houses”: “… we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers” (180). Neddy's swimming the “quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county” (55) seems like a movement through the womb-like unconscious, the element of metamorphosis and rebirth.

There is also nostalgia for an old innocence, for the “forest primeval” and the “green breast of the new world.” Ned wants to start again, to make a new beginning and would swim nude if he could. His epic swim, like his morning slide down the bannister, is an attempt to slow down the encroachment of age. Youth is, as Cash Bentley in “O Youth and Beauty!” believed, the best time—the brightest and most blessed. With a typically American inability to accept imperfection, Ned wants neither to grow old nor to grow up; he regrets lost youth and fading machismo. His athletic prowess is his last valuable possession. A return to nature (“In the woods is perpetual youth,” according to Emerson, and going to the woods was, to John Muir, “going home”) also betokens a return to the “childhood” of America and to a simpler, more “real” existence. Neddy feels the need to believe in the myth of a Golden Age, a legend accepted as fact, and has the optimist's faith that all problems have solutions. Similarly the Lucinda River, like the Northwest Passage, exists, and all he has to do is swim it to make it real. The American, alone with a continent, invents his own environment, a self-sufficient New World of the mind. Leaving the here and now for the bye and bye, the American looks forward to the past and backward to the future. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visions of coming possibilities are translated into twentieth-century dreams of past actualities, past visions are accepted as real, present facts are rejected as false. In fine, dream and reality are not reconciled but confused.

In “The Swimmer” the American Dream becomes the creation of one's own reality—the dream of living out one's imagination. In the present the only way to start anew is via the imagination. With the closing of the Frontier, the dreamer-explorer is left with nowhere to go except “passage to more than India,” no guide to follow except the Transcendentalist injunction: “Build therefore your own world.” Ned shuts exterior malice out of his personal wonderland—a neighborhood Disneyworld sufficient to satisfy a middle-class “capacity for wonder.” He creates a myth of private satisfaction to counter a public despair. Though Thomas Merton did not have Neddy's plight in mind, his comment is applicable: “An investigation of the wilderness mystique and of the contrary mystique of exploitation and power reveals the tragic depth of the conflict that now exists in the American mind. … Take away the space, the freshness, the rich spontaneity of a wildly flourishing nature, and what will become of the creative pioneer mystique? A pioneer in a suburb is a sick man tormenting himself with projects of virile conquest.”¹¹

Cheever's story, probably the most important use of the swimming pool in American literature, is an imaginative vision of American reality in its interplay of person and object. (To Cheever's people, of course, the pool is an index of affluence and status.) In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby the swimming pool is also connected with the protagonist's character and quest.¹² Gatsby and Neddy are the lustrous but naive American fools doomed by time, mortality, and history. Both wish to achieve the transcendent moment when dream and reality are one. But both attempts at transcendence are foiled by transience, water in the pools symbolizing flux and mutability. Neddy's swim, like Gatsby's final plunge, is an encounter with that new world, but one already fallen. The dreamer is betrayed by reality and by his own dream. “The Swimmer,” like Gatsby ends with a deserted house in a Paradise garden overgrown with weeds. Gatsby's mansion is not only the millionaire's palace with an obscenity scrawled on the steps but also an epitome of Western culture. Neddy's, on the other hand, is the family domicile; it is revelatory, however, to recall that his swim included parties, neighbors, friends, and a mistress, but only casual references to his family, with whom his concern had been as shallow as Rip's with his. Ned suffers a contemporary Angst; having spent too much for recognition and success, he cannot face failure. His intended romantic escape from limiting reality moves from exhilaration to exhaustion to a painful confrontation with an inner void: empty house/empty life.

Neddy's personal dilemma has both psychological and cultural roots. His crisis of consciousness is shared by his culture for “The Swimmer” probes a trauma deep in the national character. The story of the American is, like the many adaptations of “Rip Van Winkle,” an “unfinished” story still awaiting its “final imaginative re-creation.”¹³ “The Swimmer” is neither rewriting nor updating of “Rip,” any more than “The Enormous Radio” is a modernization of “Young Goodman Brown;” both stories are re-visions of archetypal Americans and situations which link the destiny of characters with the meaning of American history. Like Irving's classic, Cheever's tale endures in the reader's memory with its artistry, its psychological impications, its cultural resonance, and its penetration of the currents of existence. Cheever, moreover, gives the reader many of the rewards of traditional fiction along with the peculiar pleasures of contemporary meta-fiction. There is more in this story about “How We Live Now” than in any other work of comparable length. Swimming has become a new metaphor for the westering impulse, as walking, trekking, floating, running, riding, fishing, and driving had served other writers. The quest for the real America (if one exists) is again an exploration of inward shores. Neddy's westward swim is into the eternal country of the imagination.

Cheever's characteristic stance, a mixture of apocalypse and celebration, despair with much of the contemporary world along with joy in nature and the imagination, may be seen encapsulated in a passage from “The Country Husband”: “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.”¹⁴Falconer, Cheever's prison-novel, a seeming deviation from his usual locale, objectifies dramatically his central idea of confinement. As with Dostoevsky, the prison is an epitome of society, but for Cheever the suburban town itself is a metaphoric prison: “spiritually, financially, we were the prisoners of our environment although if we had enough money we could have flown to some other … part of the world.”¹⁵ But it is not money that offers escape. As an answer to confinement in suburban artificiality, conformity, and dullness Cheever has offered the imaginative quest for pastoral freedom. His debut-story, “Expelled,” projected a Thoreauvian search for a natural alternative for society. And the first story in his first collection, The Way Some People Live, proposed swimming as an escape from social pressures. Cheever consistently associates the values of nature and the imagination, simple physical pleasures and dreaming because of their connection with primal reality.

IV

Cheever's aesthetic credo requires that he present not the facts but “the truth;” his role is not that of the historian but that of the storyteller recapitulating “the verities.” His novels and stories are, therefore, less a depiction than an expression of his time. The fictions in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel explicitly concern the writer's problem in rendering modern life in fiction:

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death but even the mountains seems to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely women with a bar of sunshine in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you an example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can't find a comparable experience. … ¹⁶

The absurd events which he narrates in “The Death of Justina,” Cheever claims, could “only have happened in America today.” “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow,” the first and titular story in the volume containing “The Swimmer,” begins: “I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?” (1).

“A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear” in his next novel includes, as examples, the pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby game, all parts for Marlon Brando, all homosexuals, and all alcoholics: “Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the way we live” (Some, 169). The narrator of “A Vision of the World,” who finds that the externals of life have “the quality of a dream” while his reveries have “the literalness of double-entry bookkeeping” (217), wants “to identify … not a chain of facts but an essence … to grant [his] dreams, in so incoherent a world, their legitimacy” (218). He finally accepts the world in which he lives as a dream and the dreams he has as real. In Cheever's view, fiction is that intersection of “reality” and the imagination.

With increasing persistence he has commented on the challenges that the American fictionist faces today, suggesting that the “trumped-up” stories of generations of storytellers can never “hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream” (Some, 175). In his later work the discernible progress is into more innovative techniques and a bleaker vision. He has moved deeper into the darkness of the American funhouse. Many of his best later stories are self-conscious, reflexive, metafictional. Prose narrative forms, which date from about the same time as explorations of the New World, have always been journeys of discovery: new worlds and new modes of perception and new forms. Fiction is, as Lionel Trilling has said, “a perpetual quest for reality.”¹⁷ And for the postmodernist writer who gives new twists to the perennial conflict between ideal and real and to the “modern” concern with illusion, Reality itself is the primary theme.

The success of Cheever's fiction is dependent on his skill in placing fantastic incidents within a plausible context (or, sometimes, conversely) and in juxtaposing Westchester and Wonderland. His work, if read attentively, can alter the way we think about ourselves. Every incident is set within the history of a culture, a country not yet a nation, not quite completed, like the unfinished pyramid on a dollar-bill. He charts the demise of a life-style in a long day's dying. But Cheever sees the present blighted cityscape not as “the ruins of our civilization” but as a construction site, “the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build” (Some, 3). John Cheever follows in the line of fabulist and mythopoeic writers, participating in the chief business of American fiction: the creation of American Reality. America—and Reality—are composed of change, flux, chaos, contradiction; Reality sometimes seems like a comedy of the Absurd.¹⁸ The American experience has been an existential encounter with the dark territory of a continent, with history, and with the self.

American itself is an absurd creation. Our writers have asked: Is it a place? a people? a fact? a faith? a disease? a nightmare? an idea? a moral condition? To Fitzgerald, France was a land, England a people, America an idea. Brautigan, who like Cheever, always writes about “America” suggests that it is “often only a place in the mind,” echoing Emerson's America: “a poem in our eyes.” At the conclusion of “Boy in Rome,” Cheever has his young American, whose planned return home has been foiled, remembering an old lady in Naples “so long ago, shouting across the water [to a departing ship], ‘Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see America, you will see the New World,’ and I knew that large cars and frozen food and hot water were not what she meant. ‘Blessed are you, blessed are you,’ she kept shouting across the water and I knew that she thought of a place where there are no police with swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold and hunger and war and if all that she imagined was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the main thing” (Some, 161-162). From the coast of Europe “across the water” to the unexplored inner shores of America, the cycle begins again: from vision to reality to dream to fiction.

Notes

1. Lewis Nichols, “A Visit with John Cheever,” New York Times, 5 January 1964, p. 28.

2. “The Swimmer,” The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. 65. Henceforth all parenthetical page references will be to this volume. After completing the present study I discovered that Frederick Bracher had already suggested the “Rip” parallel. See Cortland F. Auser's citation in “John Cheever's Myth of Man and Time: ‘The Swimmer,’” CEA Critic, 29 (March 1967), 18-19.

3. This view of Howells is that of George Carrington in The Immense Complex Drama: The World and Art of the Howells Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966).

4. Quoted in Time, 27 March 1964, p. 67.

5. William Peden, The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), p. 55.

6. Alfred Kazin, “O’Hara, Cheever & Updike,” The New York Review of Books, 20 (19 April 1973), 16.

7. John W. Aldridge, The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture 1951-1971 (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1972), p. 236.

8. Lynne Waldeland, John Cheever (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 95.

9. Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 3.

10. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 9.

11. Thomas Merton, “The Wild Places,” The Center Magazine, 1, No. 5 (July 1968), 43.

12. See Milton Stern, The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 166, 169. One of Cheever's “Metamorphoses” narrates the transformation of a “nymphlike” young woman into a swimming pool.

13. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), p. 181.

14. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958; rpt. New York: MacFadden-Bartell, 1961), p. 67.

15. Falconer (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 80. See also John Hersey, “Talk with John Cheever,” New York Times Book Review, 6 March 1977, pp. 1, 24.

16. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 2. Hereafter cited as Some in parenthetical references.

17. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1950), p. 206.

18. See Richard B. Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and “The Absurd” in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971).