[In the following essay, Bell compares “The Swimmer” to Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, focusing on motifs of dreams and nightmares.]

The opening paragraph of John Cheever's “The Swimmer” establishes the common malady lingering poolside at the Westerhazys' that midsummer Sunday. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill. While the others talk about their hangovers, Neddy Merrill sits “by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin.” Apparently instead of talking, Neddy “had been swimming and now he was 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.”¹ Debilitated by his hangover and his swim, warmed by the hot sun and cold gin, his deep breathing resonant with heavy snoring sounds, Neddy slips into the most natural condition given the circumstances: he falls asleep. His pleasure invents a dream of heroic exploration which ends with a desolate vision within a midsummer's nightmare.

The invitation to transform A Midsummer Night's Dream into “a midsummer's nightmare” is tempting, first, because Cheever's references to midsummer seem insistent. The story begins, “It was one of those midsummer Sundays …” (603). About the midpoint, after the wind has stripped the Levys' maple tree of its autumnal leaves, Neddy reasons that “since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted …” (606). Near his journey's end, under a winter sky, Neddy wonders, “What had become of the constellations of midsummer?” (611). A further link to the play is the mystifying confusion of the seasons:

                                                                                The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

(II.i.111-14)

The transformation seems more than ironic wordplay when we consider another connection to Shakespeare: Cheever's observation that Neddy “might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one. …” Despite his impression of “youth, sport, and clement weather” (603), Neddy is not a likely subject for a sonnet, at least not for Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” Alcoholic, snobbish, adulterous, self-indulgent—Neddy is by no means mild or temperate, yet he is linked to the sonnet. He is the other subject of the poem, the inevitability of decline. Thus, he is compared to the last hours of a summer's day because, like the season, Neddy's “lease hath all too short a date.” As “every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed,” so Neddy's “eternal summer”—his illusory youthful vigor and, more important, his illusion of success, his share in the tenuous American dream—will also fade. Whether or not he has actually lost his money and status, his house and family, in the context of his dream he seems to have lost “possession of that fair [he] owest.” As his pilgrimage to that realization ends, we sense that Neddy has indeed wandered through the valley of the shadow.

The dream motif (and its direction) having thus been suggested, Neddy snores beside the pool; “the components of that moment … seemed to flow into his chest” (603). Here the narrative becomes internalized in Neddy. The dream itself begins and, with it, the “implied progression from day to night, summer to winter, vigorous manhood to old age.”²

The surrealistic quality of dreams insinuates itself throughout Neddy's journey. With his “discovery” of the Lucinda River, we see that superior point of view of the dreamer, suspended, detached, not quite real: “He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county” (603). Removing “a sweater that was hung over his shoulders” (had it been hung there by someone else?), he plunges into the stream of his subconscious. “To be embraced and sustained by the light green water … seemed,” to Neddy, to be “the resumption of a natural condition”; the dreamer floats on waves of sleep like the swimmer buoyed by light green water (604).

When Neddy hears the Bunkers' distant poolside party, “the water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair,” distant, disembodied voices made nearer by the trick of water and physics. It is one of those phenomena of reality that make us recall the dream distortion of sound as well as place and time. When he leaves the Bunkers', “the brilliant, watery sound of voices fade[s],” as if he leaves some bright sanctuary to pursue his darkening journey (605). Near the Lancaster public pool, “the effect of the water on voices, the illusion of brilliance and suspense, was the same … but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill …” (607-08). The distortion will recur at the Biswangers' with even harsher effects.

Another illustration of the dream motif is Neddy's sense of separation and detachment. As he surveys the scene at the Bunkers' pool, including the red de Haviland trainer “circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee of a child in a swing,” he “felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering, as if it was something he might touch.” The ambiguity of the word passing is effective. Neddy's “passing affection” may be only transitory; his nightmare will show that what he holds dear is indeed fleeting. But given the tenderness with which he regards his own life and this scene of “prosperous men and women,” passing suggests rather convincingly its archaic sense of “great” or “surpassing” (605). For the moment he is held outside that circle rather like Hawthorne's Robin Molineux when the boy views his family gathered for vespers under the spreading tree in their dooryard.³ But the door will not be shut in Neddy's face—not just yet, for he enters this scene as a welcome guest and greets his fellow players (or playfellows) in a dizzying round of kisses and handshakes, even though the thunder has sounded.

“I had the strangest dream last night. I was standing on the shoulder of Route 424, waiting to cross, and I was naked. …” So Neddy, on some other day, waking from some other dream, might well have recounted that common dream image. But his vulnerability and exposure in this afternoon's dream will probably not be another amusing anecdote told at breakfast. When he reaches the highway, he is “close to naked,” naked enough to be “exposed to all kinds of ridicule,” but perhaps not naked enough to perceive any truths beyond his discomfort and his perplexing inability to turn back (607). He is genuinely naked when he steps out of his trunks and through the Hallorans' yellowed beech hedge to encounter something closer to the naked truth when Mrs. Halloran says,

“We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.”

“My misfortunes?” Ned asked. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Why, we heard that you'd sold the house and that your poor children. …”

“I don't recall having sold the house,” Ned said, “and the girls are at home.”

(609)

Neddy's first response seems natural enough, yet when Mrs. Halloran begins to tell him precisely what she does mean, he interrupts her. Like unsettling, bright pinpoints of truth abruptly piercing an alcoholic blackout, her explanation hints at sharp truths that must ultimately be faced. Neddy's reply seems more an evasion than an answer, the suppression of a dark truth's glimmering. It also suggests the illogical, if not absurd, utterances of dreams.

To discern truth from within or without a dream is difficult enough, but to discern the dream itself from within is more difficult. For Neddy, it is impossible. Unprepared for the humiliation along Route 424, he is bewildered, but “he could not go back, he could not even recall with any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys', the sense of inhaling the day's components, the friendly and relaxed voices saying that they had drunk too much” (607). Caught powerless and unaware in a nightmare that now controls him, he can only swim with its current. At the Sachses' pool, he still feels obliged to swim, “that he had no freedom of choice about his means of travel” (610). Just two pools from his own house, obligation has become compulsion: “While he could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to the Gilmartins' pool” and then “staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes'” (612).

It is in dreams that apple blossoms and roses are replaced with the “stubborn autumnal fragrance” of chrysanthemums or marigolds (611). It is in dreams that midsummer constellations become the stars of a winter sky, and slender, youngish Neddy Merrill goes “stooped” and “stupified” to whatever truth, whatever self-discovery, his nightmare has led him. “He had been immersed too long, and his nose and throat were sore from the water,” a swimmer's complaint that might be shared by an afternoon sleeper whose snoring has been too long and loud, and whose dream is too frightening (612).

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, we are told that “the course of true love never did run smooth.” Neddy's encounters with love would seem to bear witness. The easy familiarity with which he greeted his bronze Aphrodite that morning is rebuffed by Shirley Adams, his former mistress with “hair the color of brass” (611). Despite Neddy's “passing affection,” the course of his real love—his pursuit of the American dream of success and suburban happiness—runs no more smoothly. Perhaps it too is besieged,

Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion.

(I.i.143-49)

In the nightmarish ruin of the “quick bright things” in Neddy's life, he has been led to the vision that his dream of wealth, status, and happiness is transitory, illusory, and fraught with perils. If our dreams are empty, what then are we? The use of that discovery, whether for reform or despair, is left to Neddy and to us. Perhaps he will mend his ways, or (as Prufrock fears) Neddy Merrill may awake from his watery dream only to drown—in one way or another.

Notes

1. The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 603. All other references to this edition appear parenthetically in the paper.

2. Scott Donaldson, “John Cheever,” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Scribner's, 1979), Supplement I, Part 1, 185.

3. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Random, 1937), pp. 1217-18.