The Swimmer

10/10

This quiet little story packs a sucker punch. It comes smack-dab-in-the-middle, but we don't realize we've been K'O'd until the end. I suppose that's how sucker punches work.

He had signed nothing, vowed nothing, pledged nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable to turn back? Why was he determined to complete his journey even if it meant putting his life in danger? At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious? 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 show more drunk too much. In the space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that made his return impossible.

We just keep reading, looking for the punch line, and if only we'd been awake and aware, we would have known it had already come. And gone.

Like life itself. show less

Mad and beautiful. Really funny and also rather sad. One of my favourite short stories ever.

Review of The Swimmer, one of his most famous and anthologised stories.
This short story is set on a summer Sunday and starts with gaiety (a word rarely used now, but it seems fitting here) and boastful embarrassment about drinking too much the night before. They’re a wealthy set, chatting around a pool: golf links and tennis are mentioned, along with the environmental Audubon group.

Neddy Merrill is pushing middle age, but gives the impression of “youth, sport, and clement weather”. He has the idea of swimming home (eight miles) via a daisy chain of pools he dubs the Lucinda River.
“He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure… show more Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way.”

Image: Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) by David Hockney. Not New York State, and painted eleven years after this story was published. (Source)

Some welcome him, some are away or don’t notice him, others are mid-party, and a few are hostile.

As his journey progresses, time condenses, the mood becomes autumnal, and the story feels slippery and a tad surreal.
“Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering, as if it was something he might touch.”
Then it becomes more disquieting and tragic. It's a brilliant and subtle segue, planting doubts in Ned's mind and thus the reader's. It’s a neat way to satirise the superficiality of rich suburbanites and the tragic consequences of excess. Along the way, there’s exploration of class, etiquette, and exclusion: who knows what, and who chooses not to.
“His was a world in which the caterer’s men kept the social score.”

The owners and their pools

Neddy's quest has parallels with journeys in myth and literature, reflected in different waters and even the names of their owners. It's deep, especially on a second reading.

This section is for reference and doesn't contain plot spoilers.

1. Westerhazy: “The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green.”
2. Graham: Has a pump and filter in a shed.
3. Hammer: Roses nearby.
4. Lear
5. Howland
6. Crosscup
7. Bunker: Up some steps, on a terrace, with “sapphire-colored waters”.
8. Levy: Owners recently left, with glasses, bottles, and nuts still out by the pool, which has a gazebo with Japanese lanterns. There’s a storm.
9. Welcher: Empty pool and pool furniture stacked and covered in a tarpaulin.
10. A public pool: Loud, crowded, regimented. “It stank of chlorine and looked to him like a sink. A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles… [he] thought that he might contaminate himself - damage his own prosperousness and charm - by swimming in this murk, but he reminded himself that he was an explorer, a pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River.”
11. Halloran: Old, wealthy, nudist couple, suspected of being Communists because they’re zealous reformers. “Their pool was perhaps the oldest in the country, a fieldstone rectangle, fed by a brook. It had no filter or pump and its waters were the opaque gold of the stream.”
12. Sachs: Small, cold pool.
13. Biswanger: “No one was swimming and the twilight, reflected on the water of the pool, had a wintry gleam.”
14. Shirley Adams: “The lighted, cerulean water.”
15. Gilmartin: Icy water.
16. Clyde


Image: An empty pool (Source)

Quotes

• “The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair.”

• “Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stairs… why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings?”

• “They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company.”

See also

• Inevitably, one thinks of Fitzgerald, specifically:
The Great Gatsby (see my review HERE) and
Babylon Revisited (see my review HERE).
• And Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (see my review HERE).

• The story was published in The New Yorker in 1964. That fits the people and setting.

• It was made into a feature film in 1968, starring Burt Lancaster. It necessarily added characters and scenes, though it omitted others. Doubts are sown earlier and there are fewer pools, both of which are OK, but the pools are in a different order for no obvious reason (the elderly nudists are well before the public pool, rather than immediately after, for example). The only aspect I didn't like was that Neddy was accompanied for part of the swim, which changes the nature of the journey. Whereas the original story has a timeless quality, the film is very much of its time - though it does portray the accelerated seasons. The trailer ends with the question, “When you talk about The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?” You can watch it on the imdb page, HERE.

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

proving once again that too much sunbathing can age one prematurely, doubly so with the chemical ooze of the time (think Dupont destroying the protective ozone layer). once the skin peels away we are left with a new and sobering reality