Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [186]
Here was a tangent leading to Cheever's greatest story, and while he'd dispense with explicit parallels to Narcissus, he retained the idea of fading youth as well as the name Ned. But Rorem was not the only boyish middle-aged male on his mind—indeed, it was one of Cheever's own defining traits, as he often admitted (with amusement and rue) in his journal. Though he played the dignified squire in his elegant farmhouse, part of him had never changed from the freewheeling youth who refused to get a job or pin himself down in any way; at age fifty-one he still flung himself into icy pools with vigorous abandon, got drunk whenever he felt like it, and was always poised to fall in love or escape. As Maxwell put it with (perhaps) faintly exasperated affection after his friend's death, “He lived as a child would live if a child were able.” Remaining young is a “mode of hope,” as Cheever would say—everything lies ahead—and in this respect he was also thinking of his brother, Fred. “You can draw a line easily enough from the summery boy to the club drunk, but where did … the phony hopefulness come from?” Fred's hopefulness in the face of total disaster—for both himself and his family—struck his brother as an object lesson in the ruinous consequences of self-deceit, a fate he rightly feared for himself. “I clear my throat, reset my shoulders, put out my cigaret in the same abrupt or jerky way of my brother. I move in the same vigorous and decisive way … that arises from, in his case, incomprehensible despair.” Such were the ideas that began to transpire as he wrote “The Swimmer,” which he later explained as being “about the irreversibility of human conduct.”
Once he knew that he was no longer evoking Narcissus, staring into a single pool, he gave Neddy the freedom to swim from one pool to the next (as he himself liked to do), encountering elements of his past along the way. Soon Cheever suspected he had “a perfectly good” novel on his hands—there were some thirty pools in all—but then something began to happen: “It was growing cold and quiet,” Cheever later recalled. “It was turning into winter. Involuntarily. It was a terrible experience, writing that story. I was very unhappy. Not only I the narrator, but I John Cheever, was crushed.” As he began to find the core of the story, he threw away pages and took yet a different approach. The main technical challenge, he realized, could not be sustained over the course of a novel: that is, Neddy could not plausibly repress the truth for some two hundred pages, and the magic involved in making the seasons change in a single afternoon was better accomplished with a few deft strokes, such that the reader scarcely notices until it is dark and cold and Ned, suddenly, is the embodiment of “an old man nearing the end of his journey.”
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night,’ “ the story famously begins. Neddy Merrill—who has “a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure”—is drinking gin at the Westerhazys’ (no less) when he's struck by the delightfully original idea of going home along the “quasi-subterranean stream” of pools from his friends’ house to his own. He names this the Lucinda River, after his long-suffering wife, who also “drank too much” and now disappears from the story with a flick of the author's wand (lest she say a word more and spoil the effect): “When Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.” For a while Ned's journey proceeds auspiciously: he walks beneath “flowering apple trees” to his first pool, the Grahams’, and then encounters a pleasant cocktail party at the Bunkers’, where he's ecstatically kissed by the hostess and “eight or ten other women” before being served by a “smiling bartender.” A faint minor-key trill is sounded around the halfway point, when Ned ducks into the Levys’ gazebo