Off the Deep Finish: Susan Cheever on the Story Behind “The Swimmer”

My father’s most well-known story was revealed in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Its hero, a Waspy, getting older, and boyish suburban businessman named Neddy Merrill, is hanging out at a neighbor’s pool on a Sunday morning when he decides to swim house throughout the county from swimming pool to swimming pool. It’s a stunning, languorous, rich-boy concept.

Neddy begins the story and his afternoon journey because the quintessential Cheever hero: the perfect of the patriarchy, the loving, affluent father of gorgeous tennis-playing daughters and the husband of a stunning spouse, Lucinda. But in artwork as in life, this floor is nothing however floor.

The good alchemy of narrative threads from delusion, literature, and native gossip enabled my father to hit a watery nerve with the splash of an exuberant cannonball. He started with summer season and the parable of Narcissus. Then there was Odysseus in our household’s often-read Robert Fitzgerald translation. Like Neddy, Odysseus traveled house throughout the water to Ithaca with many fraught stops. My father additionally nonetheless relished that gossipy story from our neighborhood a few man whose spouse left him and took the kids and all of the furnishings. And most of all there have been our buddies’ and Westchester neighbors’ elegant swimming swimming pools, many constructed within the superb Nineteen Twenties, when no nation property was full with out one.

Perhaps the concept for the story started at Yaddo, when my father, who had gone there to write down, encountered the preternaturally boyish composer Ned Rorem on the writing colony’s pool. My father, additionally preternaturally boyish, launched into an affair with Rorem. Although he as soon as boasted that he had intercourse on each floor at Yaddo, homosexual affairs brought on him plenty of emotional hassle. Ned turned Neddy. The swimming pool at Yaddo turned the Westerhazys’ pool.

It had initially been supposed as a novel, labored on within the downstairs visitor room of the home in Ossining the place my father typed away all morning. It would have been his third novel, after The Wapshot Chronicle, which had gained the National Book Award in 1958, and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, revealed in 1964. Both novels are set within the fictional city of St. Botolphs outdoors Boston, and each characteristic two brothers wrestling with their troublesome fates. This could be one thing completely different, my father thought. It could be a recent novel about class and cash, a novel about one man’s progress, a suburban pilgrim’s progress, from pool to pool. The novel would start on a sunny summer season day with cumulus clouds gathering like a military within the distance.

My father was a connoisseur of Westchester County swimming swimming pools. He refused to construct one for himself, though there had been instances when he may have afforded to. Indeed, there had been a pool constructed from a pond within the authentic plans of the home my mother and father had purchased in 1961. But my father had a wandering coronary heart, the soul of a renter, and maybe he knew that no pool he constructed may rival the neighboring swimming pools, the place all of us swam as if we owned them.