Appreciations: John Cheever’s Tale of Midsummer Dissolution, ‘The Swimmer’

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Swimmer,” originally printed in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

In the middle of yet another ungodly heat wave, there’s nothing like a nice, cool swim.

Well, even a good idea can be carried a little too far sometimes. Just how far—and how wrong—that kind of idea can be was conjured up by one of the great chroniclers of postwar suburbia.

A full immersion in the waters of John Cheever is enough to get you drunk by osmosis, and one of his most anthologized short stories, “The Swimmer,” wastes no time doing so, in this first paragraph.

Even on Sunday, a day not just of liturgical but recreational grace, inebriation cuts across vast cross-sections of the New York suburb in which this tale is set. Not only is the phrase “drank too much” used four times in the quoted paragraph above, but “drank” is italicized in each case.

Even before the title character is introduced, the major cause of his ultimate degeneration has been identified, albeit as a characteristic shared with the friends and ex-friends increasingly nettled by his presence.

“Drunk” is not the only word repeatedly employed throughout the story. So are “seemed” and “might,” with each use attached to an associated image indicating that the perceptions of the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, will be fragmented and unreliable.

In a 1971 essay, Cheever hailed F. Scott Fitzgerald for his “acute awareness of the meaning of time,” with characters who “lived in a temporal crisis of nostalgia and change.”

By the end of this story, the crisis that Neddy Merrill has been denying becomes increasingly apparent, despite his impulsive, startling decision to recapture his youth by swimming the eight miles from the Westerhazy’s pool to his own.

I haven’t yet seen the 1968 film adaptation of thisstory, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better actor to portray Merrill onscreen than Burt Lancaster (in the image accompanying this post). 

Two decades into his film career, the Oscar winner still showed the amazing physique he had achieved as a youthful acrobat. But few actors were better at depicting the complexity and insecurity below this kind of magnetic presence than he was.

Almost as soon as Merrill has conceived his almost surreal ambition, Cheever is undercutting him as a figure of epic self-delusion:

“He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda, after his wife. 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.”

The irony will only mount as Merrill stops periodically at one party after another, in the course of which he is not only stopped by one hostess but “slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many men.”

Midway through his swim (after, not so coincidentally, about a half-dozen drinks), a storm breaks out, and Merrill’s temporal perceptions become progressively unsure. A neighbor had bought Japanese lanterns “the year before last, or was it the year before that?” It’s supposed to be midsummer, but Merrill finds himself shivering, as if it’s already autumn.

Before long, he is finding a less hospitable landscape: neighbors’ properties overgrown with weeds and the doors locked; jeering by passersby as he crosses a highway barefoot; sneers by another hostess at this “gatecrasher”; and remarks and gossip he doesn’t register about his “misfortune.”

While the story is seen entirely through the consciousness of Merrill, the voice of Cheever slips through at times, as when Neddy wonders if he was “losing his memory” or if 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 had been ill?” 

By the end, Neddy has been exposed as an alcoholic, a philanderer, and a spendthrift whose financial ruin has destroyed his family and left him friendless and locked out of his suburban paradise.

Like the Lucinda River, alcoholism runs like a subterranean stream in a number of Cheever stories, such as “Reunion” and the novel Falconer. But seldom has the psychological dissolution it unleashes been rendered with such irony and phantasmagorical brilliance as in “The Swimmer.”

Cheever shared far more than a thirst for liquor and an equally desperate quest for grace with Fitzgerald: Both also have tempted filmmakers to create on-screen visual counterparts to prose whose shimmering effects are felt primarily in the imagination.

So it was with The Great Gatsby, and so it was in the late Sixties when the husband-and-wife screenwriter-director team of Eleanor and Frank Perry tried to adapt Cheever’s tale of altered consciousness. 

Frank Perry was fired midway through, and even a young Sydney Pollack, hired to complete filming, couldn’t steady a production that had become as uncertain as Neddy’s nautical journey home.

Despite a pleasant on-location experience in Westport, CT (where Cheever made a cameo appearance at a poolside cocktail party, where, Neddy-like, he marveled at a “terrific 18-year-old dish”), the author loathed the finished product of the troubled production. (I’ll have to wait till the next time it comes on TCM to assess the merits of his complaints.)

In a way, Cheever is the missing link between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mad Men (just a few of the many literary references on the late, great series examined in Jenny Tighe's post on the "Bloomsbury Literary Studies" blog). It’s apparent symbolically even in the opening credits of the classic AMC series, in the vertiginous fall suffered by its main character.  

Mad Men’s showrunner, Matthew Weiner, took his time (seven seasons) showing how ad man Don Draper hit rock bottom, just as Fitzgerald took an entire novel to detail the warped promise of its once-dazzling protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver.

In contrast, Cheever compressed the story of Neddy Merrill, but the result is the same in all three cases: men fooled by the shimmering surface of the American Dream, with not enough intestinal fortitude to survive the loss of their illusions.

Appreciations: Kirk Douglas at 100: Hollywood’s Driven Ulysses

The first time I recall seeing Kirk Douglas on the big screen was in early elementary school, at a former depot station that my hometown was trying to determine how to re-use. As part of that effort, the city replayed, on a temporary basis, old family-oriented movies (e.g., Disney’s Johnny Tremain, Kidnapped) that were cheap to rent and wouldn’t compete with the cinema just down the street.

Fifty years later, I can’t recall how much the Douglas feature, Ulysses, resembled its source material, The Odyssey. But the choice of the title character said much about Douglas’ own personality and career: resourceful, indomitable, possessed of an iron will that carried all before him.

In later years, Douglas would remember his co-star on other films, John Wayne, as a “personality star” who more or less played himself from project to project. But surely, Douglas—born 100 years ago yesterday in Amsterdam, N.Y.—infused the characters he played with his own charm, complexity and intensity.

You could not take your eyes off him, and for reasons other than that famous cleft chin that female film watchers (and, by his own admission, female co-stars) could ever get enough of. As great stars do, he could hold the screen with his gaze. He could be cajoling or intimidating, with one often tumbling immediately after the other.

But these different behaviors derived from the same ineradicable hunger, as this child of Jewish immigrants—“the ragman’s son,” in the title of his first autobiography—grasped all too well. And a mass audience understood, too. Filmgoers might find his characters cruel and hateful at times, but in recognizing their source, glimpsed their flawed humanity, too.

Like his contemporary and frequent co-star, Burt Lancaster, Douglas burst onto the Hollywood scene immediately after WWII. That massive conflict exposed Americans to a darkness in the world they had only dimly perceived before Pearl Harbor. It also prepared filmgoers for a cinema that acknowledged this reality and actors who could embody it.

Film noir, the genre of tough guys trying to survive in a dangerous, treacherous world, furnished an ideal vehicle for both Lancaster (The Killers) and Douglas (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Out of the Past). Both actors could have used their muscular physiques simply to star in the kind of superhero roles often associated with Victor Mature and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they were interested far more in how that kind of strength lent their characters simultaneously a foothold and a vulnerability in a violent, corrupt environment, especially in boxing (Lancaster again, in The Killers; Douglas, in his first Oscar-nominated role, Champion).

Uninterested in playing conventional superheroes, Douglas was drawn more often to obsessives. Their desires and wounds translated into quests that could lift those around him—or, if they could not go along with his journey, upend them utterly. That carried over into many different characters in many different genres—athlete, policeman (Detective Story), reporter bent on a scoop (Ace in the Hole), movie producer (The Bad and the Beautiful), depressed painter (Lust for Life), slave who defies an empire (Spartacus), and modern-day rebellious cowboy (Lonely Are the Brave, a personal favorite of the actor). 

One of Douglas’ obsessions, after playing the role on Broadway, was bringing Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to the big screen. After trying for more than a decade, only to be told that he had now become too old to play the part of psychiatric-institute rebel Randall McMurphy, Douglas passed the property along to son Michael, who produced the Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson in the role that Kirk had coveted.

Yet Douglas couldn’t turn away from this character who, like himself, defied the odds. More than 20 years after he played the role, he found a character with strong similarities to it: a feisty former baseball coach confined to an eldercare institution who finds himself in opposition to its administrator (Elizabeth Montgomery) in the TV movie Amos. 

In his personal life, Douglas has survived much as he has aged: a double-knee replacement, heart surgery to install a peacemaker, a helicopter crash that killed others on board, and a massive stroke that necessitated nearly endless rehabilitation. In 1996, still less than a year after the stroke, he accepted an honorary Oscar for his 50 years in the movies. He looked into the audience. "I see my four sons," he said. "They are proud of the old man!"

As well they should be. 

This Day in Film History (Burt Lancaster, 'Modernist Movie Hunk,' Born)

November 2, 1913—Burt Lancaster, who used his athleticism to get his foot in the movie industry, then his intelligence and drive to build a versatile, Oscar-winning multi-decade career, was born into an Irish Protestant household in the East Harlem section of New York City. Yet, though he sometimes appeared in films with a Big Apple setting, he never exuded the aura of a “New York actor” the way that James Cagney, John Garfield or Marlon Brando did, nor did he follow any modish acting tradition. He was simply, in the words of Time movie critic Richard Corliss, “the first modernist movie hunk.”

Like Cary Grant, Lancaster was a circus acrobat before becoming an actor, and a beefcake physique was his primary asset when his film career began in his thirties. Perhaps that particular athletic skill gave the two men the ability to land on their feet even after taking a major risk: seeking roles without the backing of a major studio.

Unlike Grant, however, who frequently acted in comedies (and often, improbably enough with his Cockney background, in the sophisticated, drawing-room kind), Lancaster tilted heavily toward drama. In addition to his job in a circus, he had also worked as a refrigerator repairman, engineer in a meatpacking plant, firefighter, salesman, and singing waiter. That varied background fed his hunger to distinguish himself, but it also probably gave him the confidence to believe he could act believably in any role once he set his mind to it.

The actor would need that self-assurance after he first secured attention as a doomed boxer in the 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers.” He could have traded on his raw physicality, with eventual diminishing returns, the way that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger have done recently. But he prized the kind of range that would assure endurance. 

While Grant essentially worked as a free agent, choosing from whichever part came his way, Lancaster took the extraordinary step of developing his own projects. So, in 1948, linking up with agent Harold Hecht, he became one of the first actors to become an independent producer. Together with James Hill, they would create some of the most popular or critically acclaimed films of the Fifties: Come Back, Little Sheba, Sweet Smell of Success, and Marty (the last not starring him, but nevertheless winning Best Picture). These movies would also serve as a launching pad for a wider career that resulted in Oscar nominations for From Here to Eternity, Birdman of Alcatraz, Atlantic City, and Elmer Gantry (the last, as a corrupt minister, giving him his victory in the Best Actor category).

While blessed with all the glamour of an old-fashioned studio star (as late as the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, critic Kenneth Turan remembered, the “spectacularly fit 58-year-old actor” made a dramatic appearance just before an interview with a preluncheon dive off the rocks into the Mediterranean, in full view of a hotel restaurant), Lancaster seemed ideally positioned to capitalize on film noir, a movie genre that sprang from the grimness of postwar America. He could certainly be cast credibly as a romantic lead. But those “great white Chiclets flashing” (critic Pauline Kael’s words) could alternately be used to grin, or nearly to devour, as in his deeply chilling portrait of a Walter Winchell-like columnist in Sweet Smell of Success.

That, in a way, gave him a crucial advantage in a fierce competition among an entire generation of actors—friend and frequent costar Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. All of them wanted the same kind of anti-hero roles becoming increasingly common in the postwar era. Especially the last four of these were associated with method acting. Lancaster for much of his career was heavily opposed to “The Method.” What he could not bring to a scene by dredging up from his own pit of emotions, he would summon through massive rehearsing and discussions with directors. That preparation could translate into interference with directors, but also a passion that to make the best product, as well as growing daring in choice of roles (e.g., even playing an Italian aristocrat in Luchino Visconsi's 1963 The Leopard).

Athleticism allowed Lancaster to project, in different degrees, energy, strength, and a sense of command. But his gaze radiated intensity--frequently related to love, but many times to cruelty. You can feel that ice-cold sense in Sweet Smell of Success. Lancaster had initially resisted director Alexander Mackendrick's suggestion that he wear glasses. Just what a mistake that was can be seen onscreen, where the spectacles transform the magnificent physical specimen that was Lancaster into what Vanity Fair contributor Sam Kashner termed a "tense, bespectacled ghoul" with the possibility of latent violence. Kashner's article from 13 years ago, on the making of this cult film, mentions that Orson Welles had been co-screenwriter Ernest Lehman's initial choice to play the role of J.J. Hunsecker, but it is hard to see how the former enfant terrible of Hollywood--already experiencing terrible weight problems--could have conveyed the sense of coiled menace brought by Lancaster.

Ironically, while disdaining The Method for much of his career, Lancaster succeeded by bringing the entire range of his own complicated personality to the screen. A man who played a multitude of parts, he contained multitudes himself. Generous, idealistic and deeply committed to causes (he was one of the early advocates for AIDS victims), he could also convey threat. "People were frightened of Burt," recalled partner Hill, "and he never did anything to make people unfrightened of him.” Lancaster was not above lifting the small Hecht into the air and threatening to throw him out the window. The father of five children, an actor who played the title role in the 1970s mini-series Moses the Lawgiver, he was also an atheist and compulsive womanizer who had trouble adhering to the commandment about not committing adultery.

(The image accompanying this post was, of course, the famous beach love scene between Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in his first Oscar-nominated role, From Here to Eternity, used in that film’s trailer.)