Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Frequent Occurrence in a Suburban Party)

“At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting with her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the babysitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long stretched out on the sofa into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal — to go to the Farquarsons for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there — died as soon as it was made, then Tracy Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair.”—American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “O Youth and Beauty!”, originally published in The New Yorker, Aug. 22, 1953, reprinted in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958)

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.

Flashback, March 1961: Richard Yates’ Searing Suburban Satire, ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Published

Even though it depicted a postwar trend—Americans’ adjustment to suburban life—Revolutionary Road, published in March 1961 by Little, Brown & Company, harked back to earlier sources of inspiration. 

The attractive couple at its heart—Frank and April Wheeler, in their late 20s with a pair of children, about to plunge into infidelity, alcohol abuse and despair—are reminiscent of the troubled married duo Dick and Nicole Diver of Tender Is the Night, and its realistic, irony-tinged style owes much to that novel’s creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At the same time, critics hailed Richard Yates for his unique, melancholy recounting of the dream that beckons to the Wheelers: chucking their humdrum, materialistic lives in Connecticut for a more low-cost, bohemian and creative existence in Paris—the same aspirations that lured Fitzgerald and wife Zelda to become expatriates in the 1920s.

Some critics have felt that Yates never equaled his achievement in this first novel of his. But the same might be said of Orson Welles with Citizen Kane.

(As I mentioned in a blog post from 12 years ago, by no means do I share this dismissive view of Yates’ other fiction. Whether in his short stories or novels, he is, I believe, our postwar bard of disenchantment.)

“The emotions of fiction are autobiographical,” Yates once observed to friend Grace Schulman, “but the facts never are.” That applied to Revolutionary Road. Although the novel was not strictly speaking a roman a clef, it reflected Yates’ frustration in simultaneously trying to write fiction, stay financially solvent, and maintain a marriage crumbling under the strain of his affairs and alcoholism.

The wonder is that his portrait of Frank is shot through less with self-pity than with withering scorn for his self-delusions and failures of will. Frank works in New York for ''the dullest job you can possibly imagine,'' with the New York firm Knox Business Machines, but he thinks he’s made for another life “as an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.”

Having returned in the early 1950s from just the kind of expatriate life Frank desires, Yates saw the dangers lurking for the intellectually pretentious: someone culturally aware enough to speak of the latest philosophical fashion, but all too willing to surrender to the all-too-easy office girl, to the liquor that takes the edge off the day, and to the better-paying job supposedly needed to keep up with the Joneses in the new suburban nirvanas cropping up around the country. Or, as Yates sums up Frank’s thinking:

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

Unfortunately, Frank’s existence has been bound up in forgetting who he is. He welcomes “being contaminated” as his means of avoiding discovering whether he really is talented and ambitious enough to make a career of writing fiction.

In the book’s opening scene, April realizes the limits of her creative talents far more quickly and painfully. Despite her good looks (“a tall, ash blonde with a patrician beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could disguise”), she flops even in the “little theater” amateur production mounted in their town. The aftermath of that disaster—a bitter post-performance argument on the drive home with Frank—prefigures the volatile summer that follows.

At least April has the energy to plan for a more fulfilling life, as well as a touching if absurd faith that Frank is gifted and dogged enough to achieve it. But, as they come face to face with the collapse of their hopes, Yates also presents her with the novel’s most pungent, memorable line: “No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”

The address that becomes the scene of the Wheelers’ undoing—Revolutionary Road—is ironic, implying that Wheelers are unequal to the spirit of independence that founded the nation and that they seek to embody in their quest for the creative life.

“Pessimistic,” “depressing,” “bleak”—all adjectives that aptly describe Yates’ work without adequately conveying the power of it. For that, it might be best to absorb passages like the following, where Yates evokes the deadening routine experienced by the commuters who stream daily into the city:

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

Revolutionary Road was a finalist for the National Book Award the following year, losing out to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. After abortive attempts by director John Frankenheimer and actor Patrick O’Neal to bring the book to the screen in the 1960s and 1970s, director Sam Mendes succeeded in doing so in 2008, in an adaptation starring wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio (in the image accompanying this post).

Though faithful to the book and critically acclaimed, the movie enjoyed only tepid results at the box office. Its subject matter is dark at any period, but Americans plunged into a recession during the 2008 holiday season were particularly not in a mood for the romantic hopes and tribulations of the Wheelers.

In other ways, though, the times may have caught up with Yates and his vision. The world he depicted with such unflinching fidelity to truth in Revolutionary Road—the synthetic suburban dreams, the Madison Avenue suits who manufactured a glossy future by day when they weren’t carrying on trysts afterward, the photogenic, seemingly perfect couples who ended up in drunken screaming matches—was recreated by AMC for Mad Men. (Indeed, that series’ showrunner, Matthew Weiner said he would never have bothered to create it if he had read Revolutionary Road beforehand, remembered ChristinaWayne, who was senior VP of scripted series/miniseries for AMC at that time.)

But it appears now that the book’s admirers have succeeded in moving the novel from cult to more mainstream status, where it can be appreciated for what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford called “its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings -- about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals.”