Photo of the Day: Late Summer Dawn, Lake Chautauqua, NY

It’s hard to believe that I’m back two weeks now from vacationing at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, but the images and other memories of that time linger—including this picture I took on my last day there, of walking by Lake Chautauqua at dawn. 

Particularly in those last few days there, as the weather cooled, segueing toward fall, it offered a feeling of peace and serenity that I, in turn, present to you, vicariously.

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on a Still Summer Evening)

“It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.” — British humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

Joke of the Day (Greg Davies, on a Local Swimming Pool)

“A man knocked on my door and asked for a donation toward the local swimming pool. So I gave him a glass of water.”—Welsh actor and comedian Greg Davies quoted in “Laughter the Best Medicine,” Reader’s Digest, August 2015

The image accompanying this post, of Greg Davies at the Taskmaster S17 World Premiere in NYC, 2024, was taken Mar. 26, 2024, by Philip Romano.

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Beach in Summer)

“As you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mademoiselle X… the actress of the Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs. ‘C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?’ says Mademoiselle, and trots up the springboard which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance Mademoiselle X repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before 300 spectators, without violation of propriety, leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.” — American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune,”1875-1876, edited by Leon Edel (1957)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on Being ‘Under the Summer Tree’)

 “They are blithely breakfasting all—
       Men and maidens—yea,
       Under the summer tree,
            With a glimpse of the bay,
       While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
            Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
 
“They change to a high new house,
       He, she, all of them—aye,
       Clocks and carpets and chairs
          On the lawn all day,
       And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
          Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.”—English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), “During Wind and Rain,” in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Wonder of ‘High Summer’)

“High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee (1909-1955), “Sure on This Shining Night,” in Permit Me Voyage (1934)

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on ‘When All the Summers Have Come to an End’)

“I’ll see you in my dreams
When all the summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
We’ll meet and live and love again.” —American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “I'll See You in My Dreams,” from his CD Letter to You (2020)

Photo of the Day: Late Summer, Riverside Park, NYC

Stretching four miles from 72^nd Street to 158^th Street, Riverside Park is a welcome oasis from the worst of New York’s heat and humidity. But I have to admit that, when I first encountered it more than four decades ago, much of its verdant loveliness was lost on me.

What I felt, when I took a jogging course called “Fitness and You” as a Columbia University undergrad freshman, was misery.

It was the third class, when we ran a 2½-mile loop in the park, that nearly did me in. More specifically, it was the hills leading from Riverside Drive to the Hudson River shoreline below.

It didn’t help to hear our instructor scream “Charge up that hill!” to me and a couple of other laggards.

So three weeks ago, when I found myself back on Morningside Heights to meet school friends, I basked in the sun and breathed in the fresh air of the park. But I was far more inclined to join the couple on the bench in this photo I took than the fellow maintaining his conditioning.

Quote of the Day (Pamela Paul, on Why She’s ‘Not Summer People’)

“The 1 percent of the 1 percent don’t need to plan summer because they have it built in. They have a place on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons. They belong to a club where everyone speaks golf and there’s a long waiting list even for those who can afford it. Summer is when the maw of income inequality gapes wide open and only people who summer are allowed in.

“I am not summer people, something hard to admit because summer is also the pushiest season, the most insistent that it be reveled in publicly.”—Opinion columnist Pamela Paul, “My Favorite Part of Summer? The End,” The New York Times, Aug. 16, 2024

I’m “not summer people” either, Ms. Paul. I not only share your lack of membership in these exclusive clubs, but also your physical discomfort with the heat, humidity, and pests that come with the season—issues that have gathered in importance with me over the years not only because of my own aging, but also because of climate change.

So yes, my favorite part of summer is also the end—though I also savor, while it lasts, something I’ve come to think of as “false fall”: the several days, maybe even a week, from in the third or fourth weeks of August when the temperatures abate, you don’t have to turn on the air conditioning, and, if you’re in mountains or the northern end of the country, maybe even don a light jacket in the evening.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Pamela Paul at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 26, 2019, by Larry D. Moore.)

Quote of the Day (Peter Robinson, on ‘Summer Rain’)

“The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot.

“[Detective Inspector Alan] Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

“Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.”—British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson (1950-2022), “Summer Rain,” in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories (2004)

Looks like in my part of the Northeast, we’re in for another day or so of “summer rain.” The sky has been darkening and rumbling over the last couple of hours. I will be glad that when it’s all over, the landscape won’t resemble what Inspector Banks encounters…

Quote of the Day (Ray Bradbury, on a Carnival on a Hot Summer Night)

“Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.”—American science fiction/fantasy fiction writer and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “The Dwarf,” in The October Country (1955)

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a Summer’s Night Talk)

“It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Between the Acts (1941)

TV Quote of the Day (‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ on the Station’s Unbelievable Summer Promo)

[The radio station is getting involved in a big charity promotion.]

Arthur Carlson [played by Gordon Jump] “And the theme this year...” [thumbs up] “…is Surf City, USA.”

Jennifer Marlowe [played by Loni Anderson] [incredulously]: “In Cincinnati, Ohio?” — WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 2, Episode 21, “Filthy Pictures: Part 1,” original air date Mar. 3, 1980, teleplay by Steve Marshall and Dan Guntzelman, directed by Rod Daniel

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Seemingly ‘Splendid Summer Morning’)

“When Jim woke at seven in the morning, he got up and made a tour of the bedroom windows. He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien. The hills seemed to come straight out of the northern sky. From the western windows, he saw the strong sun lighting the trees on the mountains, pouring its light onto the flat water of the lake, and striking at the outbuildings of the big, old-fashioned place as commandingly as the ringing of iron bells….He…went back into the dining room and out onto the terrace. The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn.  It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Jim looked at the terrace, at the gardens, at the house, with a fatuous possessiveness. He could hear Mrs. Garrison—his widowed mother-in-law and the rightful owner of everything he saw—talking animatedly to herself in the distant cutting bed.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Common Day,” originally published in The New Yorker, July 25, 1947, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

With summer beginning, I can think of few American writers, other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who can summon the outward beauty and lurking peril of summer as well as John Cheever.

Christened the “Bard of the Backyard” in this Peter Ronguette article from Humanities, he chronicled the first wave of suburbanites who, in flocking towards their individual Edens, inevitably found worms at the core of their apples.

Jim Brown, the nondescript central consciousness of “The Common Day,” is a visitor from the city who’s wary about buying a home in the country. When he wakes up, there’s something off-putting even about “the beauty of the country morning,” which is “violent and alien.”

One word”—“seemingly”—and two phrases—the “rightful owner of everything he saw” and “fatuous possessiveness”—suggest more powerfully that something will go awry by day’s end.

As I mentioned in this post from two years ago about Cheever’s later, even more famous, short story, “The Swimmer,” the writer used variants on “seem” to imply divergence from reality. “Fatuous” is a downright scornful hint that Jim is delusional to think the beauty he sees around him could ever belong to him.

But the phrase describing his mother-in-law—“rightful owner of everything he saw”—demonstrates the depth of Jim’s delusion about making this country refuge his home.

His landlady and host, while being “indifferent to children,” has also bred dissatisfaction among her foreign-born household staff with her restrictions on their travel back home and her arbitrary demands to move her lilies (“You don’t know anything but kill flowers,” her gardener Nils bursts out).

Just how ineffectual Jim is now and will be comes through as he watches the Irish domestic Agnes Shay with her beloved charge, Mrs. Garrison’s granddaughter Carlotta: “He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house without his help and he heard the door close on their voices.”

Cheever and his family had only barely survived the Great Depression, but not without the shattering of their illusions about where they belonged in American society. 

His short story marked a key signpost as American literature sought to come to terms with the class distinctions still visible despite the New Deal and the egalitarian struggle to defeat Fascism in World War II.

The vision of a better world was as “splendid” as the summer morning Cheever evoked with his characteristic luminosity, but also as illusory.

Quote of the Day (Francis Ledwidge, on the ‘Fair Tanned Face of June’)

“Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.”— Irish poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), “June,” in The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge (1919)
 
I took the image accompanying this post on June day 11 years ago at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.
 
(Thanks to my friend Rob for bringing this poem to my attention.)

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Climate Change’s Impact on European Summers)

“Since the heatwaves of 2019, summer has morphed from something to crave into something to fear. Europe, which is heating twice as fast as the global average, had its hottest ever summer in 2022, breaking the record set in 2021 — all of which was before the world re-entered the hotter El Niño climate cycle. No beach is fun at 40C with wildfires on the horizon.”—Journalist Simon Kuper, “How Will Climate Change Affect the Holiday Map?” The Financial Times, July 1-2, 2023

Will this go down as the summer when Planet Earth finally awakens to the threat of climate change, when voters finally demand that politicians stop denying its existence and start spelling out what they’ll do about it?

If only!

Even so, it is remarkable the extent to which there are few places on this planet—and, more to the point, few places in the United States—that are not affected by the rising heat and humidity. Statistics don’t persuade people of much, but maybe TV footage of relatives—or, God forbid, direct experience with the consequences of a climate in the midst of a perfect storm of factors—might convince some.

At some point, I’d like to write an analysis that, jigsaw-like, puts all the pieces of together from different parts of the globe to depict what’s happening. But Simon Kuper’s recent column that I quoted from above illuminates, in concise form, what is happening in Europe.

I didn’t know until I read him, for instance, that a particularly popular European pastime—sunbathing on the French Riviera—was invented 100 years ago this summer by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for the expatriate couple at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.

Nor, until I read Kuper, had I thought of how unbearable temperatures could alter European tourism patterns—and have a direct (and more often than not, unhappy) effect on this element of the continent’s economy.

The image accompanying this post is based on a 2022 European Investment Bank survey, showing an even wider implication of climate change: that more than a quarter of Europeans believe they may need to move to another region because of the phenomenon.

From my childhood, I distinctly recall a margarine commercial with the tagline, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” But for at least the past couple of decades, in our refusal to face up to climate change, Americans have been the fools, not the other way around. 

Maybe now, as we survey the damage, we can only hope that clown time is over.

Quote of the Day (Rose Styron, on a ‘Miracle of Midsummer’)

“Miracle of midsummer, the trust of dark
sails us beyond this harbor.”—American poet and human-rights activist Rose Styron, “Goodnight, Great Summer Sky,” in By Vineyard Light (1995)

A Disturbance in the Atmosphere: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ as a Summer Novel

“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Great Gatsby (1925)

A week or so ago, a friend’s quote from The Great Gatsby—"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”—led me to ponder what had never really occurred to me in nearly a half-century of reading and re-reading my favorite book: the extent to which F. Scott Fitzgerald had written a summer novel.

What previously came to mind when I heard the phrase “summer novel” was fiction in a seaside or resort setting, often featuring young or forbidden love that was fully a match for the hottest season of the year (as in Edith Wharton’s underrated 1917 book Summer), or some combination of the two.

Occurring in New York City and Long Island, The Great Gatsby had not had the same seasonal or geographic associations for me.

But even in its first chapter, narrator Nick Carraway casually observes that he will be presenting “a history of that summer” when the mysterious figure of Jay Gatsby entered his life.

Far from throwaway lines

With that in mind, let’s look more closely at my “Quote of the Day.” It’s nowhere near as rhapsodic as the “boats against the current” ending that, for instance, inspired the title of this blog. But these are far from throwaway lines.

What seems like a simple wind shifting objects around in the room symbolizes the disturbance in the emotional atmosphere during this fateful summer, represented by the arrival of Jay Gatsby.

Air conditioning is now so taken for granted that it’s hard to imagine how summer heat affected Americans a century ago—and how they reacted to it, architecturally and psychologically.

Cooling units were too big and bulky for the home in the 1920s, so Americans adjusted through light-colored apparel and homes filled with long draperies to keep out the heat and multiple large windows to circulate air. (For an excellent short history of air conditioning, see this summary from the Department of Energy.)

But when heat waves stretched the limits of endurance, tensions rose and people often acted aggressively—with or without the cool drinks that momentarily fed the illusion of comfort and ease.

Over a year removed from his disastrous attempt to write a profitable play, The Vegetable, Fitzgerald had absorbed a valuable lesson from this ill-starred foray into the theater: Don’t provide a static description, but one that also includes action, highlighted here by verb forms involving movement: “blew,” “twisting,” “rippled,” “fluttering,” “shut,” and, in a quiet fall, “died out.”

The color of money

The passage does more than vividly detail the setting: the Georgian Colonial mansion of narrator Nick Carraway’s second cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, among “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg” that represent the attainment of dreams.

The passage also foreshadows the tragic arc of the novel, in which the exertion of force results in the end of Gatsby’s dream.

In these two paragraphs Fitzgerald is already suggesting associations for the complex color scheme that will dominate this most concise of American literary classics.

White is the most commonly repeated here—particularly in the summer dresses worn by the two young women on the coach, Daisy and her friend, the “incurably dishonest” golfer Jordan Baker (or, in the image accompanying this post, actresses Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles from the 1974 film adaptation)—but also in the “gleaming white” windows and, implicitly, in the “frosted wedding cake of the ceiling.”

That last, striking metaphor signals the motifs of acquisition and possession that will become more pronounced with the appearance of Jay Gatsby later. During infantry training in Kentucky for WWI, Gatsby had fallen in love with the 18-year-old Daisy, but he lacked the money to marry the debutante.

Tom has had the wedding that Daisy wanted, and her white dress even now parallels the white gown she would have worn at the ceremony. For Gatsby, Daisy will always be the symbol of innocence and purity he just missed and hopes to have again, no matter what may have transpired since then—or her moral failings that he will be too blind to recognize.

The non-white colors in this passage are implied rather than explicitly drawn out. The “fresh grass” is green, and will be echoed in the novel’s famous conclusion that evokes “the fresh green breast” of the New World encountered by Dutch sailors three centuries before.

The red in the “rosy-colored space” and “wine-colored rug” evoke wealth, risk, and blood—the violence that erupts periodically, including:

*Daisy’s accusation that Tom caused her black-and-blue knuckle, even though he didn’t mean to—hinting at coercive control he wields over her, whether physically or psychologically;

*Tom’s breaking of the nose of his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, during a drink-fueled squabble—witnessed by Nick, instead of being inferred, as with Daisy;

*The party that Nick attends at Gatsby’s mansion, a riotous affair, concludes with women fighting “with men said to be their husbands” and, lying in a ditch, “a new coupe” wrecked by one of the tipsy revelers;

*The party in a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel, preceded by a “loud and tumultuous argument” that worsens when drinks are consumed—and Tom and Gatsby have it out over Daisy;

*The auto accident on the way back, when Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, runs over Myrtle Wilson;

*Gatsby’s murder in his pool at the hands of George Wilson, maddened to violence by Tom’s false suggestion that Gatsby rather than Daisy drove the car that killed his wife.

Rising temperatures…and aggression

Violence also lurks beneath the surface in the backgrounds of two other figures, in ways that Fitzgerald did not need to spell out for contemporary readers but which probably require an explanation for those who encounter the book for the first time in 2023.

Bootlegging, for instance, lurks beneath the surface, conducted in defiance of the Prohibition laws on the books in the Roaring Twenties (underscored, again, by the “wine-colored rug”).

Meyer Wolfsheim (the name translates, roughly, as “home of the wolf”), Gatsby’s business partner and friend, is an organized crime figure who, rumor has it, had “fixed” the 1919 World Series.

Moreover, although never spelled out in the novel, Gatsby, as a member of an organized-crime enterprise, could only have maintained his market “niche” by forcibly removing competitors.

But Fitzgerald judges Gatsby (and even, admittedly to a far lesser extent, Wolfsheim) less severely than another purveyor of violence: Tom.

Reading the list of bulleted items above leads to the inevitable (and correct) impression that much of the aggression it summarizes happens through the instigation of Tom, who possesses “a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.”

“Leverage” is defined as the exertion of force. But Fitzgerald, wanting to leave no doubt of its possessor’s intentions, adds that Tom’s is a “cruel” body—and Tom prefigures how he will impose himself on the threat to his marriage represented by Gatsby even on the mildly ruffling breeze coming through the windows as his wife and Jordan await the arrival of Nick.

With not just his new-found wealth but with his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” Gatsby imperils Tom to such an extent that he even disrupts how the Buchanan house keeps the outside world at bay. The “fresh grass outside,” like Gatsby’s hope for Daisy again, “seemed to grow a little way into the house,” which itself is, like the Buchanan marriage, “fragilely bound.”

Tom reacts the only way he knows how: by crushing any outside influence on his home through power. You can feel it through four words used as nouns here but which double as verbs: “whip,” “snap,” “groan,” and “boom.”

As a lover of poetry, especially Keats, Fitzgerald was acutely aware of the weight, feel and rhythm of words, and in the last sentence of the quoted passage, you can sense Tom's almost tactile deflation of Daisy and Jordan:

“Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

If you associate summer novels with “light,” “beach” reading, then The Great Gatsby doesn’t fit the bill. But if you think of this genre as evocative of the senses, of depicting a time when the rules of life may seem suspended but when so much can turn on unexpected moments of exultation and deflation, then Fitzgerald’s classic eminently qualifies.

Quote of the Day (Garry Wills, on a Summer Lesson in Work and Leadership)

“I had a chip on my shoulder, since my father had left my mother to marry a (much younger) Hollywood model. While I was in California for a high school contest, he asked me to work at his nascent business for the rest of the summer. But for that offer, I would not have stayed—I needed a job in any event. He knew that the way to recruit a resisting son-employee was to give me independence—not only in things like deliveries, but in sales and purchasing of household equipment. If I failed, that might break down my resistance. If I didn't, pride in the work might renew a bond that had been broken. Paradoxically, by giving me independence he got me to do his will. That is the way leadership works—reciprocally engaging two wills, one leading (often in disguised ways), the other following (often while resisting). Leadership is always a struggle, often a feud.”—Historian-journalist Garry Wills, “What Makes a Good Leader,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1994

Happy Labor Day, friends—and remember the inherent value of work (even, God help us, Judge Reinhold's job at Captain Hook Fish and Chips in Fast Times at Ridgemont High).

(Photo of Garry Wills by Lauren Gerson, taken on March 10, 2015 at the LBJ Presidential Library, where he was joining the Friends of the LBJ Library to discuss his book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis.)

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.