You can’t swim home again

Reading John Cheever to understand summer

I’ve spent this summer struggling to explain why I hate summer so much. I’ve written about this before, through the lens of Inspector Maigret, but my hatred of summer seems to be worse this year than ever before.

Climate change would be a convenient scapegoat. It’s definitely hotter and wildfire-smokier in Wyoming than when I was a kid. But even perfectly normal heat—82 Fahrenheit, let’s say, with the lack of humidity that is one of the high desert’s graces—seems to bother me more than before. A lot of people become curmudgeons about cold as they age; it may be that my fate is to become an old man yelling not at a cloud but at a cloudless summer sky.

So I decided to finally read John Cheever’s 1964 short story The Swimmer, as it’s considered a classic, vibey story of American Summer.

You don’t need to be Lionel Trilling to see that Cheever influenced Mad Men

The Swimmer opens with forty-ish Neddy Merrill bursting with joie de vivre on a perfect day in Westchester. Everyone else is hungover—the first line of the story is, ‘It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night”’—but Neddy has the glow of the vacationer who isn’t paying any price for his indulgences:

Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one hand around a glass of gin. He was a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he was far from young he had slid down his bannister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in the dining room. He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.

In only a few sentences, we get three separate assurances that Neddy, while objectively not young, has the spirit, the aura, the élan of youth. What could go wrong for such a man on such a day?

You should read the story, because if you haven’t, I’ll spoil it for you: Neddy is delusional. He begins the story thinking about a domestic bliss that he has long since lost. He seems to genuinely not remember his house being foreclosed upon and begging for loans from various neighbors, including his former mistress. His perfect day, intended to be spent ‘swimming home’ through pools owned by friends, is a mirage that steadily shimmers out of existence, leaving only desolation.

Here’s the narrator’s zoomed-out image of the once-untouchable Neddy after the story’s turn, when reality and storm clouds are both encroaching:

Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway—beer cans, rags, and blowout patches—exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful. He had known when he started that this was a part of his journey—it had been on his maps—but confronted with the lines of traffic, worming through the summery light, he found himself unprepared. He was laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at him, and he had no dignity or humor to bring to the situation.

Neddy has gone from borderline deific, a figure of hope and lightness, to having beer cans thrown at him, an attack which this fallen avatar of the aspirations of summer cannot even answer with ‘dignity.’ No longer are we told how defiantly youthful he is; he’s now just a ‘pitiful’ middle-aged man open to ‘ridicule.’ Sacred summer itself has become profane, a time not for the glories of swimming, but for ‘worming.’

If you’re a hater like me, you might conclude The Swimmer is about idealized summer being unmasked for the time of fetor and rot that it truly is. Neddy commits the classic summer blunder: He looks up at a cloudless sky, feels the sun on his slender limbs, and concludes he simply must Do Something. Summer wants you to do things, and it punishes you for answering its siren song. At best, when you do the things, you’ll be sweaty, sunburned, dehydrated. At worst, you’ll be getting pelted with beer cans while slowly remembering that your wife and four daughters are long gone.

Thing is, I’m writing this while visiting an old friend in Vermont. We’re by a lake, and it’s not too hot. It’s been exactly the right temperature to sit outside and read The Woodcutters. There’s just enough of autumn creeping in, to invert Tom Petty, to calm me down. Summer isn’t so bad when it’s starting or when it’s ending, I’m remembering. You just have to be patient with those middle days, you just have to get through that feeling that you must do everything when you’d rather do nothing, and you’ll emerge on the other side with the sense that maybe you’ve done exactly enough. The lake outside my window is chilly at first, but if you’re willing to spend a few minutes getting used to it, you really can go for a nice swim.

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Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Hey, that’s sweet.

The thing you forget about kids, if you’re a childless adult like me, is that they can be absolutely vicious. It’s not just that Calvin plays a classic prank on Uncle Max; he adds an emotional dimension by staging a ‘sweet’ gesture. For as much as Calvin often seems older than his six years, this is one of his more authentically childlike betrayals.

By this point in the Uncle Max Arc, you have to wonder whether Max is regretting coming all this way to visit his subtly disapproving brother and be tormented by his bumptious nephew. Is he plotting to escape from Calvin as much as he can on this visit? Is he hoping to cultivate an ally in Mom, to strengthen his position vis-a-vis Calvin and Dad? We’ll never really know Max’s interiority, but he’d be forgiven his wariness.

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A Poem

Galway Kinnell is hearing footsteps.