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Article Excerpt
There's been too much criticism of the middle-class way of life. Life can be as good and rich there as anyplace else. I am not out to be a social critic, however, nor a defender of suburbia. It goes without saying that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere.
--John Cheerer, Saturday Review (1958)
First published in the July 18, 1964, issue of The New Yorker, "The Swimmer" remains John Cheever's most distinctive short story. Neddy Merrill's famous journey across the swimming pools of affluent suburban homes wends through Sunday afternoon parties where caterers serve the gin ice-cold and everyone confesses they "drank too much" last night. (1) Merrill embarks on his cross-country swim from the Westerhazy's pool. Acoustically, the name Westerhazy tunes the reader's ear for a bit of wordplay, the distinctive surname enfolding both Westchester and the haziness of inebriation and memory. As Merrill surveys the suburb "with a cartographer's eye" (Stories, 603), the narrator notes, "The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough" (Stories, 604). Cheever introduces a dialectic relationship between physical spaces and their representations, and this interplay between the physical and the cartographic, the real and the imagined, ripples through the narrative. As the reader discovers early on, Merrill reads spaces and contexts rather poorly. He acknowledges the falling leaves, the smell of wood smoke in the air, and the early darkness, yet he clings to the idea that it is midsummer. He misinterprets comments about his financial and familial misfortunes, oscillating between denial and repression. The home he returns to in Bullet Park--dark, abandoned, and in disrepair--promises, perhaps, to break the spell: "He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty" (Stories, 612). The structure's physicality disrupts Merrill's imagined cartography. Lashing out against the house, Merrill confronts the divide between conceptual and physical spaces as a voyeur at his own window.
"The Swimmer" typifies the ambiguous position Cheever occupied in relation to the suburbs and the "middle-class way of life" and offers a useful entree into his "suburban oeuvre." As suggested in the 1958 interview in the Saturday Review marking the publication of The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, Cheever positioned himself somewhere between criticism and defense of suburbia. (2) The perfect embodiment of this middle position is the image of Merrill peering in his window, essentially trespassing on his own property. Yet this image and, indeed, Merrill's entire journey also belie the notion that what occurs in a Cheever story could "take place anywhere." While archetypal literary themes may be endlessly portable, the private spaces of suburbia create an equivocal geography peculiar to the human trespasses and the tenuous nature of middle-class life in Cheever's suburban stories.
In "The Swimmer," this relationship between trespass and equivocal spaces becomes apparent at the crucial mid-point of the story when Merrill's journey is interrupted by a roadway and a public swimming pool. Merrill's cross-country swim makes visible the premium placed on privacy in the physical and social spaces of suburbia, but most of the scholarly commentary on this story tends to downplay the suburban setting in favor of the narrative's allusive and symbolic nature. Scholars have provocatively interpreted the transitional uses of color as an indicator to Merrill's decline; water imagery and the return to the womb; biblical allusions to the Fall of Adam; classical allusions to Odysseus, Narcissus, and the Grail legend; literary parallels with Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare's King Lear, and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"; and historical references to Ponce de Leon's failed quest to discover the fountain of youth. (3) Each of these readings contributes to our understanding of "The Swimmer," but an overriding attention to intertextuality risks obscuring the very specific relationship within the text between Merrill and his suburban surroundings.
The roadway appears in the story after a line break, underscoring its intrusive, interruptive function within the narrative. Significantly, the narrator uses the imagined presence of the reader to signal the geographic shift presented by this physical barrier.
Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway--beer cans, rags, and blowout patches--exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful. (Stories, 607)
The roadway and the modern inevitability of automobile traffic disrupt Merrill's pastoral progress and the idyllic vision of his "cartographer's eye," but this particular disruption also calls attention to the reading event. (4) The narrator's second-person address signals the suburb's function as a mediating space both within the story and between the reader and the text. Cheever turns the thru way into a scene of reading, placing the reader within the cars zooming past, calling attention to the way suburban geography marks Merrill as a displaced figure in the scene. The roadway, in effect, cannot accommodate his presence.
On the other side of Route 424, Merrill encounters the further impediment of the public pool where lifeguards harass him for being in the water without an "identification disk," and he must quickly scurry away through "the hurricane fence" (Stories, 608). Having successfully crossed that border, Merrill finds himself back on familiar territory, yet now the sense of his being out-of-place is more overtly described as transgressive. "He called hullo, hullo, to warn the Hallorans of his approach, to palliate his invasion of their privacy" (Stories, 608). To be sure, Merrill has been invading people's privacy for most of the story--a point subtly indicated earlier with a reference to the Levys' "PRIVATE PROPERTY sign" (Stories, 605). But the roadway and the public pool more fully expose the transgressive nature of Merrill's progress, deconstructing the opposition implied by "public" and "private" in the story. Merrill's intrusive presence in supposedly public spaces--the roadway and the public pool--reframes his "contribution to modern geography" (Stories, 603) as a transgressive act. Merrill trespasses wherever he goes.
Starting from this reading of "The Swimmer," this essay focuses on Cheever's The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. Paying particular attention to the title story of the collection and "The Country Husband," I argue that transgression as a physical and social inevitability in suburbia unites Cheever's Shady Hill stories. This unity is more than thematic. While other writers in the 1950s--such as the satirist John Keats, novelists Louis Bromfield and Sloan Wilson, and social critics David Riesman and William H. Whyte--variously detailed the depravity of suburban culture in order to expose its dangerous banality, Cheever looks on the trespasses of suburban life with a more sympathetic eye. (5) More than simply offsetting familiar postwar critiques of suburbia, Cheever discovers in transgression an ambiguous mode of agency that complements the equivocal geographies his characters inhabit and that Cheever himself celebrates.
The Shady Hill stories present an ideal occasion within Cheever's exceptional career to explore his relationship to suburban spaces and to understand how he transforms his characters' transgressions into acts that embrace the fiction of suburban community. According to Scott Donaldson, "With the publication of Shady Hill in September 1958, [Cheever] became fixed in the public mind as a chronicler of suburban life." (6) The shift from the predominantly urban stories collected in The Enormous Radio (1953) to the Shady Hill stories that appeared in The New Yorker from 1953 to 1957 marks the collection as a transitional moment in Cheever's writing. The public perception of Cheever as a "chronicler of suburban life" remains an important element of his reputation and, in many ways, this perception encourages us to read for a sense of unity in Cheever's suburban tales. For Donaldson, the Shady Hill stories are connected by "the faintly ironic, far from judgmental, tone of the storyteller" and the way in which the characters "conspire in the pretense that everything is perfectly all right." (7) Robert A. Morace attributes the unified nature of Cheever's fiction to the sense that his characters "all face the same problem: how to live in a world that, in spite of all of its middle-class comforts and assurances, suddenly appears inhospitable, even dangerous, a world that appears to be growing more and more incoherent and 'preposterous' everyday." (8)
These observations triangulate the ambivalence of Cheever's narrator, the illusory nature of the suburban ideal, and the fragile structures of middle-class life. All three concepts are central to the historical context of Cheever's Shady Hill, and I build on these ideas by delving beneath them, offering a more foundational claim about the role suburban spaces play in Cheever's fiction. Through their indiscretions and trespasses, Cheever's suburbanites reaffirm their tenuous positions within the equivocal spaces of suburbia's private geographies. The Shady Hill stories do not set out to expose the menace lurking behind the suburban facade, nor do they engage in the "veneer stripping" that Catherine Jurca convincingly argues "has been a mainstay of the suburban novel since the twenties." (9) But neither are the stories intentional or unwitting defenses of suburbia. In Shady Hill, Cheever offers a sympathetic portrait of the transgressions that sustain a suburban community. Shady Hill's ambiguous spaces and...
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