My father’s most celebrated story appeared in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Its protagonist, Neddy Merrill, is a boyish, aging, Waspy suburban businessman lounging by a neighbor’s pool one Sunday morning when he decides to swim home across the county, moving from one swimming pool to the next. It’s a charming, leisurely idea, typical of a privileged man.
At the start of the story and his afternoon adventure, Neddy embodies the classic Cheever hero: the ideal patriarch, a successful and devoted father to beautiful tennis-playing daughters, and husband to his lovely wife, Lucinda. Yet, as in life, this polished exterior is only skin deep.
My father masterfully wove together threads from myth, literature, and local gossip, creating a narrative that struck a deep chord. He drew from the summer season and the myth of Narcissus, as well as Odysseus’s journey home across the sea in our family’s well-worn Robert Fitzgerald translation—much like Neddy’s own troubled voyage. He also cherished a neighborhood tale about a man whose wife left him, taking the children and all the furniture. Above all, there were the elegant pools of our Westchester friends and neighbors, many built in the grand 1920s when no estate was complete without one.
The story’s inspiration may have begun at Yaddo, where my father, there to write, met the eternally youthful composer Ned Rorem at the colony’s pool. My father, also remarkably boyish, started an affair with Rorem. Though he once bragged about having sex on every surface at Yaddo, his gay relationships caused him significant emotional turmoil. Ned became Neddy, and Yaddo’s pool transformed into the Westerhazys’ pool.
Originally conceived as a novel, my father worked on it in the downstairs guest room of our Ossining home, typing away each morning. It would have been his third novel, following The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the National Book Award in 1958, and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, published in 1964. Both novels are set in the fictional town of St. Botolphs near Boston and center on two brothers grappling with their challenging destinies. My father envisioned this new work as something different: a contemporary novel about class and money, tracing one man’s suburban pilgrimage from pool to pool. It was to open on a sunny summer day with cumulus clouds gathering like an army in the distance.
The story serves as a warning: you can be at the peak of your life and lose everything in a single afternoon.
My father was an expert on Westchester County swimming pools. He never built one for himself, even when he could afford to. In fact, the house my parents bought in 1961 originally included plans for a pool made from a pond. But my father had a restless spirit, the soul of a renter, and perhaps he sensed that no pool he built could compare to the neighboring ones where we swam as if they were our own.
First, there was the magnificent Vanderlip pool. When we moved to the suburbs in 1951, one of the attractions was the estate’s stunning pool, just across the lawn from our front door. Encased in marble with a 12-foot deep end, it was guarded by a statue of Neptune.
At the pool, we children were all just kids, regardless of whether some had inherited fortunes or others would later scrape by as teachers. What mattered was how well you swam, how you looked in a bathing suit, and how at ease you appeared sitting on the edge—not what was in your bank account. Long after we moved north to our house in Ossining, we returned to the Vanderlip pool every summer like migrating geese when the heat arrived.
When the Vanderlip pool felt too lonely or tensions arose among family friends, there was always the Swopes’ pool.A few miles north and closer to the new house, the pool was just as elegant, with its artificial natural setting—a landscaped stream cascaded down a rocky waterfall into the shallow end. The Swopes’ pool had soft, pale green water and included two bathhouses, one for men and one for women—rustic, shady spaces cooled by damp stone floors.
After we moved from the Vanderlip estate to Ossining in 1961, the nearest pool was Sara Spencer’s, also made of marble. It was equipped with a lighting system that made night swimming more practical, though the deep, moonlit waters of the Vanderlip pool often held a satisfying mystery and chill. Then there was the Helprins’ pool and the Wallaces’ new pool, built just a few feet from the back deck of their ranch house in the next town. “I wouldn’t spit in that pool,” my father would say if anyone suggested swimming at the Wallaces’.
As always, we saw ourselves as self-appointed aristocrats, set apart from the common crowd by intellect—a quality more important than wealth until you needed a mortgage. My father created myths at work and spun even more when he wasn’t.
One afternoon—was it by accident?—we all drove to swim in the Hudson River at Croton Point, a Y-shaped peninsula extending into the murky water below the cliffs of Ossining. “After lunch we drive to a public beach,” my father wrote on August 28, 1963, at the end of a long summer. “An abundance of trash cans, turnstiles, ticket windows, men and women in county park uniforms, worn lawns, pretty willows, water the color of urine that smells, to my long nose, like an open sewer. A plump lifeguard sits in his tower, blowing his whistle and shouting commands through his electrical megaphone at every infraction of the numerous regulations.”
Inspired, as he often was, by the nightmarish quality of ordinary lives, he wrote about the bad breath, pimply backsides, and general unpleasantness of most people’s bodies in bathing suits. It was just a few miles away but worlds apart from the slate-green waters of the Swopes’ pool, the magnificent Neptune statue overlooking the Vanderlips’ pool, and even the smaller Helprins’ pool set before their house, designed to resemble a Westchester château.
After working on “The Swimmer” for weeks, my father decided it wasn’t a novel but a short story. He sorted through the manuscript, making two piles of paper—one small, one larger. Then he picked up the rejected pages—about 150 of them—walked out through the kitchen, out the back door onto the slate patio behind the house, stuffed them into an oil barrel used for burning trash, and set them on fire. With the 10 pages he had left, sitting in that back room looking out at the clothesline and hearing my mother in the kitchen, he performed his magic: he transformed it into a story.
Every summer, my mother went north to New Hampshire, almost always taking my brothers, Ben and Fred, and sometimes me. Left alone in the house, my father’s mind wandered and shifted. During his drinking years, he drank too much. In his journals, he reminded himself to write what he called the summer story. After a rain on one of those lonely days, he saw a red de Havilland trainer airplane flying over the valley and wrote, “the maneuvering of the pilot who goes aimlessly up, down, and around for an hour seems to convey his ecstasy in the fineness of this late summer afternoon. I seem almost to hear him laugh.” In the story, the red plane becomes a symbol of delight and prosperity during the first half of Ned Merrill’s swim. “Overhead a red de Havilland trainer was circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder.”
What begins as a mild and distant rumble in the atmosphere becomes, within five pages, the end of the world. Beware, the story seems to say.It’s a message to the reader: You can be in the prime of your life, with a beautiful wife and four daughters who play tennis, identifying with a man who seems to be flying, and in one afternoon, you can lose everything. You will lose everything. You have already lost everything. This was one of my father’s great themes, and one that readers often misunderstand. Those who see the stories as set in a glorious suburban landscape, where even the small airplanes have fun, have missed something. Darkness lurks just beneath the surface. Odysseus returns to Ithaca, but when he does, it will be almost unrecognizable. By the time Neddy Merrill swims across the final pool—the Clydes’—he has to pause and rest on the edge, wondering if he has the strength to get home.
Once The New Yorker published it, the summer story quickly caught Hollywood’s attention. Although my father had been terrified by his previous experiences in Hollywood for many reasons, he had also made friends there. He drank with Peggy Lee and became close with Alan Pakula and his charming wife, Hope Lange—Hope would later become my father’s most public mistress. She told me their affair was complicated by two issues: he always had to catch the 6 p.m. train home to Westchester, and because of his accent, she rarely understood what he was saying.
In the summer of 1964, my father received a call from Frank and Eleanor Perry, a sharp, sophisticated filmmaking couple who had made waves in Hollywood with their low-budget film David and Lisa, a romantic story about mentally ill teenagers that earned two Oscar nominations. The Perrys had my father’s number. At fifty-five and on the brink of a flashy success, he had just bought a small red Karmann Ghia convertible to drive around the roads of northern Westchester.
ABOVE WATER
Burt Lancaster, who described “The Swimmer” as “Death of a Salesman in swimming trunks,” was eager to star in the film adaptation.
Photo: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images.
The Perrys promised to make a literary film, with music by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Burt Lancaster was so keen to play the part that he was already training with the head swim coach at UCLA to perfect his Australian crawl. What my father didn’t know was that Lancaster, nicknamed The Build, had taken the role only after William Holden, Paul Newman, and George C. Scott had turned it down.
For once, the Perrys assured him over many drinks, a movie would be made that didn’t simplify the original story. Filming began in Westport, Connecticut, in the summer of 1965.
But just as Neddy starts the short story with grand dreams and promise, only to end up naked, alone, and abandoned, the movie soon found itself in trouble amid a wave of changes.
My father learned that the Perrys had somehow run out of money (finances were never their strong suit). Frank Perry also kept clashing with Burt Lancaster. Frank saw himself as a genius, an improviser whose black-and-white film had touched the soul of America. Lancaster had his doubts.
To save the movie, the Perrys turned to Columbia Pictures. Executives in Hollywood insisted on bringing in Sam Spiegel, the producer of On the Waterfront, who had won three Oscars and was known for his many blonde girlfriends, whom friends called Spiegelettes.
For Spiegel, an immigrant who preferred spending time on his yacht off the South of France, the soul-searching of a suburban WASP held little appeal. He hired his friend Marvin Hamlisch to write the music (he found Miles Davis too sad) and had the writer add a part for Janet Landgard, the current Spiegelette. Landgard was written into the script as a babysitter.My father named a character Julie Ann Hooper—a name that reflected Hollywood’s foolishness, unlike the skillful names he usually created. Still captivated by Hollywood and, as usual, short on money, he went along with it. When his editor at The New Yorker, Bill Maxwell, suggested changes to a story, my father resisted. But when Sam Spiegel simply made drastic alterations without consulting him, my father got into his red convertible and sped away. No words were exchanged. The Perrys acted as if nothing happened. Lancaster, furious because Spiegel never appeared on set, did his job. He had become an excellent swimmer and was adept at conveying sadness. He knocked on a door, found no one home, an empty house. Cut.
Many writing instructors, philosophers, and even authors claim there are three, or seven, or four fundamental human stories. On every list, a key narrative is the journey story—where a hero or antihero sets off in search of something or someone, faces unforeseen challenges or detours, and finds their goal transformed along the way.
“The Swimmer” features 15 pools in its 10 pages, a progression that gives the story immense impact. Yet, just as people assume I effortlessly stepped into writing like borrowing a parent’s sweater on a cool day, they fondly recall Neddy Merrill at the start of the story or film: Burt Lancaster, with his stunning wet physique, a slight hangover, a complex past, four tennis-playing daughters, and a whimsical plan to swim home.
Tennis serves as a background detail in many of my father’s stories, though he had no idea how to play the game himself. He hoped I would play tennis for him, hiring a pro to teach me when we could barely afford food. It was a disaster. He even rented a house with a tennis court, but it didn’t help. Nowadays, I joke as I play tennis that he thought if I were better at it, he might be less gay. People find that amusing.
In his writing about what tennis meant to him, he said, “I take Fred and the red boat over to the Boyers’ where the weekend tennis tournament is happening. The sounds of a game I can’t play and the players’ voices make me feel painfully and unwillingly alone. I’m like some melancholy child, stuck on the sidelines on a summer afternoon… while you were learning tennis at Deerfield, I was starving in a rented room on the lower west side. Poor me.”
Both the brilliant story and the cobbled-together movie have gained a cult following. Something about my father’s idea that summer, the notion of swimming as a way to traverse the landscape, resonates with people. It’s strange, though, that whenever they discuss “The Swimmer”—and I’ve been approached about it countless times—they never mention the ending.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of helpful and clear FAQs about Susan Cheevers exploration of The Swimmer
General Beginner Questions
1 What is Diving In Susan Cheever Explores the Origins of The Swimmer
Its a critical essay or analysis where the author Susan Cheever investigates the reallife inspirations and deeper meanings behind John Cheevers famous short story The Swimmer
2 Who is Susan Cheever and why is she qualified to write this
Susan Cheever is a celebrated author and memoirist She is also the daughter of John Cheever giving her a unique personal and literary insight into his life and work
3 I havent read The Swimmer Whats it about
The story follows a man named Neddy Merrill who decides to swim home across his neighbors pools As he journeys the season seems to change from summer to autumn and his life is revealed to be in a state of collapse exploring themes of denial suburban illusion and the passage of time
About the Analysis Origins
4 What are the main origins of The Swimmer that Susan Cheever explores
She primarily explores how the story was inspired by the Cheever familys own life in the suburbs their social circle and her fathers personal struggles with alcoholism and his complex relationship with his identity
5 Does she suggest the story is autobiographical
Not entirely but she argues it is deeply autobiographical in spirit She shows how John Cheever used elements of his own emotions fears and environment to create the storys powerful mood and themes rather than writing a literal account of his life
6 What is the significance of the swimming pools in her analysis
She frames the pools as symbols of suburban prosperity and social status on the surface but also as containers of hidden truths loneliness and the emotional coldness that Neddy is trying to avoid
7 How does Susan Cheevers perspective change how we read the story
Knowing the personal contextlike her fathers alcoholismmakes Neddys journey feel less like a quirky adventure and more like a poignant tragic descent It adds a layer of emotional depth and tragedy to the allegory
Advanced Thematic Questions