In the idyll of a mid-summer Sunday, a middle-aged man in the ostensible prime of life, with four daughters at home in a WASPY and affluent northeastern burg, lounges in a friend’s pool with his wife and a few others, fresh from an invigorating swim. One hand dangles in the water and another, portentously, is “around a glass of gin.” (The group is nursing hangovers.)
In one of those slightly whacky creative inspirations that at the very least will give him a good story to share at the next of what we are soon given to understand are regular cocktail parties among old friends, Ned (Neddy) Merrill decides, “with a cartographer’s eye,” that he can make his way the eight miles home with a kind of hopscotching from one set of friends’ backyard pools to another. His plan is to take a lap or two (and often a drink) at each, then walk to the next, only one slight dogleg required, 15 stops in all.
Sure, one of them is a public pool, but it being well-situated on the map, he resolves to deal as he must with its proletarian milieu.
Ned decides almost instantaneously to name the “quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county” after his wife, Lucinda. “He had made a discovery,” after all, “a contribution to modern geography,” so naming rights are surely the least he can claim for his brilliant, if madcap idea.
All of which encourages him to entertain the “modest idea of himself as a legendary figure,” a bold “explorer,” the kind of man who harbors an “inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools”—and by extension, into life itself.
Oh that, Neddy—what a card!
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One of the many notable aspects of John Cheever’s celebrated, widely anthologized short story, “The Swimmer” (available online here) is how much competition it gets in the category I would call “sheer engagement” from the much lesser known and less appreciated film adaptation of the same title.
The film, which debuted four years after Cheever’s story appeared in “The New Yorker” magazine in 1964, features Burt Lancaster’s masterful inhabitation of Ned in a role he regarded as both the best of his career and personal favorite. (I’m guessing those two go together more often than not.)
Having just caught up to the story after Cheever’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection had sat on my shelf for years, I knew I wanted to explore it further—and give it another read or two. Which is what led me to discovering the movie.
Cheever is the acknowledged master, “America’s Chekhov,” of chronicling the delicacies, deceits and self-delusions of the post-World War II upper class, with its crass materialism and obsession with status. Not that his work is any less relevant today. Though he was distinctly from his time, place and social class, his concerns are all too human.
“The Swimmer” is an odd and opaque story at first read, allegorical up to its neck. It’s hard to know exactly what Ned is up to with this half-pranky plan that gives everyone a little chortle about “good old Neddy,” but leaves them with a mixture of envy and disquiet.
One doesn’t know exactly where Cheever is leading us with this strange dreamer of a man given to impromptu soliloquies on the beauty of water and sky (and virtually any woman in his presence). Nor what to make of his readily back-slapping old friends for whom he is expressing all manner of long-shared intimacy as he pops in from the woods or road clad only in his bathing suit.
But as the story unfolds, we sense something is off, not right—especially as we discover, one pool after another, he hadn’t seen any of these supposedly beloved neighbors over a good long while.
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“The Swimmer” was made into a film by the husband-wife, director-screenwriter team of Frank and Eleanor Perry (“David and Lisa,” “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” Mommy Dearest”), though Frank was replaced late in the proceedings by Sydney Pollack (“Out of Africa,” “Tootsie,” “The Way We Were”).
Film being the warmer, multi-hued, close-up story-telling mode it is, Cheever’s 12-page treatment of what had started out as a 150-page novella becomes more in-your-face dramatic and personal on the screen, the drama intensified, the alarm bells regarding Ned’s grasp on reality fleshed out with deeper concern in the viewer.
A common response to reading the Cheever story (and shared by me in my first take) is puzzlement as to exactly what we are dealing with in Ned’s escapade. The reader is hit with an electric jolt in the story’s last line that greatly clarifies matters, but it’s more sudden shock than steadily building emotion. My own impetus was then to backtrack and try to figure out which clues I hadn’t picked up on, or that Cheever intentionally soft-pedaled, as from a slight distance, in order to magnify the intrigue.
Most novel-to-film adaptations suffer from many (most?) viewers having already read the book, grown familiar with the characters, and noticing acutely when the time constraints of the standard two-hours-ish film force directors and screenwriters to jettison entire scenes and even characters that had figured prominently in the novel.
We get quite the opposite in “The Swimmer,” its short story length forcing Cheever’s brisk, unexpansive sketches that get right down to the business at hand.
In contrast, the 95-minute film allows the Perrys not only to let key scenes run a while, but also to create entire new scenes and characters that do not appear in the short story, but which greatly reinforce its themes.
Two of several such additions add to both the phantasmagorical and relational aspects of the film.
One character is Ned’s former teenage babysitter for his daughters, now a nubile and vivacious young woman he encounters at one of the pools. After she admits she’d been impossibly smitten with him as a dreamy teen back in the day, they are suddenly transported to a fantasy-laden lope through the forest, jumping over steeplechase barriers set up for horses, semi-delirious grins on their faces—until things grow distinctly uneasy in the aftermath as they rest in the grass.
Another, similar scene has Ned met by a horse in the woods between pools, whereupon these two of God’s creatures on this good earth key in on each other and break into an impromptu, hearty gallop, all native joy and abandon.
Both of these scenes, absent in the story, bring an immediacy and emotional underlay to the embodiedness that is fundamental to Ned’s initial inspiration to swim his Lucinda River.
As the story reaches its apogee, we come to see that Ned’s exultation in his physical self, that swimming, galloping, jumping creature who cavorts with the gods, is not saving him from suffering the fate of all living things who diminish over time, magnified in him all the more by his tenuous emotional grip on the life he has lived.
All that said, I can’t say I “liked” the movie more than the story. They exist in different spheres, and in any case, the lion’s share of the credit goes to Cheever for conceiving the tale. I’m glad I read the story first, and would again in a do-over. It deserves to be seen as he saw it—just as musical covers should always, if possible, be preceded by a listen to the originals.
In the end, Cheever playing his cards close to the vest, with minimal emotional valence, leaves Ned’s motivations and fate as more of an intellectual puzzle to be pondered and solved, rather than the reader being pulled into the drama of his life and the community from whom he so desperately wants validation. Film being the more multi-expressive, saturated medium it is allows Ned’s fate to matter in a way I did not experience when reading the words on a page.
One last note: I was gratified to read elsewhere that Lancaster himself referred to “The Swimmer” as “‘Death of a Salesman’ in swimming trunks,” because I had entertained the exact same thought—minus Lancaster’s colorful phrasing. Ned Merrill and Willy Loman: two of countless lost characters among us, our own occasional half-lostness over the peaks and vales of our lives making us kin.
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Pool by Artem Militonian, Helsinki, Finland https://unsplash.com/@artmilitonian
Reflection in puddle by Inja Pavlić, Osijek, Croatia https://unsplash.com/@inja_jeki
Horse by Possumvii Iviiss, https://unsplash.com/@possumvii
As you mentioned, films based on short stories/novellas/poems rather than novels is comforting to a screenwriter (no guilt about cutting scenes and more legroom for creativity). All About Eve, It’s a Wonderful Life, Rear Window, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gunga Din, The Third Man, Braveheart, Rashomon, The Killers (another Burt Lancaster movie), Of Mice and Men, Stand by Me, Apocalypse Now, The Man Who Would Be King, Shawshank Redemption, and Double Indemnity are just the tip of the iceberg of classic films adapted from short stories/novellas/poems. Interestingly, Elia Kazan cut the first three parts of John Steinbeck’s epic novel East of Eden for that very purpose.
The Swimmer is one of my favorite Burt Lancaster films, and I have nothing to add to your comprehensive comments on the film. They’re right on the money. On a personal note, a long time ago, sandwiched between two algebra tutoring sessions, I stopped at a Beverly Hills’ liquor store for an iced tea, and Burt Lancaster strolled in behind me and bought a coke. I was too shy to say anything. Some regret now. Finally, if you haven’t seen his performance in Atlantic City, do.
Your iceberg-tip list of literature-to-film ventures inspires a Neddy-like idea of, “Hey, a blogging series just on that, no doglegs or public pool traversing required!!” Will likely let that pass, but the idea is worthy of attention because the works are so abundant and pregnant for parsing.
Yes, I have seen Burt in “Atlantic City,” but it was in the long ago and is no doubt worthy of a revisit. He cuts quite a figure in film history.
I had never read this Cheever piece until opening it moments ago on this blog post. I am left with an empty ache inside at the how disorienting the passage of time can be as one ages (in this case, me). Ned’s longing for familiarity with his “set” of neighbors, coupled with the accompanying coldness he sometimes confronts with them are reminders that, as time passes, things and people once so familiar fade into foggy images of what once was, but is no longer. I found the written story profoundly deeper and touching than the trailer that I subsequently viewed. Reading this story after a week recently passed with lifelong friends was/is particularly timely as that visit, along with shared recollections of youthful times and shenanigans have thrust me into reflections on the passing of time and glimpses of people/places/relationships as images once so very real and present that are now slipping into the deep recesses of memory. The kinds of feelings evoked by this story, for me, are more powerfully conveyed and digested in written form than they are on the screen, despite the power of Burt Lancaster. With that said, I plan to give the film a full viewing and not carry this view from only seeing the trailor.
That old saw comes to mind, Jay: Never judge a movie by its trailer! (There was something similar about books at one time, but memory fails me…) I think the critical consensus is mostly that if the movie is a triple or home run, the story is a grand slam, though there are certainly devotees of the movie who feel otherwise. I think they’re so different (same tale, different creative conceptions) that the issue of “better” is almost a moot point, chiefly owing to the very different emotional colorings that both the art forms and the creators called forth. I’ll be interested to see how the movie goes with you—stop back here and let us know when you’re passing by one day!