Abundance and Loss in Cheever and Porter: Part I
For literary theorist and historian Rita Barnard, the movement of American modernism marked “a transition from a producer-capitalist culture (with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance (with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment).” According to her narrative,
Wealth and class suddenly seemed to be a fluid matter, marked by expenditures rather than by money in the bank. […] If one reads the fiction of this period with an eye on economics, monetary concerns and metaphors come to seem quite pervasive and arise in quite surprising places.
John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (1964) and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” (1930) are two short stories that can be productively read in light of Barnard’s genealogy of modernity. In both works, we find the main characters on a journey home after a drunken social event the night before. Following Barnard, these journeys home “involve the discovery of forms in which a sense of being out of place or off-center could be turned to aesthetic advantage.” Cheever and Porter both sculpt the alienated condition of the modern (wo)man who desires love, but only ends up losing themself to their own pursuit of abundance in the material world—whether it be the pursuit of wealth or the flesh. Hence, in this essay, I seek to discuss how issues of class, alienation, and gender unfold together within the context of abundance, and how they all point towards the problem that Barnard pins to the modern age: the problem of wanting too much.
Poster for the 1968 film adaptation
We begin by taking a look at Cheever’s protagonist Neddy Merrill in “The Swimmer.” The short story (and the 1968 Burt Lancaster adaptation of the same name) tells the strange story of a young man attempting to swim home through eight miles of backyard suburban swimming pools—an imaginary water route he dubs the “Lucinda River.” Merrill, an energetic young man with “an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” prides himself as an example of one who always “hoisted himself up” and “never used the ladder,” literal or otherwise. His ambition is great and he has every intention of realizing his absurd journey home. Optimistic to the point of delusion, Merrill convinces himself that throughout his journey, “he would find friends all along the way” who “would line the banks of the Lucinda River.”
According to David Ullrich, the phrase “banks of the Lucinda River” is a pun on another kind of bank: “the implied metaphor ‘swimming in money’ transfers qualities of water to money, suggesting that money supports the swimmer, buoys up and sustains the swimmer, as he or she swims.” In other words, the swimming pools behind each house represent the wealth of each inhabitant. One can say, then, that Merrill’s swim through the many pools that make up his planned route reflects his own strategic opportunism. He intends to make use of his social connections and navigate through other people’s affluency in order to achieve and maintain his own. It is no wonder that he willingly endures stopping “to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many men” at the neighboring Bunkers’s party. Here, he sees himself “like any other explorer” who would have to handle “the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives…with diplomacy…to reach his destination.” On his journey home, Merrill adapts to the conventions of the upper class in hopes of carving his own place within it.
Although Merrill makes a habit of making himself likable to ensure social cohesion, he does not simply suck up to anyone. Not everyone is good enough to be treated well by someone of his status. We first get a glimpse of this arrogance at the public pool in the Recreation Center. The crowd reminds him of the one at the Bunkers’s, but he finds that “the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill.” In spite of the fact that the water in the public pool gives their voices the same “illusion of brilliance and suspense” as the crowd at the Bunkers’s, he does not assign them the same social ranking: water from a public pool lacks prestige. As such, we can see that those who come for the water there are not treated with any respect, constantly dehumanized by the “pair of life-guards in a pair of towers” blowing “police whistles” at the public. Merrill sees the public pool as a kind of government handout, which is why he tries to reassure himself that his presence there is “merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River.”
Merrill’s contempt even extends to the kind Biswangers who “invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance.” Despite their enthusiastic attempts to befriend him, he would continue to reject and alienate them for being “the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company.” Merrill sees them as having no sense of class, abhorring their new-money crassness and refusing to accept those who are “unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society.” In a twist of irony, we find Merrill becoming the ostracized one who the Biswangers label a gatecrasher at their party. Despite this jab at his uninvited attendance, he asks politely, “do I rate a drink?” and is allowed to order himself a whiskey. But the bartender, who “kept the social score,” sees that Merrill “had suffered some loss of social esteem:” he “served him rudely,” indicating that Merrill himself had now been alienated by the very people he felt himself above.
John Cheever
After his humiliating appearance at the Biswangers’s, Merrill pays a visit to his old mistress, Shirley Adams, the woman to whom he used to turn for “sexual roughhouse,” which was “the brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step.” A patent misogynist, Merrill finds pleasure in the objectification of women. He revels in the glory that “his was the upper hand” as it “was he who had broken it off” with Shirley some time ago. He confidently “step[s] through the gate of the wall that surrounded her pool,” assuming it “to be his pool[,] as the lover…enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony.” Merrill feels entitled to the woman, believing that access to her body means access to even her belongings. Consequently, we observe that he utterly fails to comprehend “the rudeness of a mistress who had [once] come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears.” In another ironic twist, it is Merrill who now weeps as he realizes that he has been replaced by a young man in the lighted bathhouse, and has thus lost his hold over the mistress to another.
Cheever ends his piece with an image of immense loss. When Merrill finally arrives home, he finds that “the house was locked…and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.” He reaches the end of the Lucinda River only to realize that he is all alone, abandoned by both wife and mistress: his pursuit for all that he wanted in the world has left him with nothing. Such is the inevitable denouement of the homo economicus who is subsumed by the illusion of excess: Merrill loses everything. His materialistic pursuit leaves him bereft of the status, connection, and companionship that he took for granted, transforming him into the embodiment of loss within modernity’s “culture of abundance.”
In the second essay in this series, I will turn to consider this “culture of abundance” in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” (1930).
Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib is a student of creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He has a poem published in Men Matters Online Journal under the pen name Ratu Yousei.