Coming Home: A Look at John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

I remember reading John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer” in high school and being somewhat amused by its unlikely plot, a hero who seemed to love a glass of gin, and its twist ending. But rereading it as an adult, I can see that it is undoubtedly a story about the nature of alcoholism. In fact, it feels like a cry for help from Cheever. The story could aptly be called “The Drinker.” Whether he was aware of it or not, artistically Cheever drew a startlingly accurate portrayal of the disease on a number of levels. I think he wrestled with drinking for so long (he finally got sober at age 55) that he understood, in a painfully confessional way, the nature of his malady. What he lacked was the gift of surrender.

Critics have pointed out the mythic parallels of “The Swimmer” to The Odyssey. At their core, both stories involve men who are trying to get home. Cheever’s story turns Homer’s adventure on its head in a kind of “mock-epic,” with the hero, Ned, swimming his way home from a friend’s house by way of the pools of the local residents. Along the way he drinks with various people, none of whom he has a relationship with any substance, and who have a better understanding of his state of being than he does. The story gives a microcosmic portrait of the decline of the alcoholic. At its start, Ned is high in spirits, feels youthful and strong. The air is electric, it is a beautiful summer day, and he feels confident in his pilgrimage across town.

And then, at the halfway point in Ned’s adventure, Cheever drops the ominous three-word sentence, “It would storm.” Cheever knew that there was only one direction in which things could go for his hero and it is down. He also seemed to know that the alcoholic, at some point during his drinking, crosses a threshold which he cannot undo: “He could not go back… in the space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that made his return impossible.” A common analogy used to describe this phenomenon is that once a cucumber becomes a pickle, it can never be a cucumber again.

The other element of alcoholism in Cheever’s story is denial. At one point, Ned comes across a neighbor-friend, who says to him, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.” To which he replies, “My misfortunes? I don’t know what you mean.” She continues, “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house, and that your poor children…” He cuts her off abruptly, saying, “I don’t recall having sold the house, and the girls are at home.”

This level of denial is so deep that it gives the story a kind of surreal, almost ghost-like quality. It is not just the denial of how bad the alcoholic’s situation is, or that he has a problem with drinking in the first place. It is not a matter of degree; it is a complete departure from reality, as if the crucial and painful information that Ned needs in order to move closer to surrender is simply being blocked by his mind. In this way Cheever highlights to great effect how deep the denial of an alcoholic goes.

Cheever also seemed to understand the progressive nature of his disease. As the story unfolds, things only get worse for Ned. It is the first time in his life that “he ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered.” The first three adjectives in that list could apply to many, but it is the last that is one of the distinguishing qualities of alcoholism. The alcoholic who has not surrendered fights and fights and fights against a force so powerful that he will never win, and it leaves him in a state of utter bewilderment. How could my strength, my resilience, my intellect fail against this thing, this annoyance? he thinks. And he is almost forced to continue swimming the alcoholic river until he is lifted from its grip by an act of grace.

Thus Ned arrives home, a place usually associated with warmth, love, and connection, and finds the opposite. “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.” This final image of the story is hauntingly appropriate for the plight of the alcoholic: he is cut off from God, himself, and the people around him. He is thoroughly alone. He is desperate for connection, and what he wants more than anything is to go home.

When an alcoholic surrenders, a great miracle happens, something that goes against the nature of things. Somewhere deep inside his heart, he whispers a tiny prayer asking for help. And it is precisely at that moment that God enters his life. It is a moment Cheever himself would experience 10 years after writing “The Swimmer.” I like to think that Ned, pulling on the rusty doorknob of his family’s home, now a place of empty shadows, is right on the verge of reaching that point. But the story ends there. And it unfortunately is the end of the story for many, many alcoholics. But those who are graced with surrender find a house with the lights on, and people inside, and hear the familiar sounds of cheerfulness and laughter.

 

Sexual Desire in Milton & Rossetti: an excerpt

Consider the following lines, which describe Milton-as-Satan-as-serpent, rising to the task of seducing Eve, which is about to begin:

So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed
In serpent, inmate bad, and toward Eve
Addressed his way not with indented wave
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze. His head
Crested aloft and carbuncle his eyes
With burnished neck of verdant gold erect (IX: 210)

In true Miltonic fashion, the passage dramatizes the phallus attaining a full erection. The snake, normally subject to being “prone on the ground,” defies this limitation and achieves the stance of “full mast,” the skin of the phallus growing from its “base of rising folds” (IX: 210). Milton, then, eroticizes the seduction of Eve from the outset in the most literal and explicit way possible, by coming to full sexual arousal in front of his own subject of desire, Eve–yet also his readers. Eve unknowingly enters into a discourse with a fully erect phallus, and its power over her is one with which she is not yet familiar. Perhaps Rossetti recognized this power and found it stimulating, both sexually and intellectually.

For what does the actual image of desire look like? Desire as an abstract principle hovers beyond the grasp of the material, but expresses itself in the body. As Sartre wrote, desire is “consciousness making itself body” (qtd. in Butler, 140). Milton-as-Satan-as-serpent experiences the “hysteria” of unrealized desire, manifested in the erect phallus of the snake as it approaches Eve, a visual hypostatization. Although he succeeds in getting Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, a trespass against a specific order from both her maker and partner, what actually happens is a transference of desire. As Rossetti herself wrote, Eve “receives as part of her sentence ‘desire’: the assigned object of her desire being such that satisfaction must depend not on herself but on one stronger than she, who might grant or deny” (qtd. in D’Amico, 175). In other words, Rossetti sees Eve’s punishment not as the shame that comes from the disobedience, nor the banishment from Eden, but as a dependence on Adam for sexual gratification. Milton, the great liberator, has put his Eve in chains, and Rossetti sets out to unshackle her.

This transference of desire happens between Satan/Eve and Eve/Adam, as well as the goblins/Laura and Laura/Lizzie, but it is also happening within the texts themselves, across 200 years, between Milton/Rossetti. Rossetti learns from Milton how to release the waterfall of unrealized desire through her work, and becomes liberated as a result. In this reading, then, it is not equality or liberty per se that each writer seeks, but freedom from desire.

Satan describes to Eve his experience of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in sensual detail, but prior to this he does something very interesting: he describes the feeling he had before tasting the fruit, i.e. his desire. In his story he comes upon a tree “loaden with fruit of fairest colors mixed, / Ruddy and gold.” This appeals to his visual sense. Then “a savory odor” blows from the tree’s branches, which pleases his sense of smell, more than milk dripping from the teats “Unsucked of lamb or kid that tend their play.” The effect of the stimulation of the senses is, of course, desire: “To satisfy the sharp desire I had / Of tasting those fair apples I resolved / Not to defer. Hunger and thirst at once, / Powerful persuaders, quickened by the scent / Of that alluring fruit, urged me so keen.” He uses the word “sharp” to describe his desire, a word that suggests pain. Hence, desire left unsatisfied is a kind of torture, the Petrarchan unrequited lover. Satan then brilliantly describes this desire elicited in the beasts that Eve has come to know, demonstrating that it is not only he who experiences this craving: “Round the tree / All other beasts that saw with like desire / Longing and envying stood but could not reach.” These lines point directly to Girard’s theory of mimetic desire: “There is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behavior that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation” (Girard, 12). Satan shows that his desire his imitated by the beasts, and this anticipates how it will be imitated by Eve as well. But the beasts cannot reach the fruit, and now it becomes an exclusive pleasure, something all may desire but only few may have. Finally, he describes the tasting itself: “to pluck and eat my fill / I spared not, for such pleasure till that hour / At feed or fountain never had I found” (IX: 212-213).

Because Satan already has knowledge of good and evil, we can deduce that the fruit most likely had no effect on him whatsoever, which means his brilliant descriptions are the work of artistry, not empirical evidence. In fact, it is the desire he has for Eve that he uses to describe his fictional account of eating the fruit. In an attempt to rid himself of his unfulfilled desire, he creates the experience of sensual pleasure in a space where none exists for him. Tasting of the fruit, then, becomes symbolic for tasting of Eve. This is reinforced by his description of what happens after eating the fruit: his mind is opened, he sees “all things visible in heav’n / Or earth or middle” and Eve is revealed to him as the ultimate beauty, of which there is “no fair to thine / Equivalent or second” (IX: 213). In other words, she is the ultimate object of desire. What does this reveal? Satan creates a story whereby his unfulfilled desire becomes fulfilled, and it is done in guise. Could this be precisely what Milton has done by writing Paradise Lost?

Perhaps Rossetti recognized this and attempted the same in “Goblin Market,” albeit with a few major differences. Rossetti opens her poem with a Miltonesque categorical, fetishized description of the fruit for sale at the goblin market, filled with sensuousness and eliciting the same kind of response as Satan’s description. Milton’s simple apple has suddenly exploded: in Rossetti’s world we have “plump unpeck’d cherries” (which Victor Mendoza cites as mimicking “the movement of the mouth in taking a bit into a large, plump fruit”); “wild free-born cranberries…bright-fire-like barberries, / figs to fill your mouth…sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (922, 1). With this opening Rossetti broadens the spectrum of alluring and tempting fruit from Milton’s single apple, because her poem is partly about sexual indulgence. She follows Milton’s lead by writing in a self-stimulating way, not only fetishistic but also eroticized to the point that satisfaction becomes unavoidable. For Laura, it is a question of whether she will buy or not, but the reader cannot avoid experiencing pleasure simply by reading the poem–because of the language used and the images that language creates in the reader’s mind, hence the odd phrasing “sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (1). The act of reading the poem itself is a tri-fold experience of pleasure: verbal, audial, and visual.

Laura, like Eve, is curious. She chooses “to linger / Wondering at each merchant man” (2). Rossetti, like Milton, allows her subject to be human, to choose wonder and curiosity despite warnings against it, and as a result both Laura and Eve suffer negative consequences. However, both experience a drug-like “high” followed by a crash. Eve “greedily…ingorged without restraint,” and is “hightened as with wine, jocond and boon.” A curious thing then happens to Eve. In a Shakespearian-like soliloquy, her mind newly opened, she begins to wonder about Adam and whether she can “render [herself] more equal” and even be “superior,” a thing she describes ironically as “not undesirable.” This is where Eve’s troubles begin, and it is where Rossetti, in a move much like Lizzie makes for Laura, steps in to save her (IX: 218-219).

The major consequence of eating the forbidden fruit for both Eve and Laura is that their desire begets more desire. However, the major difference is that, for Milton, this desire is centered in the mind; for Rossetti, it is centered in the body. After Adam scorns Eve, calls her “deflowered” and criticizes her decision, a strange thing happens. Suddenly he changes to a “calm mood” and says that Eve’s sin is “perhaps…not so hainous.” What is actually happening is another transference of desire. Adam cannot bear that Eve has tasted of something divine, something foreign, something blissful, without him. She has singularly experienced a drug-like high, and he arguably cannot allow her that sort of autonomy. Thus he tastes of the fruit as well, another incidence of mimetic desire. Now he and Eve together experience an intense, joint high: “As with new wine intoxicated both, / They swam in mirth, and fancy that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings.” Adam’s mind is then opened, and his initial thoughts are lustful ones towards Eve, making a harlot out of her. He says, “Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained…now let us play.” Adam claims that Eve has never looked so beautiful and Eve’s eye “darted contagious fire.” The fire of lust is transferred from Satan to Eve to Adam, and when Eve and Adam act on this lust, it is a sexual indulgence that neither has known till now: Adam takes Eve to a bed of flowers where “they their fill of Love and love’s disport / took largely, of their mutual gilt the seal, / the solace of their sin, till dewy sleep / Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play” (IX: 222, 225).

Milton cannot allow his subjects to indulge in sexual desire without its punishment looming over them, even within the same sentence. In language suggestive of a drug that is smoked, Milton writes that the “force of that fallacious Fruit, / that with exhilarating vapour…was now exhaled,” and the lovers see “their minds / how darkened.” They are left naked and ashamed. Why does Milton place the Biblical scene of Adam and Eve discovering their nakedness and feeling ashamed immediately after indulging in lustful sex? In Genesis, the awareness comes directly after eating of the fruit, but Milton expands the episode and carefully places the sexual act in between.

This is precisely the moment where Rossetti steps in. There is no shame in Rossetti’s world. Laura is allowed to freely choose to eat the fruit, or to engage sexually with the goblin men, the price being a lock of her hair, or her virginity. Rossetti writes that “She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more,” (5) the repetition of which suggests oral sex. Like Eve, Laura tastes a fruit that is “sweeter than honey from the rock, / Stronger than man-rejoicing wine” (note the masculine adjective here) (4). She indulges just as Eve does, but the suggestion here is that Rossetti pushes Milton’s erotic context as far as possible. The guise of Satan’s lascivious alluring disappears, and there is no mistaking that Laura is essentially whoring herself (a transactional exchange with the goblin men) with the empowering distinction that she is enjoying it. As Mendoza puts it, “Laura gains in her transactions with the goblins not only desire…but concomitant knowledge: knowledge of sexual pleasure–that is, what it means to “Come” by “buying” (923).

Kathleen Vejvoda points out that as a volunteer at a refuge for “fallen women” (prostitutes), Rossetti had access to the stories (and the consequences) that accompany that lifestyle, resulting in an “intense preoccupation with the temptations of the material world, which at once fascinated and terrified her” (558). Rossetti shared this infatuation and anxiety with Milton. Like Milton, she does not allow her subject to indulge freely without consequence, and though shame is absent, Laura’s consequences are threefold: physical pain; unfulfilled desire/craving that takes on the symptoms of withdrawal; and the mimetic transfer of her desire onto Lizzie, who attempts to rescue her sister.

With the first consequence, Rossetti pushes the boundary of Laura’s sexual pleasure until it reaches the point of pain: “She suck’d until her lips were sore” (4). This tipping point of pleasure beyond mere satisfaction is what Lacan coined jouissance, a word that Mendoza uses throughout his essay and which resists translation. In a 1966 lecture Lacan stated, “Unquestionably, there is jouissance at the level at which pain begins to appear, and we know that it is only at this level of pain that a whole dimension of the organism, which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced” (qtd. in Braunstein, 103). A sensation beyond pleasure: this is what Laura experiences. Rossetti, like Milton, allows her own text–a safe place–to become the space in which she can do this. It gives her the agency she needs to experience the release of her own yearning, her own sexual fantasies.

Laura’s second consequence takes the shape of addiction and withdrawal. Immediately she says her “mouth waters still” and plans to buy more fruit the next evening (4). Shelley O’Reilly reminds us that there is “an aspect of the poem which is often overlooked: Laura’s physical addiction to the fruit and her personally cataclysmic, but permanent, recovery from this addiction” (108). If Laura’s unfulfilled desire resembles Satan’s state of “hysteria,” then Rossetti again pushes this further by putting her into a state of addiction. The extreme height of her pleasure was such that it produced a devastating low, but again, this consequence is still centered in the body. Eve’s shame is a result of her mind being opened. Laura’s physical state (her sexuality) has been opened, thus her torment remains there. After returning to the site of her original purchase, Laura, her body filled with desire “like a leaping flame,” finds that the goblin men are no longer there, or rather that she cannot see or hear them, “gone deaf and blind, / Her tree of life droop’d from the root” though her sister can. The fall can only happen once. Yet her body aches in its “passionate yearning,” and she trudges home, “her pitcher dripping all the way.” (8) Rossetti’s use of the word “pitcher” here is sexual, and it proves that Laura’s desire is primarily sexual in nature. The word “pitcher” was a slang term for female genitalia in the 17th to mid-18th century, and a “pitcher bawd” was a term for a worn-out prostitute reduced to running errands in a bar (Partridge 892). A “dripping pitcher” suggests the mouth-watering desire to consume more fruit, an indulgence in consuming or drinking, and a highly-stimulated body that is ready for sexual activity.

After this failed attempt at re-experiencing her initial sexual high, Laura grows sick and her sister comforts her. In a complete rejection of Milton’s episode of shamefulness immediately following the act of sex, Rossetti shows us the power of human compassion, solidarity, and love. Lizzie does not chastise her sister for eating of the fruit. In fact, there is no question at all of her continued love and acceptance, and Rossetti’s most beautiful passage follows, where the two sisters, in a spiritual alteration of Adam and Eve’s one-flesh union, become one body: “Like two pigeons in one nest / Folded in each other’s wings…Like two blossoms on one stem…Cheek to cheek and breast to breast / Lock’d together in one nest” (5-7). The language becomes spiritual in addition to sexual.

Where Milton focuses on division, separation, disjunction, and conflict between his pair, Rossetti stresses unity, imbrication, and forgiveness. The redemptive process for Milton feels long and arduous in comparison to Rossetti’s, which happens immediately upon Laura’s return (much like the parable of the Prodigal Son), where she is physically embraced by her sister. Yet in Rossetti’s world, as in Milton’s, redemption happens through the intervention of another person, a model that is faithful to Christ’s teaching. For Milton, humans need the Son, and Adam needs Eve to be redeemed. For Rossetti, Laura needs her sister, Lizzie, and this redemptive act is the climax of the poem. As such it produces another state of jouissance that surpasses Laura’s initial experience.

Rossetti writes that Lizzie “could not bear / To watch her sister’s cankerous care / Yet not to share.” The straightforward interpretation of these lines are that Lizzie is pained by seeing her sister in pain, and by the fact that she cannot “share” the weight of her pain. But underneath this reading is another possible meaning: the key word “share” might suggest that Lizzie is also pained by her own exclusion from Laura’s intense sexual experience. Recall that Laura tells her sister, “You cannot think what figs / My teeth have met in.” In ancient Greece the fig was a euphemism for the vagina. Might this have stimulated Lizzie’s curiosity the same way Adam’s was? We read that Lizzie “Long’d to buy fruit to comfort [Laura], / But fear’d to pay too dear.” Could this be Rossetti’s own infatuation with temptation, “which at once fascinated and terrified her”? Certainly desire and anxiety co-exist for Lizzie, but is her role as saviour simply a guise to allow her to explore this dark territory? Can she be both saviour and prostitute? (7-8)

Rossetti uses an extended caesura to build suspense as Lizzie approaches the goblin men, and we are told that “they spied her peeping.” This mirroring effect suggests an assimilation: just as the goblins oogle her sexually, Lizzie, too, is “peeping” on them, a word that suggests sexual curiosity and voyeurism. The “men” become animalistic–they are compared to cats, rats, snails, pigeons, fishes–and they touch her by hugging, squeezing, kissing, caressing. Rossetti begins to pull up Milton’s sexual exploration by the roots; she has entered a dark and mysterious place. She allows the experience of the ominous goblin men to be titillating. But is this simply part of the temptation, which Lizzie will all the more heroically resist?