CLASSIC STORIES, STORY 5:

JOHN CHEEVER’S THE SWIMMER

 

While submissions are open for the GBP Short Story Prize 2016/17 we'll be posting some classic short stories for our friends and entrants to access freely (please follow the links at the end of the post).

 

This week Eloise Millar – co-director of Galley Beggar Press and one of this year’s judges for the GBP Prize – has suggested John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’.

 

First published in the New Yorker in 1964, Cheever started off writing ‘The Swimmer’ as a novel, later cutting the 150 pages of the draft he had down to a mere eleven pages. Since then, 'The Swimmer' has become widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest short stories - although Cheever said that the writing of it came at a cost.

 

“I felt cold and dark for some time after I wrote that story,”he said. “It was terribly difficult to write… Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn’t a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables.”

 

It's also the favourite story of another great writer, Michael Chabon: “'The Swimmer' is a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow. It starts out, on a perfect summer morning, as the record of a splendid exploit — Neddy Merrill’s quest to swim the eight miles from the house of his friends, the Westerhazys, to his own, via the swimming pools of fashionable Shady Hill — and ends up as a kind of ghost story, with night and autumn coming on, in a thunderstorm, at the door to a haunted house. … Cheever’s mastery lies in the handling of Neddy’s gradual, devastating progress from boundless optimism to bottomless despair, from summer to fall, from swimming pool to swimming pool, no two alike, each described with Cheever’s lyrical precision.”

 

‘The Swimmer’ is freely available to read on the University of Warwick’s web site, here.

 

And there are two audio recordings – one by John Cheever himself, and a reading (and discussion of the story) by Anne Enright on the New Yorker podcast.

 

For John Cheever reading ‘The Swimmer’, click here.

 

For Anne Enright reading ‘The Swimmer’, click here.

 

Finally, to read more about this year's GBP Short Story Prize and how to enter, head here.