If it wasn’t for my friend Sara, I might never have discovered this gem of a writer.
Sara loaned me Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin. Deacon’s journey was inspired by Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’. I wasn’t that fussed about Waterlog but was instantly captivated by the idea behind ‘The Swimmer’, which is how, in accordance with the law of unintended consequences, I came to own Cheever’s Collected Stories.
‘The Swimmer’, published in The New Yorker in 1964, is Cheever’s most famous story, probably because it was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster in 1968 (although it seems Cheever didn’t like the film). It concerns Neddy Merrill, an affluent suburbanite who decides to swim home from a friend’s house across the county via a series of friends’ swimming pools. As he progresses through the pools, though, Neddy begins to twig that something is not right.
But Collected Stories is certainly no one-trick pony. If nothing else, you get a lot of bang for your buck. The collection is a whopping 891 pages long and offers sixty-one stories in broadly chronological order, starting with ‘Goodbye, My Brother’, originally published in The New Yorker in 1951 – and boasting the memorable closing line “I watched the naked women walk out of the sea” – and finishing with ‘The Jewels of the Cabots’ (1971), apparently rejected by The New Yorker before being published in Playboy. Collected Stories is Cheever’s life’s work, in effect; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for it in 1979.
In the preface to the collection, Cheever states his tales “seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world […] when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” Actually, what strikes me about the stories I’ve read is just how much they still resonate. Neddy Merrill’s swimming-pool world might be a million miles from mine, but at heart ‘The Swimmer’ is about the irreversibility of human actions; how we can lose ourselves without even realising.
Collected Stories is like a big box of chocolates: lots of variety but best not gobbled in a single sitting. I’m still dipping in and out, selecting a story here and a story there – and there’s enough here to keep me going well into 2026, I think – but this close to Christmas I simply had to read (and share) ‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,’ a story originally published in The New Yorker on Christmas Eve 1949.
Charlie is single and lives alone in a rented room. On Christmas Day he gets up at 6 am to go to his job as a lift attendant in an up-market New York apartment building. When he arrives he learns he won’t even get a lunch-break because the colleague who covers for him has called in sick.
Charlie falls to brooding about the difference between his life and the lives of the wealthy people who live in the apartments. Whenever any of the residents use the lift and wish him a Merry Christmas, he tells them his hard-luck story, sometimes even inventing children and a crippled wife. As a result Charlie is inundated with food, drink, and presents for himself and his fictional family. Instead of seeing himself as “a prisoner, confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage” he now regards his job as “cruising up and down through hundreds of feet of perilous space”. This (booze-fuelled) transformation, though, comes with a price. ‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor’ is a subversive, darkly-funny fable about generosity, indulgence, the power of giving – and the law of unintended consequences.
Which brings me right back where I started.
Merry Christmas, Everyone!
Rating: *** Highly recommended
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