Word: cheevers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the magazines, entirely dependent on the energies and whims of their editors, tended to be nomadic. Secession, for example, moved in succeeding editions from Vienna to Berlin to the Tirol to Florence, finally folded in New York City in 1924. Story, which published the first works of Cheever, Capote, Salinger and Mailer, shifted from Vienna to Majorca to Paris to New York, where it, too, folded...
...those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, " 'I drank too much last night.' " So begins John Cheever's short story The Swimmer and this picture based...
...make a novel-sized picture, Cheever's skeletal story had to be fleshed out. Scenarist Eleanor Perry and her director-husband Frank (who made David and Lisa) have done so by turning the gothic into the baroque. A little boy cannot be a symbol of innocence by himself; he must be playing a pipe like Pan. To give Merrill's mental anguish an exterior, a vanilla-colored, bikini-clad girl companion is added. To increase the audience's anguish, Merrill is made to out his hand on her stomach and quote The Song of Solomon: "Thy belly...
There are a few reflections of the acrid, desolate quality in Cheever's original-notably when Merrill is maligned by a series of well-cast bit actors playing the tradespeople and servants he once abused. But, like its main character, the project at bottom is a parody of its essential self. "When you see The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?" ask the ads. The chances are that the viewer will talk to himself during the long, embellished stretches that, sadly, make up most of the film...
...claimed for his own since he made his first appearance as a New Yorker short-story writer 15 years ago. In his own words, he is "kind of elegiacally concerned with the Protestant middle class." Among modern American writers, only John Cheever shares Updike's sense of accumulated loss, his feeling that the national past contained a wholeness and an essential goodness that have now evaporated. Even John O'Hara, an acknowledged social historian, makes no plea for the special virtues of the past. For other novelists, the present may be a disaster, but there is no indication...