1In 1956, some two months short of his forty-fourth birthday, John Cheever published a story entitled “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” in The New Yorker, the magazine to which he contributed all his working life. The story’s narrator, eight years Cheever’s junior, describes his wife as “a woman enjoying herself in a country that is prosperous and young.” In his introduction to A Vision of the World, a 2021 selection of Cheever’s stories, Julian Barnes links the above description to “Cheever’s world [being] pitched … mainly in the Truman and Eisenhower years, before the Sixties took hold, when American expansionism and power seemed uncomplicated, and consumerism not just exciting, but in a way almost pure.” While the larger context of the postwar United States is not without importance to the present article, what I wish to focus on is youth, not so much that of mid-twentieth-century America, but rather eternal youth and the means of taming time which the protagonists of two Cheever stories rather desperately pursue. I propose to read “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer,” published in 1953 and 1964, respectively, in light of the Dorian Gray syndrome, the modern anti-aging movement and the concept of successful aging.
2Reflecting on the literary provenance of the names of various diseases and citing the Dorian Gray syndrome, Fergus Shanahan notes that “[s]ince doctors and writers each deal in stories of human experience, it is not surprising that many disorders, mostly psychological, have been inspired by figures in popular literature,” with “[m]any literary-inspired labels refer[ring] to a behaviour or psychological profile, and not necessarily to a pathological disorder.” In this essay, I intend to dig deeply into the connection between medicine and fiction, and close-read literary texts—in this case the two short stories by Cheever—as surprisingly accurate prefigurations of certain sociocultural tendencies and a psychomedical condition later identified by experts. I argue that decades after Wilde’s only novel was published and decades before the Dorian Gray syndrome was first defined, Cheever depicted—obviously without naming it—the condition in question in the fictions I am concerned with in this article. The phenomenon itself is a hallmark of our times: the very name of the syndrome “might well summarise the modern-day obsession with youthful appearance” (Shanahan). As Robert B. Taylor observes, “Today we sometimes see evidence of the Dorian Gray syndrome in aging movie stars and athletes who employ cosmetic procedures or performance-enhancing drugs in an effort to avoid aging” (138). In other words, the syndrome is disquietingly topical.
3In terms of both their dates of publication and the time in which they are set, the Cheever short stories I wish to explore belong to the same period. They both feature middle-class male protagonists who live in the American suburbs and are middle-aged or on the threshold of middle age, by mid-twentieth-century or twenty-first-century standards, respectively. Tormented by a longing for their lost youth, attractiveness, fitness, joie de vivre and something yet more elusive, Cheever’s characters embark on grotesque, hyperbolic and chimerical attempts to stop or even reverse time by achieving backbreaking athletic feats. In doing so, they exemplify the Dorian Gray and Peter Pan syndromes, narcissism and immaturity. Most importantly, however, they reveal modern humans’ existential drama, which translates into tragicomic, pathetic and inevitably unsuccessful endeavors to tame time.
4As a result of Cheever’s stories being filtered through the psychomedical theories of the Dorian Gray syndrome and set against the modern background of the anti-aging movement, new, unexpected meanings are uncovered and new interpretational vistas opened up. Reading “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer” through the lens of bioethical, philosophical and sociological considerations fully reveals the deeper, complex dimensions of Cheever’s work, which may go unnoticed at first glance. In short, such an examination of his prose helps to elucidate it at the levels of both content and form, in particular when it comes to the way the problematics of age, aging and time are treated in it.
5The Dorian Gray syndrome is a turn-of-the-century phenomenon. It is also in the early twenty-first century that the anti-aging movement gained momentum and the now-popular concept of successful aging gained currency: the term famously appeared in the title of a 1998 book by John Wallis Rowe and Robert Kahn, presently seen as a landmark work. “[O]ne of gerontology’s most successful ideas,” it is, however, hardly new or even modern, since “historical traces of it can be found in Renaissance texts” (Katz and Calasanti 1). “[T]he modern gerontological idea emerged in the 1950s and was later crystallized in the work of John Rowe and Robert Kahn” (1). “[A]n early formulation of successful aging,” which we owe to Robert Havighurst, dates from the early 1960s (2), roughly the period which saw the publication of the two Cheever stories discussed here. Typically perceived as synonymous with modernity, the anti-aging movement is anything but a recent invention. As historian of medicine and aging Carole Haber reminds us,
The search for a fountain of youth is certainly not a new phenomenon and has persisted as views of aging have evolved. For hundreds of years, individuals have sought the means to retain youth and vitality. Generally, before the nineteenth century, this search was linked to the belief that old age was characterized by a significant decline in vital energy, which supplied the necessary vitality for growth in childhood and stability in middle age. By the time of senescence, however, the vital energy reserve was gone, leaving most individuals depleted and debilitated. Those able to maintain their vital energy, whether through diet, moderation, or simple good luck, were apt to experience a healthy and vital old age. (“Anti-Aging: Why Now?” 9)
6In “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer,” the American prose writer foregrounds preoccupations which are centuries-old and time-honored, but tend to be associated with modernity in the popular consciousness, a tendency justified by the spectacular developments in science and technology—including medical science and medical technology—the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw. Simply put, in the two stories in question, Cheever, who died in 1982, at once anticipates a future he will not live to see and comments on a problematics which are by no means unprecedented and which, philosophically speaking, lie at the heart of human existence because they concern life and death, the passage of time and eternity, and as such are universal.
7While the notion of battling against aging may prima facie seem optimistic and invigorating, the realities are in fact more complex. Haber notes that, disturbingly, the movement as we know it, with its view of aging as “a pathological illness to be eliminated by exercise, diet, plastic surgery, and hormonal injections” and its overall “antagonism to conceptions of aging as decline and decay” actually “reflect[s] well-worn ideas and the often-enunciated hopes of the past,” its “hopes and concerns … hav[ing] clear precedents that in fact illustrate some of the movement’s most troubling limitations” (“Anti-Aging: Why Now?” 9). At a basic level, the two sides of the coin are pointed out by experts:
On one hand, new diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive options, including technological developments (such as predictive testing, ambient assisted living, and monitoring technologies)—as well as legal tools, such as advance healthcare directives and living wills—encourage the idea of self-determined and ‘successful’ ageing that can be prudently modeled and actively shaped. On the other hand, dealing with old age and growing populations of elderly people with chronic diseases, frailty, and dementia is often perceived as a serious problem and an increasing challenge to families, care providers, and social security systems. (Schweda et al. 1)
8At a subtler level, Haber argues that, inclined to perceive aging in economic as well as medical and scientific terms, the contemporary incarnation of the movement may have negative implications because by presenting old age as something one should combat at all costs, it contributes to its demonization, devaluation and marginalization. In doing so, it resembles its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century versions rather than much earlier approaches to the issue (“Anti-Aging Medicine” B515-B522). Importantly, the two Cheever stories examined here date from and are set in the mid-twentieth century, exactly halfway between the two negativity poles identified by Haber.
9Over a century after its publication, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s classic 1891 work, gave rise to a term coined by medical experts, the Dorian Gray syndrome: “in 2000, German psychotherapist Burkhard Brosig introduced the name of the novel’s lead character to psychopathology in a paper presented at a symposium on the male quest for an eternally young body” (Taylor 138). This psychosomatic condition is also classified as “a cultural and societal phenomenon characterized by extreme pride in one’s own appearance accompanied by difficulties coping with the aging process” (Trüeb and Lee 131). In other words, it consists in “the patient’s underlying wish to remain forever young” (Harth et all. 46), to keep their good looks and stay fit. “The name of the syndrome is taken from the title of a novel by Oscar Wilde, in which the protagonist, Dorian Gray, sells his soul to the devil so that he will not have to experience growing old. The love of self, artificiality, and egocentrism of the narcissist are apparent” (46). Predictably, the nature of the condition is therefore elucidated in connection with the literary background of the clinical term.
10While this article deals with the Dorian Gray syndrome rather than the Dorian Gray novel, Wilde’s work remains an important and interesting point of reference, despite the numerous differences which distinguish it from Cheever’s fiction. In fact, the title “O Youth and Beauty!” points to what preoccupies Wilde in his legendary story of a stunning young man. As Jerusha McCormack remarks, “It is hard to say anything original about The Picture of Dorian Gray, largely because there is so little that is original in it. As if in two facing mirrors, the novel and its analogues seem to multiply towards a possible infinity, in a kind of self-perpetuating critical machine” (110). “Almost everyone knows the plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray; very few have read it. The tale flourishes as a modern myth while the book itself lies rotting in the attic,” the Irish scholar continues (111). Unsurprisingly, in their definition of the Dorian Gray syndrome, medical experts and psychotherapists focus on the essence of the novel’s plot and its basic symbolism, referencing a variation on a Faustian theme, an iconic tale of youth and beauty, the contrast between the inner and the outer, the body-soul dichotomy, egomania and ruthlessness, decadence and corruption as well as sin and eventual punishment. Inevitably, they allude to a story about the human obsession with the passage of time, coupled with a desperate but futile desire to prevent its ravages and made more acute by a sense of the timelessness of art as opposed to the fragility and brevity of life. By drawing on the largely archetypal narrative of a narcissistic and immoral man who has his portrait age in his place, the growing hideousness of the body depicted in the painting progressively reflecting the ugliness of the sitter’s soul and his vices, the experts in question concentrate on the detrimental or even disastrous consequences of a set of attitudes. The last-named include extreme self-centredness and, above all, the unreasonable and uncontrolled pursuit of ageless physical perfection which drives humans to act contra naturam.
11The title of the first of the Cheever stories I intend to discuss here contains a clichéd combination of two words frequently collocating in everyday language, for instance in the expression young and beautiful, which is more or less translingual. Magnified by the exclamatory form and tone of the titular phrase, the verbal amalgam may simply seem full of mock-pathos, humorous and ironic. Nevertheless, there is more to it than meets the eye—and the ear. Importantly, as far as the connection between youth and beauty is concerned, biological considerations intersect with social, cultural and aesthetic ones. Medical literature on the Dorian Gray syndrome draws on philosophical and sociocultural sources. In modern times, although “[b]eauty has been understood as an individual’s subjective appraisal of attractiveness that is influenced by cultural standards,” it is scientifically proven that “physical signs of youth and health [are] perceived as [universally] attractive” (Trüeb and Lee 132). Darwinism and evolutionary biology see such signs as “signals for fertility” and associate them with “reproductive advantage” (132). However, since “[l]ooking young may be more important than actually being young, and altering facial features in the direction of youth results in higher ratings of attractiveness” (132), the phenomenon is likely to be based on illusory criteria.
12Just as the seemingly trivial title of the 1953 story is in fact evocative of the complex problematics central to Cheever’s text, its initial paragraph encapsulates the protagonist’s frustrating situation and the curious way in which he deals with what frustrates him, an eventually fatal strategy he uses throughout the story until its tragic—or rather mock-tragic—finale, which the opening of “O Youth and Beauty!” prefigures as well:
At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, … Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living-room furniture. Trace and Cash moved the tables and the chairs, the sofas and the fire screen, the woodbox and the footstool; and when they had finished, you wouldn’t know the place. Then if the host had a revolver, he would be asked to produce it. Cash would take off his shoes and assume a starting crouch behind a sofa. Trace would fire the weapon out of an open window, and if you were new to the community and had not understood what the preparations were about, you would then realize that you were watching a hurdle race. Over the sofa went Cash, over the tables, over the fire screen and the woodbox. It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully. There was not a piece of furniture in Shady Hill that Cash could not take in his stride. The race ended with cheers, and presently the party would break up. (Cheever, A Vision)
13Soon enough, the reader learns that the main character, who used to be a “track star,” had put “his brilliant past” behind him. Significantly, Cash Bentley’s physical characteristics are brought to the fore: “He was still slender—he was careful about his weight—and he walked to the train in the morning with a light and vigorous step that marked him as an athlete. His hair was thin, and there were mornings when his eyes looked bloodshot, but this did not detract much from a charming quality of stubborn youthfulness” (Cheever, A Vision). The story’s title is hardly misleading: in Cheever’s world, as in the world at large, youth is beauty and beauty is youth; looking young and fit is tantamount to being perceived as attractive. What makes Cash attractive in his own eyes—and, at first glance, in the narrator’s too—is not so much his handsomeness as his physical fitness—namely, his slim figure and his agility—and the fact that he manages to camouflage his real age.
14Nevertheless, the seemingly casual and innocent but skillful way in which Cheever’s deceptively simple and minimalist description intersperses the positive features of Cash’s appearance with the more “compromising” details, such as his thinning hair and bloodshot eyes, which are ironically said “not [to] detract much,” creates tension which lies at the crux of the protagonist’s drama and to which humankind in general and modern society and culture in particular are no strangers. Cash may be sporty and energetic and his appearance may belie his age, but his is clearly a case of “looking young” rather than “actually being young.” Moreover, the very beginning of the story makes it obvious that he has not in fact moved on and that his past or, to be more precise, his lost youth is something he cannot and would not let go of. “Stubborn youthfulness” may be “a charming quality” and the phrase may sound charming as well, but it also suggests Bentley’s relentlessness and the self-destructive tendencies it entails. The adjective charming and the adverb gracefully, both ironic in this context, connote lightness and effortlessness which are in marked contrast with the strain the main character puts on himself and with the ultimately tragic dimension of his existence.
15Originally, the connection between youth and beauty was by no means straightforward and simplistic. “[T]he Koine Greek word for beautiful was hōraios, an adjective etymologically coming from the word hōra, meaning ‘hour.’ In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with ‘being of one’s hour’” (Trüeb and Lee 131). In more practical and illustrative terms, by ancient Greek standards, “a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young being trying to appear older or an older being trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful” (132). From the onset of the story, Cash tries his best not to “be of his hour”; in other words, he makes a point of ignoring his ripeness and, as a result, makes himself ugly, if not literally, then metaphorically. His refusal to be in harmony with the stage of his life he has reached makes him “ugly” because it makes him grotesque.
16To the readings of The Picture of Dorian Gray mentioned earlier, established and ingrained in the popular consciousness thanks to the literary work itself but also to its numerous—and not only cinematic—adaptations, scholars have added others, central to which are the cult of youth and beauty, sophistication and homoerotic overtones (Jackson 166; Bristow 195, 204; Cave 243). Regenia Gagnier’s analysis also builds on themes of desire, objectification and commodification. The Wilde scholar sees the novel as a statement on fin-de-siècle aestheticism but also on hedonistic and conspicuous consumption, revolving around a beautiful man who worships beauty and is himself objectified:
The consequence of Dorian’s insatiability, escalation of wants and formal equivalencing of all desires is, of course, his portrait, where the shame of his consumption is permanently, absolutely, recorded. At this price, he is given beauty without limit, the scarcest commodity in a mortal world, that is his sole source of value to others, who commodify and consume him in turn. (23)
17In a similar vein, McCormack argues that “[f]rom the moment he speaks his desire [to remain young and good-looking], Dorian himself becomes an artefact, neither alive nor dead,” desperately clinging to the artificial and abhorring the natural (113).
18Objectification and consumption may also be detected in Cheever’s tale of Cash Bentley’s ludicrous exploits. To begin with, objects themselves play a significant and symbolic role in the plot. The story’s opening cited earlier is replete with mentions of various pieces of furniture which the protagonist and his friend Trace have to move at innumerable parties to enable Cash’s race. The fragment is actually a catalogue of furnishings-turned-hurdles. Such a focus on everyday objects contributes to the overall literary effect, ironic, absurd and almost surreally humorous. The narrator’s marveling at “this man of forty [being able to] surmount so many obstacles so gracefully” and to face any “piece of furniture in Shady Hill” shows how irrational and pathetic the challenges taken up by Cash are. The fact that “[i]t was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone” further reinforces the farcical character of the excerpt and of the protagonist’s efforts. It becomes clear that Bentley’s feats have nothing to do with sport and recreation or even entertainment. It is not other people he competes with although it is other people’s approval, manifested in their “cheers,” that he needs and desires. In a sense, the race is truly a race because it is a certain idea of himself that Cash chases: someone young, healthy, active and immune to the passage of time. By mentally creating such an image of his own person—and hoping, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, it will materialize—the protagonist of “O Youth and Beauty!” objectifies himself, associating his value as a human being and his social desirability with qualities that people of a certain age are unlikely to possess in abundance and believing that he can only be of interest to others and worthy of their recognition if he proves he still has those attributes. The proliferation of objects in the story’s first paragraph serves the objectification of the main character’s fears, frustrations and beliefs but it is also used as a vehicle for Cash’s self-objectification. The last-named pushes him toward a path of self-destruction, foreshadowed by another object, the revolver.
19Not only is Cash Bentley’s story a catalogue of the furniture he jumps over at social gatherings, but it is also a catalogue of the one-man hurdle races he engages in. Eventually, one of them ends in his tripping over a chest, breaking his leg and being hospitalized. The accident upsets him on various levels, most predictably because he is afraid he may not be able to resume his hurdling exploits. Largely immobilized even after his hospitalization, the protagonist of “O Youth and Beauty!” sinks into what is probably a mild depression. Sullen and unsociable, Cash develops a further obsession with age and the passage of time as well as a grudge against both the young and the old. He resents the fact that the young doctor who first comes to his rescue addresses him in a way which emphasizes the age gap between them. When Cash does attend parties, which have lost their charm now that he can no longer impress the other guests with his athletic feats, “that poetic demonstration of his abiding youth” (Bailey 203), he spends his time scrutinizing the appearance of his friends and neighbors, people closer to his own age, searching for signs of their growing old. When he does recuperate after a few months, he jealously observes a group of boys and girls heading for a Saturday night party, unfavorably comparing their seemingly blissful and carefree lives with his and his wife Louise’s. Later that night, at the country club, which either is full of young people or seems so to him, Bentley avoids members of his own generation and makes an embarrassing spectacle of himself when he tries to dance with a much younger and clearly uninterested woman. An epilogue to this humiliating evening comes twice: first in public, in the shape of another hurdle race which Cash embarks on with Trace’s help and which leaves him drained; then at home, when he decides to repeat the stunt, this time with Louise as his only spectator. Not only is the second attempt unsuccessful, but it also leads to the protagonist’s accidental death at the hands of his wife, who does not know how to use a revolver.
20The fact that Cheever’s protagonist meets a tragic fate, albeit alleviated by the absurdity of the circumstances and the literary form in which they are conveyed, is in keeping with what is inscribed in both Wilde’s novel and the syndrome named after it. “[A] book [which] infected the public mind,” contributing to Wilde’s personal downfall (McCormack 114), The Picture of Dorian Gray is, according to McCormack, great and modern (112), and thus universal. Itself timeless, it is also concerned with humanity’s tragic longing for timelessness, which bears terrible fruit: “The prospect of eternal youth is as perennially fascinating in Dorian’s story as its renewal is in the myth of Faust; both attempts at transcending time are disastrous” (Cave 243). One of the “darker dimensions” of Wilde’s best-known work is “that the cult of youth requires its victims” (243). Similarly, experts concerned with the Dorian Gray syndrome identify dangers linked with a relentless and unreasonable pursuit of youth or at least youthfulness, everlasting good looks and physical fitness. The dangers in question are complex, nuanced and form part of the larger context of modern culture and mentality, which The Picture of Dorian Gray, despite being over a century old, foreshadows.
21A “body dysmorphic disorder,” the Dorian Gray syndrome entails several symptoms: it is “associated with narcissistic regression, sociophobia,” “[d]enial of the aging process,” “denial of personality-structuring maturation” as well as “[i]magined or minimal defects [coupled] with shame and social withdrawal,” which is “attendant on narcissistic regression” (Harth et al. 47). In addition to “a chronic state of narcissistic emptiness [which] may develop” as a result of the syndrome, “[d]epressive episodes and suicidal crisis are often observed” (Trüeb and Lee 131). Sufferers of the disorder are driven to measures such as “[l]ifestyle medications and interventions,” which “are sought to retard the natural aging process” (Harth et al. 47) and “are by definition users of cosmetic medical procedures and products in an attempt to preserve their youth, including hair growth restorers” (Trüeb and Lee 131). The recommended treatment includes psychotherapy (Harth et al. 47).
22Cash Bentley’s existential trajectory vividly illustrates the above-mentioned qualities, attitudes and feelings such as immaturity, narcissism, sociophobia and a sense of emptiness. Even his death, although not exactly suicidal, may be seen as self-induced because it results from his irrational, reckless and self-destructive conduct. While the protagonist of “O Youth and Beauty!” is hurt and irritated by Trace’s malicious comments on his thinning hair, which constitute a refrain in the story, he does not resort to medical procedures to combat the effects of aging, perhaps because they were not as readily available or fashionable in the mid-twentieth century as they are nowadays. Nevertheless, Cash does lean towards the essence of the Dorian Gray syndrome, namely a tendency to examine and find fault with one’s body. Moreover, he also does so with bodies other than his own. At the parties he attends after his accident, “[e]ven their [the other guests’] countenances discourage[] him, and, slumped in a chair, he c[an] regard their skin and their teeth narrowly, as if he were a much younger man” (Cheever, A Vision). Highly critical of his peers’ appearance, he turns to objectification again.
23It has been mentioned earlier that the main character in “O Youth and Beauty!” is uncomfortable with being “a ripe fruit.” Seasonal and vegetal metaphors reinforce the vanitative dimension of Cheever’s story. While the fiction gives us an overview of Cash Bentley’s adult life, it is in fact set over a period of several months: the accident which immobilizes and depresses him takes place in the spring while the last evening of his life is a summer one. The symbolic connotations are inescapable: if, as the story opens, Cash’s aspirations to remain fit and youthful if not young may seem vaguely realizable, at least in the near future, his fall constitutes a turning point which precipitates his ultimate downfall and actual death. The spring standing for the promise and possibility inscribed in youth, which is what Cash envies the young partygoers on the night of his death, the summer represents the ripeness or maturity Bentley fails to embrace or even reconcile himself to. For him, a spring which, paradoxically, forces him to hibernate and is no longer in tune with the phase of his existence he is in turns out to be gloomy and lifeless. In other words, suspended between a springy youth which is now in his past and a summery maturity he refuses to acknowledge, the protagonist remains stuck in an existential dead end. Left in limbo, loathing both young people—because he can no longer be one of them—and older ones—because he does not want to be one of them—he is saved by a demise which he probably does not wish for but which spares him the torment of growing really old and having to navigate maturity and, eventually, old age. In this sense, his untimely and unnatural death is symbolic because it constitutes the equivalent of his refusal to accept the natural order of things.
24The theme of vanitas vanitatum resonates particularly strongly when a despondent Cash starts developing idiosyncratic reactions to various sensual stimuli: “He did not himself understand what had happened. He, or everything around him, seemed subtly to have changed for the worse. Even his senses seemed to conspire to damage the ingenuous world that he had enjoyed for so many years” (Cheever, A Vision). Obviously, it is not the world around him that has mysteriously been altered: it is Bentley who has started projecting his fears and feelings onto it. The smell of unfresh meat, the touch of a cobweb, the sight of fading roses or of an aging prostitute in the street evoke abnormal disgust in the protagonist, who feels surrounded and almost assailed by decay. Again, it is mostly through objects to which he responds—or, in the case of the sex worker, an objectified and sexualized person, who provokes both distaste and desire in Cash – that the main character’s fear of the passage of time and his painful realization of the fragility of youth and the transience of life, which underlie his amplified sense of revulsion, are externalized. It is also with the help of objects that Bentley clings to his lost youth: his varsity sweater acts as a memento of better days, made glorious by his juvenile sporting accomplishments, but access to it and, metaphorically, to the idyllic past is barred by cobwebs, symbolic of the neglect that often accompanies the flow of time. Even Time, which Cash reads, becomes more than just an ordinary object or just a magazine, its name being suggestive of temporality, decay and death, especially when set against Life, read by his more grounded wife. “He dropped the roses into a wastebasket, but not before they had reminded him of the spoiled meat, the whore, and the spider web” (Cheever, A Vision): in the protagonist’s tortured mind, all those repugnant sensations and the objects which cause them form one depressing whole.
25As Cheever’s story draws to a close, it becomes explicit that Cash Bentley mourns his bygone youth and looks back on the prime of his life with nostalgia, regret and anger. Strikingly and symbolically, his frustration reaches its apogee on the night of his death:
It is a young people’s party. … There is nothing on their minds but the passing summer nights. Taxes and the elastic in underpants—all the unbeautiful facts of life that threaten to crush the breath out of Cash—have not touched a single figure in this garden. Then jealousy seizes him—such savage and bitter jealousy that he feels ill. He does not understand what separates him from these children in the garden next door. He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been adored and happy and full of animal spirits, and now he stands in a dark kitchen, deprived of his athletic prowess, his impetuousness, his good looks—of everything that means anything to him. He feels as if the figures in the next yard are the specters from some party in that past where all his tastes and desires lie, and from which he has been cruelly removed. He feels like a ghost of the summer evening. He is sick with longing. (Cheever, A Vision)
26The seemingly straightforward scene in which the embittered protagonist watches his young neighbors and which exemplifies his puerile wish, underscored by the use of the word children with reference to what is, after all, a group of adults, to be like them or, better, one of them may be inscribed in deeper philosophical reflections on aging. Distinguishing between “the physical, social, and cultural components of the ageing process,” Mark Schweda points out (“A season for everything” 15) the widening of the gap between one’s identity and one’s body, between who one feels one is and the physical changes brought about by the passage of time. In doing so, the German scholar draws on the Wilde novel central to the present article:
Oscar Wilde (2005) addressed the issue of ageing in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He made the paradoxical statement: ‘The tragedy of ageing is not based on the fact that one is old but rather that one is young’ (Wilde 2005, 182). What does Wilde imply here? One takes a personal identity and creates it in his or her active years. Developed and regularly affirmed, this identity comes into conflict with the beginning of the physical fragility that becomes increasingly dominant. This fragility is opposed to the self-chosen and developed form of one’s own existence, an identity created through youth and adulthood, appearing clearly as it becomes threatened by the bodily process of ageing. (“A season for everything” 15)
27The conflict between identity and physical fragility is what Cash Bentley experiences and fails to accept. The “separation” between him and the young partygoers represents the separation between an idea of himself he has cultivated since he was their age and the reality of middle age, with its trials and tribulations, compounded by a sense of no longer having a strong, reliable and attractive body.
28As Schweda further notes, it is not only the body that ages; so does one’s psyche: “The radicalization of the physically constituted basic condition of humans is accompanied by psychological ageing. It is connected to the finite temporality of life and the basic modifications of the life experience” (“A season for everything” 16). The young partygoers’ sense of time and their perspective on it are different from Bentley’s: while they have an existence in the present and the ephemerality of “the passing summer nights” does not worry them, the main character “has been” rather than “is.” For him, in other words, “The period of time during which life is experienced becomes ever longer, and yet the time left to live becomes ever shorter. Thus, the experience of becoming a body in the physical sense has an analogue in the process of becoming conscious of time in relation to the experience of consciousness” (16). While Cheever’s protagonist initially perceives the young people’s presence as a ghostly one, he is soon obliged to admit that he is in fact a ghost of his past, youthful self. His “increased awareness of time comes about through the disappearance of expected life and the increase of experienced life” (16). Schweda supports his reflections with a quotation from Schopenhauer:
From the standpoint of youth, life seems to stretch away into an endless future; from the standpoint of old age, to go back but a little way into the past; so that, at the beginning, life presents us with a picture in which the objects appear a great way off, as though we had reversed our telescope; while in the end everything seems so close. To see how short life is, a man must have grown old, that is to say, he must have lived long. (16)
29It is through a middle-aged man’s temporal telescope that Cash observes the boys and girls he envies, aware of both his physical and psychological aging. “In addition to becoming a body and becoming conscious of time, there is social and cultural ageing” (16), which results from losing your nearest and dearest and your peers: those who knew you when you were younger and knew a world which is gone and unfamiliar to the younger generation. While the protagonist of “O Youth and Beauty!” does not necessarily experience sociocultural aging, he feels he has lost his former self and has become disconnected from the world of the young. That the songs played at the young people’s party taking place shortly before Cash’s death all date from some twenty years before, that is from the time of his own youth, is paradoxically and painfully symbolic of the gap that separates him from the partygoers and from who he was when those songs were the vogue.
30The tension between youth and middle age, between being young and merely looking young or at least younger than one actually is is also central to the other Cheever story examined in the present article. Published over a decade after “O Youth and Beauty!” “The Swimmer,” whose title indicates another analogy between the two fictions, namely the role sport and outlandish athletic feats play in them, is in many ways a continuation of the 1953 story. At the same time, it is much more than a variation on the same theme. Deemed “Cheever’s greatest story” by his biographer, Blake Bailey (315) and, arguably, one of the greatest American short fictions too, “The Swimmer” is by no means inferior to “O Youth and Beauty!” It is one of Cheever’s most famous and most widely anthologized short stories, made into a remarkable 1968 film starring Burt Lancaster and referred to as “a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow” by Michael Chabon (qtd. in Bailey 318). The two works overlap, complement and illuminate each other: “The Swimmer” amplifies themes which appear in “O Youth and Beauty!” and are in tune with modern thought on aging and anti-aging.
31While in “The Swimmer” Cheever does not devote as much attention to youth, attractiveness or even—although the main character’s aim is to break a swimming record of sorts—physical fitness as he does in Cash Bentley’s story, the opening of the 1964 work echoes some passages from “O Youth and Beauty!” The protagonist is introduced as another Cheeverian character who finds himself in a liminal position, suspended between two age categories: one to which he no longer belongs but has some semblance of belonging to and another one to which he does belong without obviously appearing so. The contradiction between the two, which the eponymous hero seemingly reconciles, resurfaces in every sentence, nearly each successive phrase undermining a previous one:
Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his dining room. He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather. (Cheever, A Vision)
32And so Ned Merrill may have a slim, agile body, like Cash Bentley, and move as swiftly and gracefully as a gymnast as well as be endowed with a mischievous boyish charm, but the narrator leaves no doubt as to his being no longer really young. As in Cheever’s descriptions of Cash, the fragment loco citato acquires an ironic overtone when it is specified that Ned has more in common with a summer evening, which also sends us back to the last night of Bentley’s life, than with a summer morning or even afternoon. Ironic is also the mention of sporting attributes, unsurprising because the link between sport and youth or at least youthfulness is as inextricable here as it is in “O Youth and Beauty!” They are attributes the main character does not ostensibly need, which does not change the fact that “he lack[s]” them and, by implication, he may be deficient on other levels too. Word choice is similarly significant: Ned’s “slenderness” is “especial”—in other words, extraordinary—because it is that “of youth”; rather than calling the protagonist old, the narrator litotically refers to him as “far from young,” which understates and euphemizes the description but also paradoxically underscores the importance of youth as a point of reference and an absolute value; Ned “jog[s]” rather than runs, which obtrusively emphasizes his sportiness. The contrast between an “impression” of youth and actual youth poignantly concludes the description.
33The opening of “The Swimmer” is relevant to the subject of this article for another reason: it foregrounds the fact that Cheever took his inspiration from Greek mythology—the myth of Narcissus, to be precise. As we have seen, Cash Bentley’s narcissism is evident and, already announced in the title, with its focus on Narcissus’s key attributes, namely youth and beauty, it manifests itself in the protagonist’s preoccupation with his physical shape and appearance as well as his need for validation and admiration. As Bailey notes, “O Youth and Beauty!” was conceived as a tale of “the middle-aged suburban male as something out of Bulfinch—a Greek god, perhaps, or Narcissus crossing into hell” (202), and the analogies go further: “Cash, as Narcissus, is at length brought to hell when he breaks his leg and can no longer run the hurdle race”; ultimately, “[t]he [summer] night’s fragrant nostalgia moves Cash to resume, foolishly, his hurdle races—to take a last look at himself in the water, as it were—until his wife (accidentally or not) shoots him dead in midair” (203). By contrast, the 1964 story begins by explicitly casting Ned Merrill as a Narcissus-like figure, a mid-twentieth-century incarnation of the mythical hero. Bailey is not entirely right when he states that, the myth having been Cheever’s starting point when he embarked on a story about “fading youth,” “he’d [eventually] dispense with explicit parallels to Narcissus” (315). Sitting by one of the pools which will play a crucial role in the plot, Ned is depicted leaning over “the green water” and likely contemplating his own reflection in it. Like the ravishing youth in the ancient myth or rather his aging version, the protagonist of “The Swimmer” is equipped with a mirror, encouraging him to look at himself. Like Cash Bentley and Dorian Gray, whose portrait is his reflection in more than one way because, as Bristow puts it, Wilde’s novel “us[es] a picture to portray the young man’s unseen sins” (211), Ned is self-absorbed and his self-centeredness has disastrous consequences, which the pool-turned-looking glass in the initial scene signals. All four, Narcissus, Dorian, Cash and Ned, will eventually pay the ultimate price for being self-obsessed.
34In “O Youth and Beauty!” Cash’s self-obsession is illustrated and dissected throughout the story. Consequently, the obsession with hurdle races it leads to underscores the protagonist’s unhealthy fixation with eternal youth, everlasting good looks and sporting feats as a mode of stopping time. Ridiculous though Bentley’s stunts are, they are realistic and plausible enough. By contrast, the plot and ambience of “The Swimmer” are more surreal and oneiric. The tale’s core idea, simple but pregnant with meaning, is that of a man undertaking a pool-hopping project enabling him to traverse the county. By swimming in pools belonging to his friends, neighbors and a former lover, he hopes to eventually reach his family home. To quote Chabon again, despite its “mythic echoes,” “The Swimmer” “is always only the story of one bewildered man, approaching the end of his life, journeying homeward, in a pair of bathing trunks, across the countryside where he lost everything that ever meant something to him” (qtd. in Bailey 318). The reader no longer witnesses the protagonist’s excessive preoccupation with his own body and his youth having become a thing of the past is only subtly suggested by the narrator, first in the opening scene and later mostly by means of references to the weather and the cycle of the seasons. The plot follows Ned Merrill on his aquatic quest, which turns out to be an allegory of human life in general and a mid-twentieth-century middle-aged and middle-class American man’s life in particular.
35Ned Merrill may not be as preoccupied with and alarmed by his own aging as Cash Bentley, but he experiences it nonetheless. It most obviously manifests itself towards the end of the story, when Ned visits Shirley Adams, the last pool owner he interacts with. Shirley, whom he casually abandoned after having had an affair with her, resentfully shows him the door and gives him to understand that she is entertaining a new lover. About to leave her estate, Merrill attempts to repeat a movement he first made at the beginning of the story, when “[h]e hoisted himself up on the far curb—he never used the ladder” (Cheever, A Vision). This time, however, weakened by his swimming exploit and drained of all energy, he finds himself incapable of doing so:
He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry. (Cheever, A Vision)
36The main character’s physical capitulation coincides with a defeat of a different kind. The figure of Shirley’s current paramour is of especial importance here. The young man in the bathhouse is not only Ned’s replacement and, in a sense, his rival, now that the tables have turned and Merrill has been scorned by a woman who once had difficulty coming to terms with their breakup. The man Shirley is seeing is Ned’s alter ego, a younger, arguably more desirable version of himself, chosen by a woman who used to care about Merrill, someone who also spends time by the pool, another “swimmer,” who is not exhausted yet and is not history from Shirley’s or anybody else’s perspective. The protagonist, enveloped in darkness and exposed to a smell resembling that of a potentially lethal substance, only catches a glimpse of the young guest’s silhouette and has to turn around to do so. This underlines the fact that Shirley’s new lover is—to use an analogy with the first Cheever story discussed here—a ghost of Ned or, more accurately, that Ned is a ghost of his former, young and flamboyant self. The autumnal metaphors complete the overall picture in an existential odyssey, in the course of which, as Bailey rather poetically puts it, “Ned, too, begins to shed leaves as he journeys from past to present, illusion to truth, his strength waning with every step” (317) while summer turns into fall.
37As James Hoopes reminds us, in the United States, “backyard patios and swimming pools … symbolized 1950s prosperity” (12). Cheever’s 1964 short story is replete with this and other status symbols, bringing us to a theme present in both works discussed here, namely money and material success or lack thereof. Cash Bentley and Ned Merrill alike have financial problems. “In business Cash had suffered reverses and disappointments, and the Bentleys had many money worries. They were always late with their tax payments and their mortgage payments, and the drawer of the hall table was stuffed with unpaid bills; it was always touch and go with the Bentleys at the bank” (Cheever, A Vision), the narrator straightforwardly declares. The use of the verb suffer, the emphasis provided by the assonant and consonant combinations of many and money as well as Bentleys and bank and the repetition of the word payments, preceded each time by the possessive pronoun their, all accentuate the pecuniary dire straits the couple are in. Moreover, the fact that “they live[] in a medium-cost ranch house” and “belong[] to the country club, although they c[an]not afford it” (Cheever, A Vision) indicates a discrepancy between their financial status and lifestyle and those of the middle-class community they are ostensibly part of but do not really fit into perfectly. Notwithstanding, the Bentleys’ situation is superior to that of Ned, who has clearly gone bankrupt. In fact, bankruptcy marks both protagonists’ fate: Cash, whose first name is a telling one, being a homophone of a word denoting money, is constantly on the verge of it while Ned is already insolvent.
38More regrettably, both Cash and Ned are bankrupt in the metaphorical senses of the word: professionally, socially, emotionally, morally and existentially. As the main character in “The Swimmer” moves from one estate to another, visiting successive swimming pools and the friends and neighbors who own them, it becomes obvious that his is a story of loss—and not only in financial terms. Gradually, the suburban elite Merrill used to belong to has come to ostracize and despise him: devoid of material resources, he is a pathetic loser and a potential burden to his one-time friends, a persona non grata, like Cash after his accident, albeit for different reasons. Sadly, it is not only his friends that Ned seems to have lost but his family as well—or at least his family home, as the story’s disturbing coda implies. Upon his arrival on his own estate, the protagonist of “The Swimmer” finds it deserted and abandoned: “The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. 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” (Cheever, A Vision). The repetition of the adjective stupid, each time combined with a different noun, is suggestive of the protagonist’s irritation and despair, but also emphasizes the fact that he used to be a man of high status who could afford to have domestics. Another repetition—that of the verb locked—makes it clear that Ned has been evicted not only from his home, but also from his own existence and that his losses are irreparable and his downfall irreversible. The closing sentences of “The Swimmer,” evocative of the havoc the passage of time and the vagaries of life can wreak on one man, illustrate Ned’s financial and social degradation, already foreshadowed halfway through the story by his rather humbling visit to a public pool, which stands in striking contrast to the posh swimming pools he habitually frequents. The visit is followed by more humiliating interactions with his former friends and ex-mistress. Ned’s literal bankruptcy, coupled with other aspects of his personality and private life, such as his immature insouciance or marital infidelity, has clearly had extramaterial implications, shattering not only his social life but also his personal one.
39While the economic failure the Cheeverian protagonists experience may seem independent of their hopeless quest for perennial youth and ageless beauty, the two are, as a matter of fact, closely connected. Upon careful examination, it appears that the fictions evoke not just the misfortunes of two hapless individuals, narcissistic and affected by the Peter Pan syndrome, but, more metaphorically, the dangers of a particular approach to aging, critically identified decades after the stories were published. Pointing out the overall optimism surrounding successful aging, Katz and Calasanti are hardly blind to its deficiencies. The optimistic narrative, they warn, is also a capitalist and right-wing one because it fails to consider important social and economic factors: “[B]y aligning their ‘new gerontology’ so strongly to the role of individual volition and lifestyle in maintaining, improving, and even reversing disabling problems, Rowe and Kahn moved successful aging further from the social determinants of health” (Katz and Calasanti 2). Such a model fits into a larger social, political and economic context: “lifestyle and individual volition fit a contemporary consumerist, neoliberal, and entrepreneurial style of thought that dominates health and retirement politics” (4). Drawing on the sociological theories of Georg Simmel and Max Weber as well as Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, Katz and Calasanti dwell on the problem of intersecting social and economic inequalities, pointing out the exclusionary nature and implications of successful aging discourse (3-4).
40At first glance, the Cheever stories explored here, ostensibly light-hearted and, in the case of “The Swimmer,” endowed with a dreamlike quality, may not seem socially committed or politically engaged. Nevertheless, in having their protagonists’ “unsuccessful aging” compounded by their financial fiascoes, they inscribe themselves in a larger narrative about the perils of capitalism and consumerism, anticipating how they both underlie the way modern societies think about growing old. Cash Bentley’s and Ned Merrill’s issues are psychological, existential, philosophical and rooted in centuries-old human concerns. However, they also represent—albeit in hyperbolized and allegorized form—the traps of sociocultural and medical trends which became prominent at the turn of the twenty-first century, and which have ideological and economic underpinnings and implications. In other words, Cheever does under a literary guise what Katz and Calasanti do when they warn against some aging and successful aging researchers’ “fail[ure] to acknowledge social relations of power” (4), which are inextricably linked with ageism (Calasanti qtd. in Katz and Calasanti 6), and other factors which are largely beyond the individual’s control.
41Not only is the conception of successful aging essentially capitalist, but also closely related to one of the key American values and attitudes, a prominent feature of the American national character, namely individualism: “Individualist culture shapes Rowe and Kahn’s formulation about successful aging, which not only emphasizes successes and failures, but also individual responsibility for same” (Katz and Calasanti 3). As such, successful aging is in tune with the American cult of excellence and achievement. That Cheever is a chronicler of mid-century, middle-class and middle-aged America, famously dubbed “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” is relevant here, as “the research [into successful aging] paralleled the postwar American preoccupation with individual adaptability and adjustment in later life, a relationship that became a mainstay in the successful aging paradigm developed by John Rowe and Robert Kahn” (2). In fact, the latter tended to blame his country’s culture for the model’s failings: “I believe that this problem, to the extent that it exists, reflects a characteristic of contemporary American culture rather than something intrinsic to the concept” (Kahn qtd. in Katz and Calasanti 6). “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer” qualify as unsuccess stories, the protagonists’ failure to achieve or maintain high financial status being paralleled by and inextricably intertwined with their inability to age gracefully, that is to either stay frozen in time, or, more realistically, find some means of coping with its passage and its ineluctable effects.
42Looking at the problematics central to this article from a social, psychological, philosophical and moral perspective, Schweda, Pfaller and Schicktanz point out the impact of modernization and individualization on today’s life, the resultant disappearance of certainties and people becoming “obsessed with decisions and risks” (Schweda et al. 2). Liberating in some respects, these changes also pose significant challenges to the individual, turned into a “planning self,” no longer essential, but rather “conceived of as a ‘project’ of individual self-conception and self-fashioning that is in constant need of reflections, decisions, and justifications” (2). One consequence of such a project-like approach to life is that “[a]geing … turns into a task, something that has to be prevented, structured, and treated,” leaving no room for “[c]ontingency, fate, and acknowledging weaknesses, as well as accepting helplessness and dependency” (3). While Cash Bentley’s and Ned Merrill’s athletic feats must be regarded as overdrawn and farfetched, it is possible to classify them as project-like ventures. Both protagonists, immature, irresponsible and unserious, are far from being disciplined or methodical and would seem unsuited to any kind of project, but each of them embarks on one regardless. They do so because they are products of an individualist and capitalist culture which preaches that they are expected to take matters into their own hands in every aspect of their lives and that the sole responsibility for success or failure lies with the individual.
43In the short stories examined in this study, the Cheeverian suburbs are associated with material affluence or at least material comfort. This depiction of suburbia as a land of milk and honey is relevant to the topic of the present essay because of the connection between anti-aging thought and capitalism discussed in the previous section. The bourgeois idyll is, however, fragile, an earthly paradise from which one may be easily expelled, as illustrated by Ned Merrill’s fate. However, Ned’s lost Eden stands for more than the treacherous world of middle-class capitalist materialism. It forms part of an allegory of human life, affected by time and the passage from youth to maturity and, eventually, old age. Central to this allegory is the protagonist’s extravagant swim. Initially a celebration of life, vitality and youth, it gradually becomes a via dolorosa for a man who, having started his journey with a sense of unlimited possibilities, finds himself increasingly depleted and deprived as he carries on. A background to his road to Calvary, the suburban townscape deteriorates accordingly, as the wealthy, glamorous estates, complete with swimming pools and tennis courts, give way to empty houses which have been put up for sale, waterless pools and, worse still, a road and other squalid and degrading public spaces. Similarly, the string of endless parties, which mark mid-twentieth-century suburban life in “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer,” are, in the latter story, a metaphor for the protagonist’s existence: at first in demand and greeted with open arms, Ned is progressively relegated to the position of an unwelcome guest. While Cash Bentley experiences the realities of aging more straightforwardly and literally, Merrill is metaphorically exposed to them, his pool-hopping adventure steadily becoming a journey into unpleasantness, bitterly contrasted with past delights.
44What the two Cheeverian characters have in common is their inability to cope with the inevitability of aging: more direct in Cash’s case, it is symbolized in Ned’s story by his being in denial about his financial and family problems when certain more sympathetic and well-meaning friends try to discuss his plight with him. In terms of how growing old and responses to it are portrayed, “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer” complete, enrich and illuminate each other. While the former serves as a more realistic and explicit illustration of these issues, the latter takes Cheever’s insights into the problematics further, foregrounding what Cash Bentley’s frustrations and fixations already signal. Cash’s friend—or rather his frenemy—Trace Bearden, who plants disturbing ideas about aging in his mind and is his alter ego of sorts, voicing the doubts and anxieties the protagonist himself nurtures, seems representative of how society and culture make people feel about their growing old. The same holds true for the obstacles which multiply in Ned Merrill’s path as he covers increasing distance, itself figuratively representing his advancing years, and for his settling for second best and accepting what he used to reject in the latter half of the story. This mistreatment, whose symbolic culmination comes when Ned is made to get out of the public pool by lifeguards, may be construed as a metaphor for aging, the rifeness of ageism and the exclusion it entails.
45In fictions which are comic at best and tragic at worst, Cheever ironically and movingly cautions against the disquieting implications of an obsession with youth, which breeds an irrational wish to endlessly prolong it—or at least to prolong its semblance. In doing so, he looks back on what has preoccupied humankind since its inception and foreshadows an age in which, courtesy of scientific and technological progress, these preoccupations have taken unprecedented forms. The last-named are often farfetched, sometimes potentially dangerous, always complex and never unequivocally positive. The unconditional pursuit of youth stems from, gives rise to and exacerbates a fear of aging and, consequently, the marginalization and deprecation of old age and the old. It is also intertwined with capitalism, consumerism and individualism. While capable of apprehending the fears and desires behind this quest, Cheever identifies it as not only narcissistic, objectifying and frustrating but also self-destructive. Through his protagonists’ refusal to accept the natural order of things and their enslavement to the gaze of others, the absurd and the surreal turn out to be painfully realistic in “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer.”
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