You can’t always get what you want

The psychological narrative of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing” vs. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” stories is that of quiet desperation while each main character proceeds on a physical and somewhat metaphysical journey. Many similarities exist in both main characters as they try to find the answer to something evident to them or the world around them, but they cannot put the pieces together. They must end if there is no correct response to “the Big Thing” that each story hints at throughout the main characters’ journeys.

We follow the narrator of Rilke’s piece from the start of their walk, when the narrator states, “that my stove began to smoke again and I had to go out, is really no misfortune.” There’s no assumption of the narrator’s gender from the start because the story is from the first-person point of view, potentially allowing the reader to be the narrator. It is not until almost the end of the story that we find out that it is a man when the doctor asks if he has slept well. The narrator does not give us much about liking or disliking him. His story provides a reader with no room to be opinionated, which goes hand in hand with the physical act of journeying. The story is what it is. He notices the things around him and comments as he goes by. You can take it or leave it.

In Cheever’s short story, we follow a married father named Ned Merrill as he “swims” the Lucinda River home, named after his loving wife, made up of swimming pools between his neighbors and their marital home. The reader is entirely in his head as the narrative gives us a limited omniscient point of view. The description of Ned provides us with a mental image of “he was a slender man – he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth – and while Ned 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 towards the smell of coffee in his dining room,” and grounds us into that point of view. Although he is physically moving from place to place and interacting by choice or because of the absence of the pools’ owners, the pace is slower, as if the reader is going for a slow, leisurely swim alongside Ned. The blindness to his faults is where the sympathy lies.

There is no ironic distance between the main characters in each short story. In Rilke’s piece, he reports on what is happening inside and outside of their mental state, which is on display when “they wanted to try electric treatment” on the narrator. There are limited interactions with other characters through the eyes of the narrator. The reader must piece together coherence based on the narrator’s biases.

Cheever very quickly conveys that something is going on underneath. Ned has emotionally clipped, recurrent conversations with the neighbors, such as his first one with Mrs. Graham, who says, “What a marvelous surprise. I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.” A similar dialogue occurs with the neighbors he manages to visit during his swimming adventure.

The narrator of Wrecked Houses is keen on getting the reader up to speed. He mentions the stove’s smell and the people’s movement as they go by each other from the first page. He does not own his own home and is liable to “misrepresent” those that do. The details of his financial state are in direct opposition to the narrator of The Swimmer, who assumes you are familiar with the type of neighbors Ned has, such as people known by their family names or the fact that “the leader of the Audubon group (is) suffering from a terrible hangover.” Ned is from the white upper class, and Cheever intersperses the details into the story without haranguing them for long. The story takes place in the present, but the dialogue details things that happened in the past. However, it is interesting that while both main characters are diametric opposites on the financial and class spectrum, sympathy for each main character is not lost. Cash rules everything around them. It is relatable in every sense.

The strength of Cheever’s piece is that he interacts with all sorts of characters but doesn’t truly process the conversations he is having with them. When he visits with the Hallorans, who pointedly say, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.” But then Ned goes on to say, “My misfortunes? I don’t know what you mean.” There’s a vicious undercurrent in the dialogue that Ned is unaware of, either by choice or by being consciously blind to it.

That’s not to say Rilke’s piece does not have a vicious undercurrent, but the narrator’s dialogue keeps the tension going. The reader becomes the narrator’s consciousness. Rilke does not waste any time moving the story forward, nor is he bogged down by the narrator’s interactions with other characters. What little dialogue is on the page is clinical, perfunctory, almost journalistic reporting. The narrator has no one else to play off of except for himself.

The setting for Rilke’s piece is in France, highlighted by the details of the presence of the Louvre, the French language spoken by the cauliflower vendor, and the fact that it takes place during carnival, which is before Lent on the Catholic calendar, placing it during the earlier part of the year.

Cheever’s piece tells us from the first sentence that it is a midsummer Sunday. However, the smell of “chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrances,” or that the water in some of the pools is colder than it should be in summer, or the existence of a neighbor’s drained pool, leisurely clue the reader into the fact that his odyssey takes place over a matter of months, not a day. Cheever relies on concrete details, which makes for a lot of showing. The reader builds mental pictures of the pools of the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, the Crosscups, the Bunkers, the Levys, the Welchers, the Hallorans, the Sachses, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins and the Clydes. Ned mentally maps out which pools he will use to get home to Bullet Park, and the story moves with each visit to the pool of the named families. Ned mentions that “beyond the hedge, he pulled on his trunks and fastened them. They were loose, and he wondered if, during the space of an afternoon, he could have lost some weight,” which lets the reader question the fact that more time has passed than initially stated.

The abstractness of Rilke’s piece comes before the French passage in the text because the narrator is conscious enough of what is happening that he wants to write it down, knowing it will outlive him, knowing that “every word is sustained and has time to die away.” The narrator gives many visceral details when he diverges from the almost stream of consciousness in the first few pages. A shift in consciousness is happening or is about to occur without arranging whitespace on the page and losing the strength or tension of the physical journey. The narrator has a mental illness and requires electroshock treatment. The visceral location of the hospital highlights that “the air was foul, heavy, impregnated with clothes and breaths,” which immediately evokes the setting’s sense of hopelessness. The pacing of Rilke’s story takes place in real-time, with the narrator noting that they “had to be at Salpêtrière at one o’clock… I looked at the clock; it was five minutes to one… I looked at the clock; I had been pacing up and down for an hour.” Time is an unwavering constant that encourages a sense of urgency. Only the narrator of Wrecked Houses would give us a play-by-play in this way.

In opposition, Ned begins by noticing that “the day was lovely, and that he lives in a world so generously supplied with water that it seems like a clemency, a beneficence.” Later, Ned notices “the Lindleys’ riding ring, and he was surprised to find it overgrown with grass and all the jumps dismantled.” Alluding to the type of upper-class neighborhood he lives in, no one in their social class would leave their riding ring unkempt, especially during the summer when it is perfect horseback riding weather.

Ned’s story slowly comes together when the narrator states, “he could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears.” These final, lingering interactions with the neighbors were no mistake; without them, he would not have realized the problem. He needed to have these conversations.

The climax of Rilke’s story is when the narrator mentions “that which struck into me my first, profound terror, when as a child I lay ill with fever: the Big Thing.” In Rilke’s time, dying from a fever was common. The Big Thing continues to be a constant reminder of the narrator’s mortality, even into his adult years.

Each story leaves the reader with a decent sense of satisfaction. This emotion punctuates each journey like a slap on the face. The last line of Rilke’s piece is “I did not know in what city I was or whether I had a lodging somewhere here or what I must do in order not to have to go on walking.” It lets the reader know that although we have left the narrator on this leg of their journey, it will most likely continue for an indiscriminate amount of time. The last line of Cheever’s story is “he shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw the place was empty.” It leaves the reader satisfied knowing that Ned’s physical and psychological journey has ended.

Each story teaches us that you cannot always get your way. Sometimes, a story must end where it does for contemplative satisfaction.