Swimming Pools
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Four gift shop postcards sit blue-tacked and slightly off-kilter on my wall, where their curious combination, along with a fading but still brilliant picture of my parents’ wedding has become a sort of talisman, or strategy for inspiration. Of these images, the one I return to most is the print of a photograph of a swimming pool. The picture appears in media res, as if through the eyes of someone about to dive, watching strange ripples form in the water from some unseen disturbance – a disconcerting sense of effect without cause. The only visual clues are a bright, cerulean blue, the edge of a diving board, a small flight of steps marking the exit, and the white frame of a pool house. I am always caught between trying to understand the image, and letting it linger in obscurity.
It only takes four key search terms – ‘swimming + pool + Tate + postcard’ – for me to discover that this is in fact ‘Pool #9’ by Edward Ruscha. Google tells me that it’s part of the series Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), that it was taken at a ‘low budget Las Vegas motel’ and that the way the scene has been set-up deliberately elicits the uncanny (for all the reasons I had thought, but never properly articulated). Another tab, and I’m looking at a shattered tumbler – the image that comes last in that sequence – and wondering why the shards look soft and liquid to the touch, and why an image about alcoholism and consumption seems so pertinent to the series.
The pool as a signifying image never ceases to beguile my English sensibilities.
On his website, I discover that Ruscha was born in Nebraska but later moved to LA, where the majority of his subjects are situated. I learn that he works with intriguing and playful mediums like caviar and chocolate syrup, and in 1963 published Twentysix Gasoline Stations, another series of photographs designed to be available in ‘mass-produced’ commercial supply. I find his 1966 composite of California – an accordion-shaped artifact named Every Building on the Sunset Strip – and soon, despite the fact I feel like I am cheating on my little floating postcards, I am spiralling back through pools #1 to #9 to see how blue, how lively but lifeless, how melancholic and, crucially, how seductively they draw the eye.
The pool as a signifying image never ceases to beguile my English sensibilities. It is at once alien and chimeric, both in a metaphorical sense and for the more obvious climatic restrictions of the UK. These pictures, with their subtle discolouration and their attempts to capture the hot scene of New Hollywood are therefore a cunning visual trap; this is the American landscape of the 60s, both filmic and shiny, yet broken and shattered. It’s also a trap I readily fall into because in staring at Ed Ruscha’s California and endlessly scrolling online, I’m lured in by analytical potential and determined to find out what the pool might offer as an entryway to this period in literature and art.
After a short while surfing the internet, I’m reminded of John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’ – perhaps the befitting example of a pool-pilled America. Published in The New Yorker in 1964, the story begins in the haze of a Sunday morning where murmurs of ‘I drank too much last night’ linger in self-fulfilment and lethargy. This is the ennui of urban sprawl, and the luxurious groaning of an emerging middle-class. It is the first text that comes up when searching ‘swimming pools in literature’, and the scene is set with half limbs of lounging socialites floating in the nape of the water’s neck, while grey clouds form above.
Our story’s protagonist is Neddy Merrill, who wants to trace the dotted line of swimming pools in his neighbourhood by staggering across the county through each domestic and public pool until he reaches home. He names this line ‘Lucinda’s River’ as if his wife (of the same name) were something untouchable and mythic. And to the confusion of each of his neighbours, his journey is questioned and soon exposed for its pervading delusion. Cheever defines the swimming pool as a site where one might be convinced, through the trappings of wealth and luxury, that the ‘natural’ environment and its elements are tameable, or where leisure in East Coast suburbia can only be achieved with material success, with ownership of and disruption to the land.
In the world of ‘The Swimmer’, everything is therefore interconnected and reachable by water; there is a supreme ease to the lifestyle. Neddy is a perfect product of this environment because he is known by all, and he takes to the water as if he were born in a private pool. It’s a visual world so captivating as to receive a Hollywood film adaptation (1968, dir. Frank Perry), where he is played by Burt Lancaster, whose king-sized shoulders frame the screen with a dramatic masculinity. In the film’s denouement, as Neddy must finally swim through a public water park, overwhelmed by sounds ‘louder, harsher, and more shrill’ than ever experienced before, he is confronted by unfamiliar crowds and capital letters – ‘ALL SWIMMERS MUST WEAR THEIR IDENTIFICATION DISCS’. Neddy’s cultural antennae are thrown into disarray by this unsubtle class migration, and his fallacy is thus further revealed; his social environment is his natural environment, both of which he has lost control.
The uncomfortable sadness revealed at the end of Cheever’s short story and its Hollywood adaption is then, of course, a hole in the ground – Neddy Merrill returns to his house but he is not at home, because he has no water in his swimming pool. The suburban dream is replaced by a damning reality where again we see the effect and are left to consider the cause, of what led to the submergence and darkening of this psyche, forever lost to its environment. Just like with my postcard, I’m left with questions.
It is difficult to perform any symbolic examination of 60s America without consulting Joan Didion. She talks about swimming pools in The White Album (1979), rejecting associations of private pools with obvious delineations of affluence, instead describing them as containable ‘order’ or water ‘made available and useful […] infinitely soothing to the western eye’. In her essay ‘Holy Water’, she visits the Operations Control Center for the California State water project and observes how from state to state, these centres moved water through ‘aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains’, more water moved further ‘than has ever been moved anywhere’. She depicts summers of drought, when fires in Big Sur and the bricking-up of swimming pools became part of the visual geography, just like with the droughts of 1976–77, when dust-bowl skateboarding emerged in the hollow reeves, dips and fissures of suburban backyards. These absences loomed large and spoke, yet again, of a great uncanny – because what exactly is a swimming pool without its water?
Pools in New Hollywood represent a borderline psychotic obsession with self-image, a vanity and a projection of wealth that almost always ends in disaster.
Didion in fact attributes the end of the 60s to a single afternoon in a pool. August 9th 1969 – a haunting date in Hollywood history that saw the killing of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Stephen Parent, and one day later, Leno LaBianca in Los Feliz – was a time of ‘demented and seductive vortical tension’. Didion writes of receiving the news: ‘I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive.’ In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Tarantino’s ode to a simplified era of pool floats and bright technicolour, these tragic August events are rewritten so that instead of finding Tate at her home, Manson’s accomplices crash the house of actor Rick Dalton and stunt double Cliff Booth. Rick is found floating on a Lilo, radio on and cocktail in hand when his Hollywood Hills fantasy is interrupted by a screaming and bloody assailant, who he proceeds to comedically torch with a prop flame-thrower.
In this way, swimming pools have become symbolic of a growing tension, and an unravelling about to occur. For Didion this premonition was the political distemper of the 70s, but more generally, pools in the media of New Hollywood represent a borderline psychotic obsession with self-image, a vanity and a projection of wealth that almost always ends in disaster.
I type ‘swimming pools + Hollywood + movies’ and a new pattern emerges: in the opening of Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950) a dead man floats upside down in his swimming pool à la Jay Gatsby. In The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1968) Benjamin Braddock’s crisis of passivity is floating in a pool on his 21st birthday – ‘I would say that I’m just drifting’. In La Piscine (dir. Jacques Deray, 1969), we see Alain Delon’s character Jean-Paul drown his jealous and drunken friend after accusations of seducing his daughter. The water here is a transgressive space, and a site of sexual rebellion that harks playfully and painfully back to a state of childhood innocence (we naturally associate pools with a juvenile freedom). It has then been moulded into a theatrical stage only for the performance of adulthood, of manliness, of identity in crisis, where the fluid blurring of morality is an obvious but pertinent metaphor.
The pool soon reveals its origins in Greek mythology; these characters are simulacrum Narcissus, staring too curiously at their own reflections and eventually falling in head-first. Eco-critical and Posthuman studies of bodies of water relate these occurrences mainly to an interconnectedness, where natural waters such as seas and rivers collectively represent a feminine connection to the earth, or in psychological terms, an unbridled emotion and lifeforce. Pools are therefore a curious manipulation of the natural, for they contain and repress desire, and are facades of visibility, akin to a murky subconsciousness. Where the sea performs feeling, unbreakable and unending, the reality of the pool is one trapped, much like the icons of this era, in aesthetic permanence.
I’m amused when my internet searching reveals an image from the cartoon TV show BoJack Horseman, where a male body with a horse head stands at the border of his swimming pool looking down at another male body with a horse head looking back at him. It’s of course a nod to Hockney, and to a ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ (1972), which is itself a remodelling of Narcissus. The image plays with reflections, where we view an artist peering at the submerged form of a younger male swimmer, whose silhouette has been disrupted by tricks of light, water and the eye. In Hockney’s 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, the artist describes the way many great Renaissance and Baroque painters used mirrors, compasses and optical tricks of camera lucida and camera obscura to capture their surroundings. These forms of angular alchemy, from which he then took inspiration, rely on refraction and light play, on patterns invisible to the untrained eye – in other words, they rely upon a beautiful deception.
The internet then tells me what I already know, that David Hockney moved to California in the 60s seeking a ‘promised land’ of artistic allure, sexual possibility and that ‘beefcake’ model of Physique Pictorial. He found all this in the image of a swimming pool, for example in a series of pictures shot on 35mm film that he referred to as ‘joiners’. One of these works, ‘Nathan Swimming’ (1982), uses multiple Polaroids to frame a male figure from an aerial view; each square box distorts the next, and the summative effect of image rippling on the series is to separate Nathan from his arms, or spread his figure out to different ‘frames’ or ‘pools’. The vignette is a prime example of Hockney’s aesthetic fascination with water and the male form, and a visual product of the Los Angeles landscape, which with its bright blue punctures so contrasted England in the mind’s eye.
Another of Hockney’s more famous pool paintings is ‘A Bigger Splash’ (1967). The image pairs curiously with my original postcard, that of Ruscha’s ‘Pool #9’ – both works tease the exit wound of ricocheting water with no culpable diver in eye-shot, leaving a scene to be reckoned with, and a narrative to fabricate. It’s an image so iconic and intriguing to have inspired not only a film of the same name (2015 dir. Luca Guadagnino, which is a reworking of La Piscine), but also a scripted documentary following Hockney’s work and love life from 1970–1973 (dir. Jack Hazan, 1973). The Hollywood ideal, it seems, followed him all the way back to his later life in England.
Hockey was born in Bradford, a city in Yorkshire around twenty-five minutes by car from my own childhood home. In his searching for something outside of himself and his environment he found America, and acrylics, and the colour blue that would transform his life and maybe his perception of the world. It was, however, his vivid depictions of the northern landscape that earned him a prized place above my grandparent’s fireplace – an image that to this day I can picture in all its whirling technicolour if I just close my eyes.
When I mention the painting in passing to my mother, and my looming fascination with the States, she reminds me that at one point I was more American than English, having spent seven months as a baby in the USA. I’m not really sure this qualifies as an ‘Americanness’, but I have always been intrigued by that time in my life. At some level, I think the landscape I imagine is one perforated with swimming pools, and stiflingly hot. Perhaps I also imagine the way in which that environment subtly altered me (my interests, my lexicon and occasionally even my accent). But it’s all effect, with no cause. This was an America I cannot remember. And in reality, when I speak to her in greater detail, I learn that we were in Iowa, not California, and that it was cold, and sometimes snowy, and not at all close to the image I had fantasised.
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Emmeline Armitage is a writer and musician originally from West Yorkshire, now living in London. She graduated from The University of Oxford before completing her Masters in Literary Non-Fiction from Royal Holloway, and her work has since been featured in The Bedford Review, The Line of Best Fit and Wonderland, as well as on stage at Hay-On-Wye and Out-Spoken. She is signed to indie hip-hop label Lewis Recordings, most recently having opened-up for The Streets on tour, played the global music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, and being named by the Guardian as ‘One to Watch’.
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