“It had struck me a long time back that the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. I'd been collecting them up, these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death. Some were healthful: antidotes to a kind of felt dirtiness gathering elsewhere. In a fairly weak mid-period short story called 'The Swimmers', Fitzgerald wrote about immersion as a literally life-saving practice for a man trapped in an unhappy marriage.”