Garth Greenwell: “The book is structured like nesting dolls of brokenness”
The author of ‘Small Rain’ talks about what it means to care for things and to be cared for, and how all his books are interested in asymmetrical relationships
Sharmistha Jha: The narrator, a 40-something-year-old poet is suddenly faced with the possibility of death. He is isolated because of the 2020 Covid pandemic but art doesn’t leave him – a stanza from a poem, songs or the vision for art. Art becomes the bridge between the narrator’s past and his present. Do you believe that art has restorative power?
Garth Greenwell: In some way, I think that is the biggest question that the book is asking and I think one of the reasons I had to write this book was that I needed the book to be able to think about such a difficult question. The book comes to a very difficult and partial answer. To me, the most important moment is in the fourth chapter, which begins with a long essay on a poem. The narrator is going through what becomes for him a very difficult procedure – a PET scan – and he finds himself in this very small space having a panic attack. He turns to poetry and realizes that poetry isn’t there. The poems that he has memorized over the decades, they aren’t there to help him in this moment when he needs help. Except he realizes at the end of the experience that, in fact, two words of the poem have been with him – the smallest little fragment of the poem. I think the book comes to the answer, can art save us? The answer is no, ‘except that’ … and that ‘except that’ the two little words that allow the narrator in some sense to let him hold himself together in this experience. That saves him. So the answer is something like, “Can art save us? Almost not at all.” But in that ‘almost’ is something very important.
I read this book and instantly felt less alone. Was it your response to the pandemic? We also feel the narrator’s anxiety about global warming, and disappearing bird species, and about racial violence in America. What were you going through as you wrote this?
What I wanted to do in this book was to try to give as precise a representation as I could of embodied experience – an experience of a particular consciousness in a particular body. Which also means the experience of a particular place in a particular time in history. So, I think of historical pressures and social pressures, those are parts of the experience of embodiedness. They are part of what it means to be a body in the world. I came to realise only after writing the book that it is structured like nesting dolls of brokenness, that there is a consciousness in a body that is broken, that is situated in a house that is broken, that is situated in a country that is broken, that is situated in a world that is broken. One thing that I realised that happens in the book is that the fact of brokenness makes it possible for the narrator to love these various habitations in a way that he has not loved them before. He has hated his body, he has come to really hate or resent a house that has become very catastrophic for him and his partner. He has felt a lot of resentment towards his country and those three things and the very fact of their brokenness make him realise how precious they are for him. And that was interesting to me that there was a relationship between brokenness and love or care which the book is very much about. It is about what it means to care for things and what it means to be cared for.
What made you want to capture the dysfunction of a hospital during a pandemic?
This book is also about sickness. In some ways, I thought of one of my primary projects as trying to capture the texture of existence in an ICU ward and what life feels like in a hospital situation. And I was interested in the way that being in an ICU ward you are already isolated. Being in an ICU ward during Covid, you are doubly isolated. Then, I was interested in the way that the Covid pandemic is like this big weight or pressure on these various systems of America. So, it is a big pressure on American societies that felt in 2020 as though they were breaking apart. Covid also put a lot of pressure on the systems of the hospital itself and that was interesting to me to know how the system maintains itself under the weight of this pressure. And maybe the thing that interested me the most about life in a hospital were the kind of relationships that form between the caregivers and the patient. In a way, this connects the reader to my other books because all of my books are interested in what I call asymmetrical relationships – relationships that are experienced very differently on the two sides. The kind of intense attachments and dependency and the feelings of gratitude and need that a patient feels towards an ICU nurse is so different from what the nurse feels because for the nurse, it is a job. I wanted to capture the different kinds of relationships that are possible in an ICU ward. All of my books have been interested in relationships made possible in particular places and relationships that are compromised in some sense – relationships that are not in any easy way the coming together of individuals who have the same amount of power.
I also want to talk about how the nature of desire changes. The narrator has felt a strong sexual desire all his adult life and when he comes to the hospital, he is put on beta blockers and a bunch of other drugs that are carpet-bombing his system.
That was very interesting to me as a writer because the narrator of all my three books is the same. In the first two books, the narrator is a character who is ruled by desire and dominated by his desire. So it was really interesting to me to ask who would this character be if he did not have desire. It was interesting to me as kind of a challenge to my narrator to say, what if I take desire away not just from my character but from me as a writer? What if I take away sex? It was interesting for me to see what happens to the writing. I do think that the big subject of all three of my books is this question – how do human beings make meaning? I think the big three, maybe four, ways we make meaning is through art, through religion and the idea of God, and we make meaning through love and through sex. So, it was interesting to me to take sex away, which has been the primary mode of making meaning for my narrator and see what happens to other aspects of meaning-making. What happens is that they all light up. They take on a greater importance.
READ MORE: Review – Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Why is your book titled Small Rain? “Small Rain” is a phrase that comes from a medieval poem that was turned into a very popular sixteenth century song. And it is a poem that I love. When I was a high school teacher, I would often teach this poem on the first day of class. I can’t remember when I realised that the poem was going to be an important part of the book. It was in the first weeks that I was working on the book that I realised this poem would be important. I slowly came to realise that I wanted Small Rain to be the title in part because the poem only appears once in the first section of the book but actually, I want the reader to be thinking about the poem throughout the whole book, especially at the end when the narrator gets to go home. Near the second half of the poem is a line, ‘Cryst yf my love were in my Armys and I yn my bed Agayne’ (Christ if my love were in my arms and I in my bed again). And there is a moment at the end of the book where the narrator sort of pauses right outside of his bedroom. His partner is already in bed waiting for him, and he pauses, and it’s like before arriving at this experience which he has longed for more than anything else while in the hospital – he has longed to be in his bed with his partner – and he pauses to be in that sort of longing state a little more. My hope is that the reader will remember Small Rain, the song and the poem, again. One reason I made it the title was because I hope it allows the poem to arch over the whole book and not just one scene that appears in the initial pages.
You are also a poet. Can you tell us about your writing process? Did you know that you wanted music and poetry to be a big part of Small Rain before you started writing?Yes, I did in some sense. This is a narrator who has built his life around art and a narrator who believes that art is a source of infinite value, that art can fill up a life with value, and I felt that I needed to show what that means. That meant having long passages like a long essay on a very short poem. That, to me, felt necessary because I felt like I needed to show what it means to believe that a poem can be an object of devotion and that you can pour your life into a poem or a piece of music and that something else will come back to you, that there is a circuit formed between yourself and the work of art; and that is a circuit of meaning. I knew I had to write a lot about art in the book in order to show what that would mean.
Sharmistha Jha is an independent writer and editor.
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