A Swim in the pond in the rain
A book review: A Swim In a Pond In the Rain by George Saunders
I’ve spent most of my nonfiction writing life advocating for Catholic Liberal Arts and Great Books curricula to incorporate discussions of craft. One would think Great Books programs could produce an abundance of great writers, pumping one out after the next. After all, if you want to be a great writer, you must read the great books, so you know what great writing looks like. Unfortunately, the ability to write does not seep in through osmosis. Imagine a child who wants to be a great soccer player. Every day, he watches clips of Messi and Ronaldo, and every weekend, he watches their games. Wouldn’t that child improve his soccer more if he had a trainer pointing out what to look for? Or, even better, if he went out and played! (I’ve been watching soccer for years, but I refuse almost every chance I’m given to play. My excuse is that I’m awful at the sport, so I don’t practice, which makes me awful at the sport and unwilling to practice, but I love to watch it. The thing is, I don’t pretend like watching will make me a better soccer player the way I think some people assume reading will magically make them into better writers).
That said, consider a different child. One who only plays and never watches. His dribbling is probably great, and he can probably shoot well, but I’d bet he lacks intuition for tactics and plays. In fact, he probably doesn’t know the limits of his sport, because he hasn’t seen Messi push them.
Both athletes would benefit from a trainer working them through a recording of Barcelona vs Manchester United, May 27, 2009.
To me, that’s what A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is for writers.
Let me explain: I’ve spent most of my writing life reading books that moved me, writing something, thinking, "this is garbage,” then reading again to help me fix that. I think every writer has a similar experience. We read one of “The Greats,” and we wonder, “Huh, how did they pull that off?” How did Dostoyevsky entertain us, make us cringe, feel love and pity, for the narrator of Notes From Underground? Margot Livesey talks about this in her book The Hidden Machinery, Essays on Writing. After spending much of her time after university traveling and writing, she admits, “I had no sense of pacing, no thought for what sort of unit a chapter could, or should, be; no understanding of the importance of setting; and, perhaps, strangest of all, no notion of the crucial role of suspense,” until one day, she presented her stories to Brian Moore who, “From the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, he produced a fountain pen. Then he read the story aloud, imitating all the characters and animals…. ‘Now would she say that?’ he pondered. ‘Or should there be a little something more about the ponies, that nickering sound that they make?’ [She] would go home and throw [herself] back into the story, guided by his neatly written comments.” We could all use a Brian Moore.
What Brian Moore was doing, which Margot Livesey was learning to do, was reading as a writer. Reading as a writer is how you learn to write, which makes this all very complicated because don’t you already need to know how to write to read as a writer? I don’t play because I’m no good, so I’m no good, so I don’t play.
Thankfully, people who are writers exist. (If we want to build a rocket ship, we don’t have to start by rubbing two sticks together. We can start by reading the writings of Einstein, or, I don’t know, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I suppose if I wanted to be one, I could ask rocket scientists to teach me.) In the introduction to A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, he writes, “Hoping to understand the form (‘How does this work, anyway?’), we turn to a handful of great Russian writers to see how they did it.” Coming from a Great Books background, I felt that this statement was two things: First, surprised. In most writing circles I’ve been a part of, I hear a lot of talk about R.O. Kwon and Zadie Smith, but every time I mention Don Quixote, people say, “Oh, that old Spanish book? I haven’t read it.” Don’t get me wrong, I love the practice of challenging old cannons and establishing new ones. I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t believe that there are new books to be written, but I still suffer from the sort of filial piety that makes me desire to be a necromancer; that is, in discussion with the dead. The second feeling I felt was doubt. The labor of turning to dead writers to learn how they did it is a huge undertaking. One which, I’m sure, was scary even to George Saunders.
This doubt wasn’t whether one could learn from old dead writers. I’m confident we can. At TAC we had to take a class on music. During the unit on music theory, a girl in my class said, “I don’t doubt that any of this is true. I doubt that Mozart was thinking, ‘Oh, if I raise this note a half step, or end on this chord, it will have a feeling of relief on my audience.’ Music seems more magical and intuitive, less calculating.” This girl was not a musician. In TAC’s library, there just happened to be a book titled Mozart’s Letters, where he says exactly that kind of thing. Musicians, writers, and artists all calculate to achieve the goal of their art, the way a rocket scientist or soccer player might. What Marques, Mozart, and Messi did looks like magic, and in some way, it is, most of us could never achieve it, but that doesn’t mean there’s no understanding of their art. In fact, they did it because there’s a profound understanding. However, working from Mozart’s letters to his understanding is one thing; working from his music to his understanding is another. This is exactly what George Saunders sought to do with “the great Russians.”
He delivered. It seems unfair to call A Swim in the Park in the Rain reverse engineering of the mind of Gogol and his compatriots, but that’s what it feels like. I don’t mean “feels” in the weak sense of, “I think this but I’m not quite sure.” I mean “feels” in the powerful sense of “my heart drives me in this direction.” I first felt this at the end of his discussion of “The Singers” by Ivan Turgenev. In it, we explore how a lack of craft, how a Russian aristocratic reportorial style, done intentionally made the long digressions give the reader an emotional payoff. He ties this in with a discussion of discovering the heart of the story. If a reader feels that every moment they asked, “Huh, what’s that doing there?” Corresponds with an, “Oh, that’s what it was doing,” then they feel that their time is well spent. However, if there’s no correspondent, “Oh” to every “Huh” a reader will feel their time is wasted.
The book's structure shifts. The chapter, “One Page At A Time,” takes you through Gogol’s “In The Cart” one page at a time. Who would d have thought? In this chapter, the reader is asked to track their reaction, what expectations they feel are being set up, and how these expectations are changing.
After this, the book changes to a pattern of Story, Craft Essay, and Afterthought. The reader is presented with the whole story, followed by a brief essay on one craft element like “patterns” and how it’s presented in the story, sometimes followed by a small section titled “Afterthought”. The stories, of course, were beautiful. The Craft Essays and Afterthoughts were inspiring in a way I didn’t expect. In them, not only does he enter an in-depth discussion of an element of craft, but he provides a profound meditation on the writing life. He relates Turgenev’s “The Singers” to his attempt to find a writing style by looking up to Mt. Hemingway, not being able to reach its heights, and finding a little shit hill with his name on it. It didn’t matter, because it was his, and writers should write what they can best write. In his discussion of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” he relates the story to a time in his life when he was on a with a failed engine, maybe falling to his demise, when a fourteen-year-old boy asks him, “Is this supposed to happen?” In these essays, you don’t just see the way a writer reads, but the way a writer is moved by reading. You can’t help but move with him.
Craft is not cold and unfeeling. Yes, great artists calculate, but when love and reason fight, love always wins. Messi is probably thinking of the thousands of different moves he can do every second, but his heart is beating. I think that’s what the girl in my music theory class saw. Her mistake was thinking that it was no thought, all emotions, but in a way, she was not wrong. Art primarily interacts with our emotions, so it makes sense that emotions are what guide the artist. George Saunders doesn’t hold back from this. Yes, he still considers craft as something technical, sometimes citing sociological and psychological studies on the ways readers experience stories, but other times he engages with these stories on a deeply spiritual level. For me, this book was the Catholic Liberal Arts Great Books approach to craft I’ve always wanted but never had. I wish I could travel back in time to eighteen-year-old Oso, who went to TAC to read the great books, so I could give him a trainer, a Brian Moore for my Margot Livesey, a Virgil for my Dante. “You’re a writer? Good. This is how you’ll read.”
