“In my darker moments,” Garth Greenwell confesses in the Yale Review, “I sometimes think it’s true that art is simply a biological process, shorn of significance.”
The narrator of Greenwell’s third novel, Small Rain, harbours similar anxieties about the aesthetic. Hospitalised with an aortic tear and alone in the ICU, he, a poet and teacher like Greenwell himself, reaches for his usual resource: “there sprang into my mind a scrap of a poem, the blown aorta pelting out blood, which I couldn’t place and was of no help at all”. Fiction, now the flailing, fitful instinct of a sick man, fails him.
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Illness, then, is an interpretative crisis. The critic becomes the object, studied by often disinterested doctors. “Who taught these people,” he wonders at each diagnosis, “who gave them their vocabulary, their stock of images?” But there’s a kind of spasmodic poetry to the narrator’s suffering, moments in which art gains an ascendancy over the actual. He cries when an emergency room nurse plays a recording of John Taverner’s Westron Wynde. During a claustrophobic CT scan, he chants two words of a poem, the smallest “patch of stable ground” to stave off his fear.
The speaker has spent his career ‘trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel’ but his illness forces him into a more immediate form of feeling – the sensations of pain or his blood pressure decreasing when the man he loves walks into the room. And his recovery, slow and insecure, becomes a rehabilitation both to life and to literature.
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Small Rain suggests that art, when tasked with the business of trauma, proves both inadequate and indispensable. It is a strange stalemate for any writer. The consummate stylist in his first two novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness, Greenwell seems more circumspect now. This caution is born of experience; Greenwell himself was hospitalised during the pandemic. He knows, as well as his narrator does, the precarity of the “whole metaphysical edifice”, how “love and artmaking and thought, poetry and painting, the possibility of God” all rest on the body’s “brute mechanism”.
His writing is less extravagant, perhaps more earnest. Confronted with the great immensities of life and death, Greenwell glimpses grace obliquely. His subject is now the “unremarkable moment” which in Small Rain he realises remarkably.
