Sharmistha Jha: The narrator, a 40-something poet, faces the prospect of sudden death. He is isolated due to the Covid pandemic of 2020, but art never leaves him – a stanza of poetry, a song or an approach to art. Art becomes a bridge between the storyteller’s past and his present. Do you believe that art has restorative powers?
Garth Greenwell: In a way, I think that’s the biggest question that the book is asking and I think one of the reasons I wrote this book was that I needed the book to be able to think about such a difficult question. . The book gives a very rough and partial answer. For me, the most important moment is in the fourth chapter, which begins with a long essay on a poem. The narrator is undergoing what turns out to be a very difficult procedure for him – a PET scan – and he finds himself suffering panic attacks in this very small space. He turns to Kavita and realizes that Kavita is not there. The poems he has memorized for decades are not there to help him at this moment when he needs help. Except that at the end of the experience he realizes that, in fact, two words of the poem have remained with him – the shortest piece of poetry. I think the book comes to the answer of can art save us? The answer is no, ‘besides that’… and that ‘besides that’ are two little words that allow the narrator to put himself together in this experience in some sense. That’s what saves him. So the answer is, “Can art save us? “Almost not at all.” But there is something very important about that ‘almost’.
I read this book and immediately felt less alone. Was this your response to the pandemic? We also feel the narrator’s concern about global warming, endangered bird species, and racial violence in America. What were you going through when you were writing this?
What I wanted to do in this book was to try to represent as accurately as possible the embodied experience – the experience of a particular consciousness in a particular body. Which also means the experience of a particular place at a particular time in history. So, I think about historical pressures and social pressures, they’re part of the embodiment experience. They are part of what it means to have a body in the world. Only after writing the book did I realize that its structure is like that of a broken doll, that there is a consciousness in a broken body, that is located in a broken house, that is located in a broken country, that a world which is broken. One thing that I felt happened in the book is that the fact of brokenness made it possible for the narrator to love these different settlements in a way that he never had before. She has come to hate her body, she has come to really hate or resent the home that has become so destructive to her and her partner. He feels a lot of resentment towards his country and those three things and the very fact of their breakdown makes him realize how precious they are to him. And it was interesting to me that there was a relationship between being broken and love or care which the book talks about a lot. It’s about what it means to care about things and what it means to care.
What made you want to depict the chaos of a hospital during a pandemic?
This book is also about illness. In some ways, I thought of it as 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 setting. And I was interested in the fact that you’re already isolated, being in the ICU ward. Being in the ICU ward during Covid, you become doubly isolated. Then, I became interested in how big a burden or strain the COVID pandemic is on these different systems of America. So, this is a huge strain on American societies that in 2020 felt as if they were falling apart. Covid also put a lot of pressure on hospital systems and it was interesting for me to know how the system maintains itself under this pressure. And perhaps the thing that interested me most about life in a hospital were the relationships formed between caregivers and patients. In a way, it connects the reader to my other books because all my books are interested in what I call asymmetric relationships – relationships that are experienced very differently on both sides. The kind of intense connection and dependence and feelings of gratitude and need that a patient feels toward an ICU nurse is very different from the feelings of a nurse because for the nurse, it is a job. I wanted to capture the different types of relationships that are possible in the ICU ward. All my books are interested in relationships made possible in particular places and in some sense compromised—relationships that are by no means made easy by the coming together of individuals of equal power.
I also want to talk about how the nature of desire changes. The narrator has felt intense sexual desire his entire adult life and when he arrives at the hospital, he is given beta blockers and several other drugs that are attacking his system.
This was very interesting for me as a writer because all three of my books have the same narrator. In the first two books, the narrator is a character who is ruled by desire and is dominated by his own desire. So it was really interesting for me to ask who this character would be if he didn’t have his will. It was interesting for me to have this question for my narrator: What if I took away desire not only from my character but also as a writer? What if I take away sex? It was interesting for me to see what happens to the writing. I think the big theme of all three of my books is this question – how do humans make meaning? I think the big three, maybe four, ways that we make meaning are through art, through religion and through the idea of God, and we make meaning through love and sex. So, it was interesting for me to take away sex, which has been the primary way of making meaning for my narrator, and see what happens to other aspects of meaning-making. What happens is that they all become luminous. They matter more.
Read more: Review – Little Rain by Garth Greenwell
Why does your book have that title? little rain, “Little rain” is a phrase that comes from a medieval poem that was turned into a very popular song of the sixteenth century. And this is a poem I like. When I was a high school teacher, I often taught this poem on the first day of class. I can’t remember when I realized that poetry was going to be an important part of the book. In the early weeks when I was working on the book I realized that this poem would be important. I slowly realized that I wanted little rain Partly this is the title because the poem appears only once in the first section of the book but really, I want the reader to keep thinking about the poem throughout the book, especially at the end when the narrator goes home. There is a line near the second part of the poem, ‘Christ if my love was in my arms and I was in my bed again’ (Christ if my love was in my arms and I was in my bed again)And there’s a moment at the end of the book where the narrator stops right outside his bedroom. His partner is already waiting for him in bed, and he pauses, and it’s as if before arriving at the experience he’s wanted more than anything else while he’s been in the hospital – sitting in his bed with his partner. Desires to stay at – and he stays in that state of longing to stay a little longer. I hope readers will remember little rainSongs and poetry, again. One reason I created this title was that I hoped it would allow the poem to be contained throughout the book, rather than just a scene appearing in the early pages.
You are also a poet. Can you tell us about your writing process? Did you know that you wanted to make music and poetry a bigger part little rain Before you start writing?Yes, I did in some ways. This is a storyteller who has built his life around art and a storyteller who believes that art is a source of infinite value, that art can fill life with value, and I felt I needed to show that. What does it mean? This meant placing long pieces, like a long essay, on a very short poem. For me, it felt necessary because I felt 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 something else. Will come. Back to you, that creates a circuit between you and the work of art; And that’s a circle of meaning. I knew I would have to write a lot about the art in the book to show what it would mean.
Sharmistha Jha is a freelance writer and editor.
