Russian class
Booker Prize winner George Saunders examines the wit and wisdom of 19th century literary giants, and teaches readers the value of going slowly.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life) by George Saunders
Part way through his essay on Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” George Saunders interrupts himself to admire: “That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life. “But, Lord, it’s harder than it looks.” A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the 2017 Booker Prize winner’s new book, is a series of meditations on reading and writing, how fiction works, the short story form and the structures of narrative, built around a selection of 19th century Russian short stories from his course at Syracuse University, in upstate New York.
“What I learned writing this book was how rewarding it is to pay attention to something relatively small, very deeply,” Saunders tells me on Zoom from his “little basement dungeon” in Oneonta, a couple of hours’ drive from Syracuse. “To spend that much time on seven stories – I probably read each of them 50, 100 times, and wrote eight or nine different drafts of the essays.
“There was something really beautiful about that process, because each draft got better, and I would go back and read the story and suddenly notice something I hadn’t seen before.”
The stories – three by Anton Chekhov, two by
Tolstoy and one each by Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol – show Chekhov’s structure and humour, Tolstoy’s exactitude and social observation, Turgenev’s succinct character sketches, Gogol’s wild bureaucratic illogics.
“The Russians, for me,” says Saunders, “were kind of a gateway drug to serious literature because as an 18- or 19-year-old, I could understand them as philosophical writers, which of course they are.”
Readers, though, are not invited simply for a well-selected anthology. Saunders doesn’t allow us merely to enjoy A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – his third non-fiction title – we must also understand the composition of the pond water. And we are here for an avuncular dose of engaging pedagogy.
For example, Saunders compels us to read the opening story, Chekhov’s “In the Cart”, one page at a time – a stop-start approach, he notes in the text, that readers may find extremely annoying. After each page of Chekhov, Saunders pauses our reading to discuss the story’s unfolding: where we have come to and where we expect this story to go. Will Marya change her life, leave her unsatisfying teaching job, find a good man? Or will the icy Russian life grind on unchanged?
Lesson: how good fiction works, Saunders writes (citing film producer Stuart Cornfeld), is that “every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a nontrivial way”.
Saunders examines each chosen story for how it can inspire the reader or writer – not necessarily what makes it the perfect story in itself. We are reading to observe escalation of the action, and for the creation and disruption of patterns of expectation. And: “As we read a story [let’s imagine] we’re dragging a cart labelled ‘Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing’.”
In Norman Mailer’s 2003 book on writing, The Spooky Art, he recounts the story (or legend) of Tolstoy saying to Chekhov, “Some of your short stories are so good, I would have been pleased to have written them myself. But, Chekhov, I must tell you, you are a terrible playwright, you are even worse than Shakespeare.”
“Tolstoy is so interesting,” says Saunders. “He had such strong opinions and I can almost imagine him
reading Shakespeare. Those flights of language: he wasn’t a big fan of that. He was very much a quotidian master.”
Lesson: clarity of language. Even in fiction,
Tolstoy was all fact, “No judgment, no poetry. Just flat observation.”
But what path led an American writer of 11 books – including acclaimed story collections Pastoralia (2000) and Tenth of December (2013) – to spend 20 years immersed with 19th century Russians?
“The Russians! I was working class and didn’t read a lot of literature in school. I was a guitar player and weightlifter. My early reading in high school was all self-help,” says Saunders. “I was trying to figure out how to live so that I could avoid some of the pitfalls I saw in our neighbourhood. I understood that writing and reading is moral, ethical: you know, how should we be living on Earth? At some point, I blundered into Dostoevsky during college.”
The book’s subtitle is not just about reading and writing but life, and for Saunders, the art and beauty of the stories took on a particular poignancy during extended lockdowns in the US.
“During that quarantine period, I kept having these flashes of what it was like to be alive, how amazing that period was [before Covid-19], where you could just be in a crowded saloon, or you could be on a bus,” he says. “In this pandemic especially, it reminded me that, as messed up as the world can be and as frustrating, and as crazy-making, our minds are pretty good. And our minds, if we give them a narrow enough task, really like to focus in. So I was rewarded personally, just by being happy. I’d go up to my writing shed feeling worried about the world, spend a day with Chekhov and my own mind, and come down feeling like, ‘this is kind of a nice world’.”
And perhaps slowing our readings will improve our lives, help us to connect with the world, the fullness of an experience like a swim in the rain. This may be the book’s most profound lesson.
“Part of the reason I wrote this book was, I noticed when I was reading the stories, my mind was sort of like a skimming rock: it wasn’t quite sinking into the stories the way it usually would,” says Saunders. “When I’m reading well, images arise in rich context and the story seems to be happening in my mind, but that time I was almost reading them from memory.
And I thought, ‘Oh, I know why.’ I was doing promotion for Lincoln in the Bardo [his first novel, which won the 2017 Booker Prize] and I was on my phone or the computer all the time. The written word was not being given a chance to get in there. I had a chance to get off screens and spend more time with the written text on the page, which is what I did for the two years of writing.
“It changed my relation to the written word.
I’m reading much more deeply now than I was five years ago. I’m sure there’s something that happens neurologically when you’re reading pixels, skimming the way we do on social media.
“Your mind is ready to work in whatever way you ask it to. If you say, ‘Be facile and agitated and angry,’ it’ll be happy to oblige. Whereas if you say, ‘Let’s slow down and try to cultivate curiosity and love and compassion,’ it’ll be happy to do that, too. Since I have limited years left on the planet, I’m gonna opt for the latter.”