THE UNNAMED NARRATOR of Small Rain will be familiar to readers of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Cleanness: poet, teacher, expat, gay. Those two books of fiction trace the poet’s life in Bulgaria, where he teaches English literature to high schoolers, though a difficult childhood under a violent patriarch in Kentucky intrudes on the present. That present is lonely, loose; the romance at the heart of What Belongs to You germinates in a toilet. Small Rain, by comparison, is a domestic novel. The poet has now spent seven years in Iowa, first as a graduate student, then as a professor of poetry, alongside his partner, the Spanish poet-professor L. They lead a quiet life of the mind in a home they own.
Small Rain chronicles the two or so weeks of the unnamed poet’s close brush with death, from the onset of pain to the first days out of the hospital. He has suffered an infrarenal aortic dissection; the inner wall of one of his arteries has torn, which puts him at risk of death by burst aneurysm. Attending medical staff describe him as an “interesting case,” a “conundrum,” an “ER doctor’s dream.” Torn arteries usually afflict older people, people with pre-existing conditions. But the poet has passed his life in good health, or what he had believed to be good health, and like no rock star. Now, he can’t shake the feeling—a common one, in the works of Greenwell—that while things have appeared fine, even banal, at the surface, something subterranean has been working against him.
The most obvious possible culprit is a bout of syphilis suffered some years earlier (see What Belongs to You). The poet contracted it from his then-partner, a sex worker named Mitko, and endured a medical fiasco that resulted in his being treated with a second-rate antibiotic, the usual one being out of stock in Bulgaria. As he lies in his hospital bed, the poet of Small Rain remembers his “sense of luck at having escaped real consequence—since it was luck, dumb luck, not to suffer as Schubert or Flaubert or Keats had suffered.” His suffering, he thought, had been of a lesser order, that of putting up with “doctors, the bureaucracy of hospitals, the huge pills that made me sick for weeks. I had thought I had been lucky but maybe I was wrong.” Maybe something worse was coming for him.
He is in his early forties when that something ferries him across the “gulf that separates the sick from the well—or what seems like a gulf, I had crossed it in a flash.” Though what seems like a flash is also a gulf; he keels over on his sofa for eight hours with severe abdominal pain—“They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale”—and then suffers for another four days before finally driving himself to the emergency room, where he then waits for several hours before being seen. The hospital is full of Covid patients. K. had an easier time getting into the castle.
The poet knows that his reluctance to seek medical attention, “an American attitude or a Kentucky attitude, maybe,” is also a reluctance to face the gravity of his situation. Somehow, the long wait consoles him:
I had made my decision to come and now, for a while, there weren’t any decisions, other people would decide, and so long as they hadn’t decided I could relax in their not-yet-deciding . . . as if so long as they hadn’t spoken whatever was happening wasn’t real, as if there could be no catastrophe so long as the catastrophe wasn’t named.
A world in which things are not real until they are named—the poet knows it’s a fantasy. Still it buys him time, or makes the passing of time more bearable. But when the catastrophe is named—for him, not yet for the reader—he doesn’t understand what the doctors are telling him. He attempts a close-read: “The words didn’t mean anything, I only understood one of them, aortic; 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.” All that time spent studying trochees and iambs, learning sonnets by heart—what good can it do him now? He laments his lack of hard, practical knowledge:
I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well all be magic; and now my life depended on it, this brute metal the nurse secured to my wrist with three clumsy stitches, rough Xs binding it in place.
Alone in the hospital and loosed from his bearings, he attests to believing once and for all that poetic knowledge—the acquisition of which he has devoted his life to—is useless. Perhaps, in better times, he would have championed that uselessness, calling it purposive without purpose (elsewhere he mentions Kant’s kingdom of ends), but now he despairs of the fact that there is nothing his notebook can do to save him.
Why, then, has he brought it to the ER? Why does he bother to call the metal at his wrist “brute”? Why, when his condition is named again—now for the reader—does the poet attend so closely to its phrasing? “What has happened to you is a tear in the inner layer, here a line arced to the left, it creates something like a flap that then blood flows around, making what is called a false lumen—false lumen, I thought, such a beautiful phrase—the blood going where it shouldn’t go.” He can’t stop himself from putting language to what he sees, or from scouring language for beauty. This aesthetic (or aestheticizing) engagement with the world promises to carry him through his crisis, even if he doesn’t yet know what “through” means.
THE LATE POET, critic, and professor James Longenbach—poignantly thanked for his mentorship in Greenwell’s acknowledgements—vouched for something he called “lyric knowledge.” In a close reading of “Western Wind,” the anonymous sixteenth-century song from which Greenwell takes the title of this novel, Longenbach argues that “line by line, sentence by sentence, we’re made to feel not that we’re receiving the results of an inquiry but that the inquiry is taking shape as the poem unfolds.” Lyric knowledge is more than knowledge of lyric, it is knowledge arrived at, experienced, through lyric, each time a poem, a good poem, is read or recited.
Greenwell thinks like a poet; his novels think like poems think. He lingers in contradiction, oscillates between negation and assertion, asks questions, fails to make up his mind. The poet of Small Rain wants to die alone; he also wants L at his bedside. He claims poetry is of “no help at all,” but he recites it constantly in the ward. He longs to return to his life before the catastrophe, to pay closer attention to its rhythms, but even from his hospital bed, he is taking care to do just that; and even before his sickness, he earned his living by paying attention. We need poems, he claims, because they “exist in a different relationship to attention and to time. . . . Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, . . . and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.”
In his search for the origin—but really, the meaning—of his suffering, the poet leaves no stone unturned. He regrets not having exercised more; not having seen a primary-care physician; not having eaten as well as he could have; he regrets his previous use of poppers and the sexual risks he took in his youth; he regrets having bought a house with L, an endeavor that has caused great financial stress; he regrets the commissions he has felt compelled to accept since, “two years of real writing” lost to “fluff, anything that would pay.”
The flip side of this regret, usually hedged with doubt, is a reappraisal of his blessings. In the early hours of his visit, he describes his body as “a machine I took for granted, a complete mystery,” and as he reflects on “the little cruelties of intimate life” in his relationship with L, he realizes that “I had begun to take our life together for granted, which was the real danger of domesticity.” Things we take for granted are things we don’t notice until something is wrong—ironically, inattention can be the cause of this wrongness. It would appear, from his partner L’s stated resolutions, that this new awareness is shared. L insists that he will cook for them every night once the poet recovers and returns home, that they will go on walks together every day—resolutions the poet shares even as he questions how long they will last. Ultimately, the poet regrets regret itself:
Regret will come whatever you do, with any action or inaction; it’s a false kind of reasoning, a kind of divination, you might as well read the stars. There’s no proof against regret, was what I meant, and no way to assign it a weight among other possible consequences; I distrust how it can swamp our reasoning, it’s always a motive to do anything, or a motive to leave anything undone.
For Greenwell, who trades in rumination, ambivalence, and circumambulation, a character confined to his bed—a character reduced to pure contemplation—is ideal. The beeping monitors, an incompetent nurse, an unbearable urge to piss—these external forces ramp up the narrative tension by reminding us of, and at times threatening to inflict, the poet’s death. The doctors come back with negative results for each new test they run, including one assessing the possibility of a syphilitic infection lying in wait. It is a difficult truth of this novel that it leaves one of the biggest questions it raises—the cause of the poet’s infirmity—unanswered. If we have been reading to find out what went wrong, we are now forced to look back for something else. Our attention has been redirected. Small Rain is one man’s reflections on a life lived and not lived, with his partner and in solitude, on poetry and music. All the rest, it turns out, is backdrop; it’s there so we can see what’s before us more clearly.
DURING ROUNDS, medical students encircle the poet as though he were the corpse in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. He hates being ogled, even as he recognizes the impulse in himself, he who seeks out videos of natural disasters: “It was a terrible tendency to indulge, though really who knew why we were drawn to such things, whether it was pity or empathy, a desire to share in others’ suffering, or some darker exaltation we take in catastrophe.” This darker exaltation, when applied to the self, proves foundational to Greenwell’s body of work. “You’re attached to your suffering,” a friend tells the poet when the poet, in a past life, refuses therapy. One thinks of the opening of What Belongs to You, when the poet, having been ditched mid-sex, reflects that his pleasure “wasn’t lessened by [Mitko’s] absence, that what was surely a betrayal . . . had only refined our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would.” To indulge in suffering has been how Greenwell’s narrators have, thus far, made meaning of their pain.
But the poet of Small Rain has changed; he has generally become more skeptical of his pain, wishing, instead, to “undull myself to the luck we had had, that I had had, the luck of the love I felt embracing” L. His talk of having been dulled can be hard to believe, because even before the catastrophe, he was exceptionally attentive and grateful; he loved watching sparrows while sitting outside at a café (“They were wonderful, really, commonness didn’t cancel wonder, or I didn’t see why it should, not all the time”) just as he loves watching sparrows through his hospital window. Perhaps his very capacity for attention and appreciation enable him to notice where he slips, or that, as attentive as he is, he still misses out on so much. “I had let myself go, as they say,” the poet observes of his weight gain, “though that wasn’t what it had felt like; I had felt like I was holding on with all my strength, like I was just barely holding on.” A similar melancholia animates his descriptions of cooking too little, looking too much at his phone, speaking too sharply to L or feeling too little for him (“it had become easy to forget him a little, to forget the force of my feeling for him”).
This fixation on undulling, elsewhere described as “disciplined attention,” undergirds the poet’s reflections on medical care, domestic partnership, the artist’s life, and the “arts of living.” “The disciplined attention of art,” the poet argues in an extended close reading (itself an act of disciplined attention) of a George Oppen poem, “is a moral discipline, even when the content of that morality isn’t obvious, in the way Cézanne paints an apple, say, or the bowl that gathers the apples, the hundreds of strokes he makes, each an act of seeing, a judgment, each an attempt to activate in us that awareness we nearly always shut down.” His attempt to undull himself is an attempt to see the beauty in what he has overlooked: “Why does one leaf sparkle and not another, one sparrow claim our attention. Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.”
The poet’s disciplined or “particularizing” attention is contrasted to the attention of the doctors and nurses, “all the precise data they collected from my specific body.” This data, he thinks, “had nothing to do with me, really,” even as he recognizes that this is by necessity, that it is impossible to take in everything. But by reading and writing poems—and, in the case of the poet, by recording his reading experience—we get to try. The impulse to record, the possibility of capturing, via art or criticism (one of this novel’s, and Greenwell’s, primary modes), is viewed with less pessimism here than in his earlier work, where even the description of a boy on a train induces a deconstructionist’s anguish:
Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.
The absence of this line of questioning from Small Rain is at once affirming and disquieting: there is more faith, in this prose, in the redemptive power of art-as-attention; and less concern that, in seeking refuge from the world, one misses anything.
Angelo Hernandez Sias’s latest story appears in the current issue of n+1.