A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long. We’re perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.

He was criticized for this perceived lack of a political or moral stance. Tolstoy’s early assessment: “He is full of talent, he undoubtedly has a very good heart, but thus far he does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.” But this quality is what we love him for now. In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

Any idea we express is just one of many we have within us. In daily life, of course, we choose to identify with, and endorse, and live by, and fight for certain of those ideas and dampen others that, nevertheless, we’re capable of imagining: vestigial traces of philosophies we embraced when young but have since rejected (hello, Ayn Rand), the strange voices in which we used to speak, ideas that we disagree with politically and that make us uncomfortable when we find traces of them within us. If you’re a pro-immigration person, are there anti-immigrant feelings down there inside you? Of course: that’s why you get so emotional when arguing for immigrants’ rights. You’re arguing against that latent part of yourself. When you get mad at a political opponent, it’s because he’s reminding you of a part of yourself with which you’re uncomfortable. You could, if forced, do a decent imitation of an anti-immigrant person. (Similarly, that angry anti-immigration advocate is railing against his inner leftist.)

If you gather ten writers in a room, ranging from the great to the bad, and ask them to put together a list of the prime virtues of fiction, you won’t get much disagreement. It turns out, there is such a list of prime virtues, one we’ve been casually compiling as we’ve worked our way through these Russian stories: Be specific and efficient. Use a lot of details. Always be escalating. Show, don’t tell. And so on. The respective craft talks of those ten writers will all involve some restatement/personalization of those prime virtues, plus or minus a few, with some likable variation in the anecdotes they use to sing the praises of those virtues and claim that they always faithfully work by them.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. That’s it. Over and over.

It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

The point is: if you start with that sad little swath of prose and then begin (to use another fancy technical term) “energetically messing with it,” per exactly your taste (no defense or rationalization needed), it will start to become a more highly organized system. It just will. And it will have something of you in it. It will, potentially, have a lot of you in it, nothing but you in it.

The choosing, the choosing, that’s all we’ve got.

“I have decided to stick with love,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said. “Hate is too great a burden to bear.” And we feel that this is the conclusion Alyosha’s life has brought him to as well.

A few great hearts have urged a different way. Tolstoy is saying, maybe, that Alyosha is just such a (rare, spiritual) person. Was Jesus not serious when he said, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you”? Did Gandhi not mean it when he said, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”? Was the Buddha being facetious when he said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule”?

“So-called great men are always terribly contradictory,” Tolstoy told Gorky. “That is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself.”

The story makes a beautiful case for the argument that making a beautiful case for cheerful obedience is a gift to tyrants. Which is it? The wonder of the story is that it fails to answer that question; or, rather, that it answers—it succeeds in answering—in favor of both views, simultaneously.

The most artful and truthful thing is sometimes simply that which allows us to avoid being false: the swerving away, the deletion, the declining to decide, the falling silent, the waiting to see, the knowing when to quit.

Once Gorky asked Tolstoy whether he agreed with an opinion Tolstoy had assigned to one of his characters. “Are you very anxious to know?” Tolstoy asked. “Very,” said Gorky. “Then I shan’t tell you,” said Tolstoy.

These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That’s the essence of these activities: ascertaining whether connection is happening, and where, and why.

whatever fiction does to or for us, it’s not simple. There’s a certain way of talking about stories that treats them as a kind of salvation, the answer to every problem; they are “what we live by,” and so on. And, to an extent, as you can see by this book, I agree. But I also believe, especially as I get older, that we should keep our expectations humble. We shouldn’t overestimate or unduly glorify what fiction does. And actually, we should be wary of insisting that it do anything in particular. The critic Dave Hickey has written about this, the notion that saying what art should do might enable a reactionary establishment to start saying what it must do, and then to begin silencing those artists whose works aren’t doing that. In other words, whenever we get up on the soapbox and sing fiction’s praises, explaining how good it is for everyone, we’re actually limiting its freedom to be…whatever it wants to be (perverse, contrary, frivolous, objectionable, useless, too difficult for any but a few to read, and so on).

When somebody cuts you off in traffic, don’t you always know which political party they belong to (that is, the opposite of yours)? But, of course, you don’t. It remains to be seen. Everything remains to be seen. Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It’s a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can’t always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story, but feeling that way even briefly reminds us that such a state exists and creates the aspiration in us to strive to be in that state more often.

Out the door of my writing shed are some things. What things? Yes, exactly. It’s up to me to tell you, and in telling you, I will shortly be making them. How I tell them is what they’ll be. Are those “shaggy sad redwoods, speaking of the long defeat that is life”? “Proud, magnificent red-brown friends of my working days, connecting me with innumerable generations past”? “A stand of redwoods”? “Some trees”? Depends on the day, depends on my mind. All these descriptions are true, and none of them is, at all.