GEORGE SAUNDERS
George Saunders is an American short-story writer, novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Syracuse University, New York. The author of numerous short-story collections, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000) and In Persuasion Nation (2006), his stories are regularly featured in acclaimed anthologies including O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. In 2017, Saunders won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo. His latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a series of discursive commentaries on short stories by Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol, based on a course he teaches at Syracuse. He discussed the mechanics of his writing process, the elusiveness of the short story and writing during the Trump presidency with TANK.
Interview by Matthew JanneyPortrait by Chloe Aftel
Matthew Janney The full title of your latest book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life. How do these seven featured stories do that?
George Saunders There are so many that could have been in the book. It is based on a class I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and there are probably 40 stories that we do over the course of a semester. I picked these seven because they seemed to teach the best over the years. Whenever we would get to these stories in the syllabus, the class would kind of come alive. These aren’t really even my favourite stories, but when you put them in conversation with a bunch of young writers, a little explosion happens.
MJ You’ve been teaching these for 20 years. How have these stories changed over time for you?
GS In the two years I wrote the book, I came to such a deeper understanding of the stories that I felt a little guilty for teaching them all those years without having gone to that depth. I noticed this time that almost all the stories, and certainly the Chekhov, worked in a way that I hadn’t noticed before, which is through self-contradiction. I think of a story as having a viewpoint, political or moral, and then that viewpoint goes into the world and gets tested, but Chekhov was working in a much more sophisticated way, which is presenting several viewpoints and letting them resonate against one another. I guess at this advanced age, it felt to me very much like a form of embodied wisdom about how life should be lived. You know, we’re pretty good at occupying that sort of ambiguity. So I started to see these stories as sort of scale models or like training modules for how to be a little more open in the world and not to be so quick to judge, which I really hadn’t noticed before.
MJ You end the book on a note of openness by refraining from any attempt to reduce the short story or offer a pithy, catch-all definition.
GS For me, it kind of amounts to a recommitment to the form a little bit. You get to a certain point in your neurology, as an older person, where you start to become a little too sure of what’s what. You solidify. And it was really lovely to read these stories and be humbled by them, and then to be re-energised about the possibility of the form. I imagine it’s a little bit like somebody who’s running a long race and then they get to take a little bit of a rest. They sit by a river or something; they just take stock. It was really beautiful in that way, and I think they will keep speaking to me into the future.
MJ In your commentary on Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”, you write: “That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.” Have you found a common ingredient to stories that become like life or does it depend on how the story interacts with itself?
GS It seems to me that there’s something about the editing process. The writer, through a kind of severity, can excise the parts of the text that are just him or her. I’m really talking about compression. There’s just a tautness in these stories, sometimes it’s a kind of a relaxed tautness, but the personal kind of annoying, ego-based writer has somehow been extracted from these. So in the Tolstoy essay, I talk a lot about factuality, and it seems to me that’s a pretty strong valence in fiction. If it’s been winnowed down to facts and action, that’s what makes the words disappear and the story come forward. For Syracuse, we have to read admissions manuscripts every February and we might each read close to 200 stories from young writers. In that process, if there’s a feeling that there’s a human being speaking to you from the other side of the text, you know it when you feel it. It’s very hard to deny and you kind of fall in love with the person, but I’m not quite sure if it could be reduced. It’s really hard to prescribe and it’s almost impossible to miss when you see it. But I think as I mentioned in the book, it might have something to do with your sort of unspoken, implicit idea of who the reader is.
MJ You describe the writer as like the driver of a motorcycle, pulling the reader along in a sidecar. I wonder if you carry this image with you when you’re writing?
GS I don’t think it’s really an image, but a stance, and the way that I’m enacting that stance is imitation. I’m trying to imitate myself as if I haven’t ever read the thing before. So that’s another way of saying I have a lot of respect for my reader. My reader is exactly as smart as me because it’s me. It’s just a little mental setting that I’ve learned to do over the years. When I sit down to edit something, I just do a little internal click, and I disavow the story, I don’t know it. It’s just some writing. Then I start reading it and I can feel those little micro-flutters in my mind, that you like something, you don’t like something, that you’re pulled in or you’re resisting. In that mode, I’m very open, willing to make a change. But I think all of that is a form of this enacted respect, because I’m saying I’m not going to leave this paragraph intact because yesterday I liked it. I’m really going to be open to it anew, over and over.
MJ What I think this book does really well is it shows you all the different ways you can derive satisfaction from the story. There’s Tolstoy and the majestic accuracy of his observation. That’s very different to Gogol and his kind of fantastical and surreal humour. We consider the short story as a single genre, but it’s such a capacious term for such different styles and genres and formats, isn’t it?
GS The story is anything that keeps you reading, I suppose. There are so many different ways to charm like that, and then it becomes a bigger question, which is about communication and human relations. And for me, I was writing this during the pandemic and during the Trump presidency and sometimes I felt like, “Wow, why am I writing about 19th-century Russia?” But I took a lot of comfort from just reminding myself of that little microcosmic system, which is reader-writer. That’s big; actually, that’s everything. That’s what’s failing here right now. There are so many people talking without any sense that there’s an equal person on the other end. So I think that’s what makes the story so lovely: it absolutely will not be defined. The minute you say a story must do this, you’ve already made a dinosaur of yourself, so even this late in the game for me, I really don’t know what they are. That’s why I wrote the book. And coming out of that, now, I’m having a pretty productive period, partly because I’m like, “I don’t know fuck all about this.” I find that’s really a refreshing artistic stance.
MJ In the commentary to “Master and Man”, you speak about repeated patterns, expected sections endings and cadences, which you say, create meaning. Can you elaborate on this?
GS One of the things that this book has made me is just amazed at the level of organisation in these pieces. If you read those stories, you’re going to feel that organisation. If you then analyse the stories and identify that organisation is really there, it raises your internal bar a little bit. When I’m reading one of my stories in a late stage now, I’m saying, “OK, is there any other way to make it a more organised system?” I also try to titrate into the book that the danger of this kind of analytical thinking is it becomes too mathematical and it becomes so efficiency-minded that you’re not very generous with yourself as a writer. So I think partly we feel the efficiency, but we also feel the embellishments of efficiency or even the denials of efficiency. That’s also part of the artistic pleasure. We’ve all read stories that were so mechanical that they just felt condescending. So I think that’s part of it, too. We recognise that being constantly thoughtful is the goal in life. OK, but you can’t. So it’s an absolute versus relative thing. We do want to be efficient; we want to use everything. And yet, you know, totally otherwise, we get blocked off. Take David Foster Wallace. He’ll do three paragraphs that are brilliant. They’re kind of neurotic, you know. In your imaginary cart, you put: “Extremely intelligent, neurotic narrator who is not that worried about whether I’m with him or not.” So that’s there. And then, later, when that narrator does something to account for or justify those three paragraphs, then it feels like a virtue. Then it doesn’t feel like a long-winded narrator. So that push and pull is always going on, which means you can do anything as long as you notice that you’ve done it and then pledged to try to make that part of the artistic whole.
MJ Speaking of awareness, what are you reading at the moment?
GS I just finished a semester, so now I’m reading Don Quixote. I don’t think I’d ever read the whole thing in sequence before. So that’s my mission. I’m about a tenth of the way through and it’s so good. It’s interesting to try to apply these Russian principles to that book. But I don’t know about that. It’s working on its own, you know? It sounds kind of maudlin, but I just turned 62 last week and felt a kind of converging awareness that I’m not actually going to live forever after all. I’m not going to write 60 books in my life; I’ve got maybe… some number. So I said gently to myself, “OK, let’s kind of be a little bit urgent here, you know, but not too urgent. But let’s try to make it so that when my strength does let out, which it will, at least I will feel that I took a pretty good swing at it.” So this book was helpful in that way. ◉