Small Rain

Review

I’ve been eyeballing Greenwell’s bluecovered Small Rain since the hardback hit my local bookstore’s shelves in 2024. I felt it reaching out for me, I could tell it would be sad and I didn’t know what flavour that sadness would be.

I finally bought a copy a few months ago and have let it set on the living room table, to stare at for a few weeks, then I put it on my TBR shelf, away from the other up-next books that usually stack on that table. A few weeks ago I finished a book and without thinking at all I went to the shelf and pulled it down. Something about me knew it was time. Reading the first page, I started to worry—the writing is near-stream-of-consciousness, a style that exhausted me recently reading Mrs. Dalloway. Then, on the last line of the first page, that equally exhausting word: pandemic.

I’ve avoided COVID-set books. It was such a strange time, so tense and so busy for me. On watching Ari Aster’s Eddington—the first piece of COVID storytelling I consciously elected to watch—I realized how much I did not want to be put back into those times, even though in many ways the intense work of it produced in me the best mental health I’ve probably ever consistently had. And a movie lasts a few hours, a book one might float through over weeks

Yet, the COVID of it all is a backdrop. While not insignificant, the medical dramaturgy of it all does not focus on that virus, but it does set an anxious tone in the hospital, in the waiting room, and passing amongst the crowds. How often do you remember stepping into the grocery store in those days, and finding it either deserted and eerie, or full and menacing?

The most powerful parts of the book center on the unnamed narrator’s longing for visits with his s/o, L. Such depth of love as rendered through lowering blood pressures, the comfort in the scent of a loved one, and in the enchanting effect one you love can have on the unquiet mind:

The pleasure was in not talking, in how he quieted the anxious monologue running through my head, nonstop, except maybe for an hour when the pain pill hit and I floated free of voices. It must be something similar, the chemical burst of his presence, the sight of him triggering the same reward center in the brain. He was better than oxy, I thought, looking at him, and it made me smile, so that he said What, and when I said nothing he said what again, tell me, and I told him that I was so happy to see him, that I loved him with my whole heart.

p199-100, emphasis mine.

An unrivaled comfort, even if one has spent days anxious about seeing such a person, worried and nervous, and then to have it all melt away and for the time together to be so quiet, so comfortable. To want to soak them up and pray it charges some hidden battery within.

Greenwell’s prose wanders through the current and the past, with the narrator’s memory and his thoughts on what death would mean, his sense of impermanence. I felt kinship with some of these passages in particular:

I was nothing to her, really, I was her job, she would clock out and enter her real life, which had nothing to do with me, and in a week or a month there would be no memory of me, I wouldn’t have left any impression at all, whether I lived or died I would be entirely erased; or if anything remained it would be some unindividuated fact, divorced from my person.

Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace.

But why don’t you feel it, she asked me. I don’t know, I said, but I don’t. Maybe something had been broken in me, I had sometimes thought, broken early, so that always I felt a sense of detachment, always I felt on the verge of disappearing from my life, of slipping free and leaving no trace, no tie had ever really anchored me. . . . Maybe everyone feels the way I do, that it takes an act of will to hang on to a life, maybe it’s a myth to think anyone fits so seamlessly there’s no chance of slipping free.

This is a difficult book to express feelings about. I had a hard time putting it down, I felt so within the narrator that I’ve spent the morning forgetting that I am not fresh out of the hospital with some major cataclysm behind me. It feels ridiculous to write, but such was the immersion of it.

Two other parts that I admire and respect, in different ways:

Greenwell describes a little about gay life, or some gay lives, in such clear and uncritical ways. There is a long passage on 122-123, where the narrator recollects being introduced to poppers, going into a video store, “the warren of little cubicles and the open space with the large screen where men sat and raised the brown bottles to their noses, sometimes with another man between their legs and sometimes alone, jerking themselves off. I loved those places…” The scene goes on in one long, unbroken paragraph to describe “the camaraderie of filth,” in a way that is at once alluring in the way many sort of taboo, sexually-liberated places like that can be, but also in a loving way, without judgement or condescension. It might seem odd, to describe a dingy video store or a bathhouse that exists almost exclusively for strangers to fuck as something quite so associated with (in my mind) high-brow sexual liberation. Not all queer people want anything to do with such places, and, like many things, some can find the idea titillating as fantasy but terrifying as reality. There is room for all in this text, and it feels lovely to read about when written with such love.

In another, Greenwell shows our narrator experiencing another vaguely taboo but common experience: the feeling of a lovely shit:

. . . I had barely lifted the gown and gathered it around my waist like a skirt, before everything rushed out, scalding and liquid, and the intensity of the relief I felt made me realize how much I had been suffering. I hadn’t been able to shit since the tear happened, even though I felt bloated and full and like shitting would have helped; for several days it had been impossible, and as I emptied myself finally—that was what it felt like, like opening a corked vessel and emptying it out—I realized how crucial to humanness that was, too, being able to shit.

The passage put me heavily in the mind of Hervé Guibert, particularly some parts of Propaganda Death. I didn’t have the reaction to Guibert’s scatology that I had to it here, though. With Guibert, I could feel the provocateur, could feel the effort to repulse and alienate. And I could also feel how raw Guibert was in his writing, so new. I don’t feel any of the provocateur in Greenwell, and maybe especially not in this segment or the earlier noted segment of the ‘atmosphere of filth.’

Quite the contrary, I feel that Greenwell has depicted these moments as maybe some of the most human moments of life. Common, in some ways more than others, and critical. The body’s mechanisms and how they pump and churn, driving us strangely.

I would be surprised if Greenwell has never read Guibert. I went for a snoop on his Goodreads (I can’t recall ever doing this before) and there is no evidence of it, yet I can feel in my bones that it must be so. I was unsurprised and pleased to find his love for Isherwood (particularly A Single Man, which I adore) and John Williams’ Stoner. They do all feel present in Small Rain, not as inspirations or points of reference, even, but as progenitors. I am sure that this, like those, will be a common revisit for me.

Notes

• p46 - It was one of my favorite poems, authorless, mysterious, the first two lines unparsable: Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne, a sentence with a broken back. . . . Think of the significance of the west, the direction the sun sets, the region of death; could he be longing for death, I would ask them, is he at that pitch of extremity; and what is the small rain, isn’t it beautiful, the weird adjective, how can rain be small; and does he want it, the speaker of the poem, does he long for the rain, is that how we should understand the cracked syntax; and isn’t the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can’t quite make sense of it, settled sense, I mean, for how it won’t stay still; isn’t the non-sense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our attention into it, what makes it not just a message—though it is a message, I would say to them, all art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there’s a kind of sense only non-sense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible.
• p83 - He was just coming for an hour, I told her, he would have to leave then to teach, and she reminded me that I could only have one visitor a day, that even if L left early nobody else could come. But I didn’t have anybody else, I thought, nobody I would want to see me like this. Seven years in Iowa but I hadn’t really put down roots, not fully, I left whenever I could and spent months out of town, with L or on my own. And the worst thing about the city was that it was so transient, that hardly anybody stayed, all my friends from graduate school had fled as soon as they got their degrees; and faculty left too, almost everybody from that first dinner with L had moved away . . .
• p87 - I had been asked a question once, in one of those places, about what I would like to tell my younger self, since most of the poems in my first book had been about the misery of childhood (childhood is not health, I said again and again, there’s no bigger lie in literature).
• p91 - There was nothing in that house but violence, no love, only violence, or if there was love there was only baffled love, curdled love, my love for my father and my brother, my brother’s love, his desperate love. It was love I saw on his face when my father struck it but love there was nothing to do with, love only good for the garbage, love for the trash. Maybe my father felt it too, that baffled love, felt it for us, I mean, I doubt it but maybe it was so. The house L and I had made was nothing like that, it was full of love we had use for, full of love and still there were times I felt a kind of rage I didn’t know what to do with, not against L, exactly, mostly not against anything I could name.
• p91 - There were things one couldn’t apologize for, I knew, irreparable things, and if I hadn’t quite committed one I felt the potential for it. I remembered a line from a novel I loved, I have the germs of every human infirmity in me; everything my father was I could become, which would be hell, I thought, actual hell, I promised myself I would never make L cry again. But they’re inevitable, the little cruelties of intimate life.
• p99-100 - The pleasure was in not talking, in how he quieted the anxious monologue running through my head, nonstop, except maybe for an hour when the pain pill hit and I floated free of voices. It must be something similar, the chemical burst of his presence, the sight of him triggering the same reward center in the brain. He was better than oxy, I thought, looking at him, and it made me smile, so that he said What, and when I said nothing he said what again, tell me, and I told him that I was so happy to see him, that I loved him with my whole heart.
• p116 - I thought of the Gospel of Thomas, the line everyone quotes about being saved by what is inside you, by bringing it forth, but then there’s its corollary, that darker promise Jesus makes that what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
• p122-123 - . . . I had been asked so many times already, about my medical history, about recent traumas, illegal drugs, I paused after saying no; I said Well, yes, maybe, amyl nitrate. Sometimes I did use poppers recreationally, I said, it hadn’t occurred to me to mention it before, I hardly thought of them as drugs. This wasn’t really true; I had withheld it from the other doctors, because I didn’t think it was relevant, and also I had never thought of them as dangerous. I knew there were warnings, that they could interact with certain medications; but they were so common, ubiquitous really, and no one I knew had suffered any ill effects Thank you for telling me that, the woman had said, which struck me as odd, and then as she resumed checking my joints—she was moving from my head to my toes, at every point bending and palpating—she asked me how long I had been using them, and how often. Just in the past few years, I said, which was true. In my teens and twenties men had offered them to me, and there was a video store I used to go to in Manhattan, on Eighth Ave, where the whole upstairs reeked of them, the warren of little cubicles and the open space with the large screen where men sat and raised the brown bottles to their noses, sometimes with another man on his knees between their legs and sometimes alone, jerking themselves off. I loved those places, I still do, sometimes I was there less to have sex myself than just to bask in the atmosphere they made, other men fucking and watching porn together, the camaraderie of filth. I had tried poppers there and other places, too, when a man reached down with the bottle, holding it to one nostril while he pressed the other one shut, always a gentle act, even tender; sometimes it was a way to make someone more compliant, to turn them on and make them more eager, but also it was a concern for pleasure, a desire to draw each other into an altered space. But it never did that for me, I would inhale and feel nothing, or only a high bright tone somewhere deep in my brain that would sharpen eventually to an ache. Only a few years before had I finally felt for myself what I had seen others feel, when a man insisted I use them, it was a scene he liked, a kind of domination, not so tender with him: he held the bottle to my nose and counted down, slowly from ten; he made me hold my breath until he told me to exhale; he repeated it on the other side and I felt a warmth climb up from my chest, rise into my cheeks and to my scalp, and with it a rush of lightness and a buoyancy, not ecstatic exactly but a kind of euphoria. And this was followed by a desire that had nothing to do with my dick; they made me go soft, actually, that doesn’t happen to everybody but it does to me, it was a different kind of intensity I felt, it was like I wanted to dissolve into that atmosphere of filth I loved, and the agent of dissolution was sex, sucking and being fucked. It was a lovely feeling, and the man laughed a little as he saw me feel it, he capped the bottled and ruffled my hair before he slid his cock back into my mouth.
• p124 - I was nothing to her, really, I was her job, she would clock out and enter her real life, which had nothing to do with me, and in a week or a month there would be no memory of me, I wouldn’t have left any impression at all, whether I lived or died I would be entirely erased; or if anything remained it would be some unindividuated fact, divorced from my person.
• p139 - Her blond hair hung loose around her shoulders and on her face there was a tremendous smile, full voltage, an American smile, a smile of triumph, I thought, a smile of that Midwestern confidence and cheer I found so odious, a pernicious smile, privileged and coddled, a smile that had never known hardship or fear, a smile of utter complacent harmony with its world, a smile I had always hated. It was the smile of the enemy, I thought, of course there was animosity between us, instinctive on either side, unearned; that smile was the flag of the enemy’s army, the army of those at peace with the world. Or it was the smile of a girl excited for her first day of work, I told myself, for Christ’s sake.
• p160 - . . . I had barely lifted the gown and gathered it around my waist like a skirt, before everything rushed out, scalding and liquid, and the intensity of the relief I felt made me realize how much I had been suffering. I hadn’t been able to shit since the tear happened, even though I felt bloated and full and like shitting would have helped; for several days it had been impossible, and as I emptied myself finally—that was what it felt like, like opening a corked vessel and emptying it out—I realized how crucial to humanness that was, too, being able to shit.
  • TB: This puts me heavily in the mind of Hervé Guibert, particularly some parts of Propaganda Death,. I didn’t have the reaction I had to it here, though. With Guibert, I could feel the provocateur, could feel the effort to repulse and alienate. And I could also feel how raw Guibert was in his writing, so new. I don’t feel any of the provocateur in Greenwell, and maybe especially not in this segment or the earlier noted segment of the ‘atmosphere of filth.’
• p168 - When I was younger, I felt differently, I wanted to be confrontational, provocative, to get in people’s faces; when I went home to Kentucky I covered my backpack with buttons: We’re queer, we’re here, Silence = Death, another that just read FAGGOT, in capital letters, Pink against a black ground. That seemed meaningful to me then, if somebody was a homophobe I wanted them to declare it, I wanted to have it out with them, to rub their faces in their wrongness,; and maybe I was right, maybe that’s how we should live. But the little gestures I was so disdainful of, the little graces of civility, seem precious to me now, even if they’re a façade or a veneer, even if they’re a lie and everything really is always just the struggle for power, violence root and branch.
• p180 - . . . I guess, that problem that always plays out in poetry, in all art probably, of wanting to be faithful to the concrete, particular thing, which is where the love in art comes from, I think, what I care about most, devotion to the actual; and wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative. One wants to cherish an object in time and also nail it outside time (that was a poem too, an image from a poem, I couldn’t remember which), nail it to eternity; it was a tension you could never resolve, you had to make the tension resonate too.
• p187 - [In a long passage talking about Oppen’s Grecian Urn]. . . It’s a shift of point of view, but more than that, the whole world of the scene springs up around us. And that’s the horror of it, to feel the animal flesh, terrified, being led to slaughter, covered in flowers and moaning in distress. It’s a whole theory of civilization, that image, the flowers and the slaughter, the flowers covering the slaughter. And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.
• p221 - You’re attached to your suffering, a friend said to me, a friend who did believe in therapy, she thought everyone should have a therapist, not as a response to crisis but just as general maintenance, part of the project of being a human being. That seemed a grand way of putting it, melodramatic; I didn’t think I suffered any more acutely than anyone else, though I had gone to the emergency room several weeks earlier, when I had thought I might do myself harm, not in the minor controlled ways I was accustomed to but in large, irreparable ways. That had been melodramatic, it had offended my sense of aesthetics, of good taste. But still it had seemed ordinary to me, something everyone must go through or might go through, a stutter in one’s commitment to life; I would rather risk that than become someone unrecognizable to myself.
• p227 - . . . I thought of his face against mine in the hospital room, the smell he brought of home, and none of it helped, they were like images on water, scattering at my touch. My whole mind was like that, an image on the water, my self quicksilver, anywhere I tried to grasp myself I fled myself, there were no images or poems. And then suddenly I realized I had been repeating something, not a poem, not even a line, but two words I made into a kind of chant, the smallest possible patch of stable ground.
• p235 - [Nursing’s] like teaching, I guess, a relationship that engendered intensity but had transience built in, so that the sign of its success was its ending.
• p239 - Maybe all love does that, I don’t know, maybe all love demolishes one pattern and sets another.
• p249 - What a strange thing a body is, I thought, how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail; and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well. Poor body, I thought again, looking down on it. I had hated it so much and been so ashamed and I might have loved it instead, I thought suddenly, it had been all that time available for love and it had never occurred to me to love it, it would have seemed impossible, as it seemed impossible now.
• p249 - But there are feelings we don’t get to have, I thought as I washed myself alone, with the cold wipes smelling foul, there are lessons we can’t learn. Or maybe that’s not true, maybe I just needed more time. Maybe I could still get over myself, I thought, maybe L would teach me yet.
• p260 - . . . impossible to imagine [his grandfather] in a place like this, saying those words, responding, as the woman asked if he had thought about how he would hurt himself, if he had a plan, in the same flat tone, Well, I guess I do. It was a flat tone that was also a tone of pure misery, the same misery the woman felt as she sobbed, or not the same, that was the problem, two miseries locked away from each other; and I thought of the nurse, who must ask such questions again and again, and hear such responses again and again, I wondered if she was a third locked misery in the little room.
• p276 - Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace.
• p285 - But why don’t you feel it, she asked me. I don’t know, I said, but I don’t. Maybe something had been broken in me, I had sometimes thought, broken early, so that always I felt a sense of detachment, always I felt on the verge of disappearing from my life, of slipping free and leaving no trace, no tie had ever really anchored me. . . . Maybe everyone feels the way I do, that it takes an act of will to hang on to a life, maybe it’s a myth to think anyone fits so seamlessly there’s no chance of slipping free.