Garth Greenwell's life in literature began when a childhood music teacher noticed something in his singing voice and offered him lessons. Growing up in Kentucky, Greenwell had struggled to imagine what kind of life an artistically inclined gay boy might have, and this exchange opened a portal to a different world, one filled with opera, art, and beauty.

Greenwell's most recent novel, Small Rain, is partly an exploration of whether that world is enough to sustain a person through enormous strain. The narrator has a sudden, life-threatening medical event, which comes on as, in Garth’s words, an “annihilating pain that takes so much away.” The narrator is left in the ICU considering the life he might be losing. With so much swept away, does an aesthetic life—in his own estimation—still retain its meaning?

We talked about what happens when a person makes art “the central activity of a life”—not family, not religion, not place—and how to determine when that devotion is just too much. When I posed this question about too-much-ness, Garth almost completely refused it. “My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on: if something is too much you do more of it,” he said.

Greenwell and I sat down at Pioneer Works, last fall during Second Sundays, to discuss his total devotion to that other world, and the fruits of his ruthless pursuit ever since that first encounter.

For those who don't know, Thresholds is an interview series where I talk to writers and artists about threshold moments in their lives that have inspired or provoked important work for them. People interpret the threshold prompt extremely loosely and broadly—some talk about getting sober, while others talk about realizing their book needed to be in the second person. Some people say they don't like the concept of a threshold at all, and that actually works great. So, Garth, what is a threshold that has changed your life and your work?

When I think of the decisive turning point in my life, it was failing ninth grade English. I was a high school teacher for seven years, and I used to love to tell my students about how that actually saved my life. I was really lost at the time. I was a gay kid in the American South before the internet. I just had no sense of anything I might be able to do with my life.

And because I failed freshman English, I needed extra credits. I signed up for the school choir in this public school in Kentucky because I thought it would be the easiest option, and it turned out that the director was an extraordinary singer and teacher named David Brown. He died just a few years ago. I was very lucky and happy that I got to tell him all of this shortly before he died. He heard something in my voice. He started giving me voice lessons after school. I didn’t know what an act of generosity that was until I was myself a high school teacher.

He also introduced me to opera and gave me my first opera cassettes and VHS tapes, and then he gave me tickets to the opera. What I heard in opera was the opposite of Kentucky and this world that I felt I had no place in, this world that I thought really wanted me not to exist. Opera was the promise of a world where I might have a place and it gave me an object around which to orient my life and set me on a course toward the life of an artist. I could not have imagined what that life would look like when I was 14, but it set me on that path.

Do you remember what opera he gave you tickets to?

The first opera I saw was Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, which now I think is extraordinary, but it kind of flew over my head. But the second opera was Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw, and that made me feel like my head was exploding. It was my introduction to Benjamin Britten, who continues to be an obsession. It was also my introduction to Henry James. Actually, my entire aesthetic compass comes from that day when I was 14 years old and saw the Kentucky Opera production of Turn of the Screw.

Do you remember anything specific about it?

I remember everything about it. I went with my brother's long-suffering girlfriend, whom I adored. And the tenor was a brilliant singer. He originated the role of Satyagraha in Philip Glass's Opera. The soprano who sang Miss Jessel was Elizabeth Futrell, who was a very brilliant soprano who sang a lot at the New York City Opera.

The opera begins with just piano and tenor voice, and James's novella is a frame tale. I realized that is actually the sound of the narration of my books. It was from that opera that I learned a certain sound of storytelling, which was a Jamesian sound, but I wouldn't encounter it in James for years and years and years. It's an opera that's constructed as a theme in variations, which means it takes a small idea and gets as much material as it can out of it. That's also how I construct narrative. I really think my entire aesthetic came from that evening.

How would you have described that sound of narration then, and how would you describe it now? What was that sound?

I don't know how I would've described it then. I don't think I could have even begun to. I think it just created an itch that I would try to scratch. But the sound is singular. It's a monologic approach to narrative. There is also a way that the opening of the prologue is recitative, so it's between speaking and singing, and I think that is often the register of my prose. From the very first moment, it creates a world, and that world has a sound. That's something that feels true to my experience of writing a book, that there is a kind of tonal world one has to create with the first sentences. All of that was right there.

So you're 14 and you've just heard or discovered something that is not of Kentucky, but you're in Kentucky. How did you move toward the thing?

I became very close to that teacher. He was the first adult who ever treated me as though my life might have value. I had an absolutely insane home life. It was such chaos. And my only access to gay sociality was cruising in the park, so I was having the most reckless sexual life. I mean, this was pre-protease inhibitors, obviously well before PrEP. I really felt like I had to make a bargain, which was that if I was going to have access to sex at all, it meant that my life would be really short. I had accepted that bargain, and he knew how crazy my home life was. He knew that I was a kid who was in real danger of not making it.

In my second year he brought me an application to the Interlochen Arts Academy, which I remember finding absurd—I could never go, we couldn't afford it, et cetera. And he said, "Well, let's just fill out the application." And so we filled out the application together. I forged my parents' signatures. He recorded my audition tape, and then because of some baroque machinations and my parents’ 12-year divorce, I ended up receiving enough scholarship that it was cheaper for my father to send me than to pay child support.

So I got to escape. And when I got to Interlochen, this place where everybody was passionate about art, it just transformed me. I went from being a C, D, sometimes F student to getting straight-As. It modeled for me what an aesthetic life, a life of the mind, could look like. It opened up a path, and I went from there to conservatory and then left music, in part because I found poetry, and that was when I got on a literary path.

That feels like a story about how important teachers are among other things. What a great teacher.

Yes, and there were two teachers for me. I decided not to put the usual list of names in this book, which already exist in my first two books. Instead I listed the poems that are referenced in the book, often without attribution, and then added two names. One of them is David Brown, that choir director in Louisville, and the other one is the poet and critic who also recently died, James Langenbach. In my first semester of junior year, I was at the Eastman School of Music, which is part of the University of Rochester. I took a poetry workshop with Jim Langenbach and he made me feel that a life devoted to poetry would be the noblest possible life, which I still think, and that was the second big redirection. He really set me on the path that led to this conversation.

So much of your fiction bears the stamp of a life that is built from art other than fiction. I read in a conversation that you had with Brian Gresko that this book in particular needed to be made out of experiences of art, which made me wonder how you think about capturing the experience of art in language. And I'm wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about this book and how it's constructed for anyone who hasn't read it yet, and in particular why art and the experience of art enters into this story, which unfolds mostly in an ICU.

This book begins when the narrator—who is an early 40s-ish poet living in the American heartland in Iowa City—is struck down by an annihilating pain. After waiting five days, which is really dumb, he finally goes to the ER. He waits in part because this is at one of the heights of pre-vaccine COVID, and so he thinks of ERs as really dangerous places. But he goes to the ER and discovers that in fact something really grave has happened to him, that he has a tear in his aorta. One of the first things he hears in the ER is that he could die, and he'll spend the next 10 or 12 days in the cardiovascular ICU.

On one hand, it's a novel about a guy who, decades before he thought he would have to, is forced to confront these questions about the meaning and the value of his life, which for him has been a life devoted to art. I think any artist’s life is a kind of gamble. Any life organized around a central object of devotion is a kind of gamble... I mean he's a poet, he thinks about death all the time, but now death is actually there in the room.

In that light, you discover whether the object of devotion holds up, and so there's all this art in the book because he's trying to test that. He's trying to figure out, "Have I been right in this gamble I made with my life of believing that artworks are repositories of a value that is infinite?"

How did you think about how to reproduce the experience of art in language, even on a technical level? There's a translation that has to happen there. I know this is something that you've done throughout your books, so you have a trajectory of that enterprise. Do you write about the experience of art differently now than you did before?

Yeah. I don't think I could have done it in those early books. My first real sustained writing of art, certainly of non-literary art, is in Cleanness. In some sense, it's always the same problem. Whether you're writing about sex or you're writing about pain, we are engaged in an utterly impossible quixotic endeavor to make incommensurate things commensurate.

It is ludicrous to think that one could take the experience of sunlight on leaves, and translate it into the utterly incommensurate medium of words. And I hate the tack of radical reflexivity—part of the long tradition of trying to represent consciousness—wherein perception becomes the object. I mean, that's kind of my whole project, to try to put on the page what it feels like to be an embodied consciousness. And in this case, it's a consciousness that is embodied in a body that is broken.

You used the word annihilation earlier. It feels like this book, and actually a lot of your work, is about annihilation, or some kind of experience that empties you out, whether it's pain or mortality or sex or literature or art. I am curious how you came to that as a theme in your work, if that feels related at all to the 14-year-old you were describing, and how you've seen that take shape as you have grown as an artist.

I mean, it is something that I am interested in and excited by. That 14-year-old kid was someone with a devotional temperament who didn't have a bearable object of devotion. And what that choir director did was he gave me art, which could be a bearable object of devotion. Well, the experience and the promise of devotion is a kind of unselfing, this radical attention to an object that requires a kind of emptying out of the self.

I've always been interested in bodies in crisis, and in my first two books that crisis was sexual, where sex allowed for this sense of annihilation of the self. The experience of great art is also that for this narrator—a moment when the self blinks out and makes space for something else to flood in. Obviously, all of this is really resonant with a certain kind of religious tradition. But my narrator doesn't have God as the object of devotion. He has art instead. I mean, he says in the first page that in this experience of annihilating pain, he becomes a creature evacuated of soul, and that's how he feels, that his self is just stamped out.

I’m curious about the connection between having trained as a musician and the way that you write. I can hear it, I think, but I'm curious to hear you talk about it.

I wouldn't know it for 10 years, but everything in my musical education was really education to be a writer. Language is different from other kinds of art mediums because when you engage with paint, say, paint is so obviously a substance alien to you that has its own qualities and characteristics that you have to learn. You have to figure out things about viscosity and how quickly paint dries.

Language isn't like that. Certainly if you are speaking the language to which you were born, most of the time it feels continuous. Like right now, I don't have a sense that my thought is something separate from my speech that I have to translate into this medium. The medium is my thought. The language is my thinking.

To think about language as an aesthetic medium, you have to somehow trouble that transparency. You have to understand language as material, as having properties that you can manipulate. Singing is an extraordinary education in that—when you sing, language inhabits your whole body and you're so conscious of the quality of a vowel because if you change it, everything goes haywire. You're so conscious of how consonants are material things because if you place them just slightly wrong, the whole phrase is destroyed.

So music taught me the materiality of language, and then also because I was trained in bel canto singing, [wherein] arias work by taking very few words and extending them over a long time, I learned how language suspended in time can be generative of emotion. I think my approach to sentences is often chasing that.

You brought me right to another question I wanted to ask you, which was about time and how writers manage it for themselves, for the reader, for the protagonist. This book is set in a really interesting place regarding time because in an ICU, things move really fast and really

Always in fiction, there is external time and internal time, and most of the time they don't match up. When I was an undergraduate just hanging out in the library, I found this book by Husserl, who was Heidegger's teacher and one of the founders of phenomenology. It's called The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. I thought that was the most beautiful title.

I am really interested in what consciousness does to our experience of time, and how pain and fear can be consciousness killers, distorting our experience. Being on opiates also changes your experience of time, and consciousness takes no heed of clock time.

The hospital was [a great setting] because the ICU functioned as an external clock, which is helpful if you're interested in the phenomenology of internal time consciousness. Every four hours he gets a pain pill. He is really attuned to that. Every eight hours, he gets a Heparin shot. Because of COVID restrictions, he gets to see his partner once a day for just a couple of hours. He's so attuned to that.

And because there is that rhythm going on, you can go wherever you want. That Heparin will always put you back in external time. When you have that external clock, it's just enormously freeing.

Were there any moments when you were working on this or drafting this when you thought, "I'm pushing too far, I'm too far into interior time. I don't know if I can pull that off"?

Well, I definitely worried about pulling off the whole novel. I wrote my first book before I had ever studied fiction. I had never wanted to be a fiction writer, and I didn't think of that book as a novel until it was almost finished. I thought of what I was doing as writing sentences. I was waking up at 4:30 in the morning, writing for two hours before I went to teach my classes, and I thought of those two hours as my time for writing sentences.

I think that's a great strategy for writing a first novel. If I had said to myself, "I'm going to write a novel," I would've never written anything. I would've been terrified. And my second book too, I tricked myself into writing because it's another book in pieces, and I didn't think of myself as writing a book until I was deep into it. This was the first time I sat down thinking, "I'm going to write a novel." That freaked me out. And then also I thought, "I'm going to write a novel in which the protagonist basically never gets out of bed." I was really worried about that and about the ability to sustain a kind of narrative propulsion or energy when external action would be so restricted.

But on the question of too muchness, I feel like my whole aesthetic practice is predicated on if something is too much, you do more of it. There is a kind of absolute ruthlessness about aesthetic practice, and if I catch sight of something that I'm after, I'm going to pursue it. That ruthlessness consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, "Will anyone go along with me?" And I do believe that especially when you're drafting, you only arrive anywhere by going absolutely as far as you can go.

So I don't ever think about that, is it too much? I know that that question will arise at some point. But my first novel has a 43-page paragraph. My second novel has sex scenes that many readers have been unable to go along with. If I try to anticipate resistance to what I'm after, I'm just giving up the game. That is really central to my aesthetic practice. You just do it and you are absolutely ruthless about it.

Does that feel to you like a politics as well as a craft practice?

Art is the central activity of my life. I want to feel like that activity is part of the moral project of trying to be a human being, but also, I think in this paradoxical way, art has to be ruthlessly protected from the claims of any moral program for it to be morally useful to us.

The way that art is useful to us morally, and I would also say politically, is so mysterious and so beyond anything we could be strategic about. The minute we try to engineer it, we destroy any helpfulness art might have. There is an ethics in that kind of ruthless pursuit, but I actually think it's an ethics that's probably at odds with the larger ethics of my life.

My great teacher was the poet Frank Bidart, who is for me the most important living American writer. He models an absolute ruthlessness that kind of terrifies me, but that I would also like to emulate. It’s problematic, but Frank believes, and I guess I believe, that the only thing of meaning I can do with my life is to write the books that only I can write. And it does feel to me like a kind of ethic to say, "I am going to be ruthless about not letting anything keep me from writing the books that only I can write."

That's a beautiful answer. And the ruthlessness with which you pursue the work now sounds a little bit like the kind of engine that you needed to have, as a kid living in real existential precarity, to go pursue a life of bel canto opera.

I do think it's helpful, but it can also be disfiguring. Very early on, I was implanted with a kind of skepticism about the usual ties that bind one to life. And I just assumed that if I was going to have any kind of erotic life, I was going to die young. The first two men I had sex with tested positive shortly after I had sex with them. They both got sick and they both died. There is no reason that I did not get sick. I mean, it is just the dumbest chance. I did everything they did and I took no precautions.

And so early on, I felt that there was a value that was different from, and maybe at odds with, the usual values, like family. I am grateful that one of the first things I knew as a conscious being was that I didn't want to have kids. That's really helpful to being an artist. And I'm grateful that I was not agonized as I made my work in the way that I see some of my students and my friends be agonized about things like, "Will this hurt my family? Will this shame my family?"

It was really helpful to not have any of those bonds, but it's also disfiguring of existence. That was something that to me felt like a bargain, but art was more than compensation. ♦

This conversation took place on October 13th, 2024, during the Second Sundays Broadcast Radio Hour for Thresholds. You can listen to their full conversation here.