James Alan McPherson ends “Hue and Cry,” the last and title story of his 1968 collection, with a question: “But if this is all there is, what is left of life and why are we here?”
The answer lies in the title, which McPherson tells us is drawn from a history of English law that instructs that when a crime is committed, “the hue and cry should be raised.”
The Pulitzer- and MacArthur-winning McPherson refuses to remain silent when he sees a crime. Not those spelled out in legal tomes, but the outrages ordinary people endure as they seek love and justice in their lives. He demands that his readers at least take note.
I read the 10 stories of “Hue and Cry” for the first time recently. After closing the book on that last poignant question, I opened “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders and found what could have been a description of McPherson’s stories.
“They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative, but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.”
In “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” Saunders illustrates his own approach to fiction by exploring three stories by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy and one each by Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev. While Saunders won the 2017 Booker for his first full-length novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” he is chiefly a short story writer. He and clearly loves the compact form of tales I can imagine being recited around the campfires of our prehistoric ancestors.
Each of the Russian masters’ 19th and early 20th century stories is provided in full in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” along with commentary by Saunders.
“I like what I like and you like what you like, and art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill,” Saunders offers by way of writing advice. “How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?
“The choosing, the choosing, that’s all we’ve got.”
Saunders also teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, where he has supported generations of students. When I finished "Chain-Gang All-Stars" -- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel that manages to be both a love story set in a dystopian, not-too-distant future America and an indictment of our current carceral state -- I found in the acknowledgments a thanks to Saunders for his "mentorship and guidance through the years." Adjei-Brenyah, a Syracuse MFA student born in the late 20th century, is among those inspired by what Saunders has learned from 19th century writers.
Saunders is drawn, as I am, to stories that show a writer’s humanism and integrity without being polemics. As Saunders guided me through his Russian stories, I heard echoes of work I like emphatically by authors closer to home.
Saunders collection includes Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot," about a young man whose status as a peasant means he has no voice in his own life, including about whom to love. Saunders says the story poses "the question of how to deal with oppression, then and now, in a world divided into haves and have-nots, the most urgent one of all.” Alyosha is punished severely for presuming to be fully human, the same fate that befalls a loving couple unable to marry because of racism in “Hue and Cry,” as well as the young Black sculptor who is falsely accused in James Baldwin’s 1974 novel “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
I learned in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” of the Russian literary technique known as skaz. Skaz is drawn from oral traditions and, Saunders writes, deployed by writers such as Gogol to make their ink-on-paper narratives ring true. It brought to my mind how Zora Neale Hurston made readers hear Janie, Tea Cake and the other denizens of an all-Black Florida town modeled on the real-life Eatonville in her fictional “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
In "The Nose,' Gogol's skaz-talking main character finds himself in an absurd world in which people who think of themselves as well-meaning refuse to acknowledge his desperation. Saunders points to a newspaper clerk refusing to help place an ad for the missing nose.
“It’s sadder, the saddest, that the clerk, not at all malevolent, is still utterly unhelpful,” Saunders writes, drawing parallels to Nazi Germany, where “something troubling (a missing nose, a hateful political agenda) is met with polite, well-intended civility, a civility that wants things to go on as usual.”
Consider the passage in Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” in which an exhausted driver, a Black doctor and an Army veteran fleeing the South for what he hopes will be a new life in California, is refused a place to rest along the way in Arizona. One motel owner tells him: “We’re from Illinois and we don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”
The driver breaks down.
“The exhaustion, the rejection, the unwinding of his dreams in a matter of minutes, it all caught up with him at once. He had driven more than fifteen hundred miles, and things were no different. In fact, it felt worse because this wasn’t the South,” Wilkerson writes, and goes on to quote the doctor:
“I came all this way running from Jim Crow, it slaps me straight in the face.”
As Saunders writes, “some stories show us the process of rationality fraying under duress.”
With just seven stories by four writers, Saunders presents a universe, and asks readers and writers to be open to possibility.
“We keep trying to get to a place of stability, to understand the story as being ‘for’ or ‘against’ something so we can be for or against this thing too,” Saunders writes. “But the story keeps insisting that it would rather not judge.”
Choose. Choose curiosity and empathy. In reading, writing and living.