Conjured and Dismissed

Fiction (!) from Garth Greenwell. John Taverner: 'Westron Wynde Mass' + Staff/patient bonding in hospital + That sense only non-sense can convey

This week, something new (but hopefully recurring) ‘round these parts: FICTION! In a scene from Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, an ICU patient bonds with his nurse over a Renaissance mass.

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watercolor sketch by Joanna Frieda Mulder

As this scene opens, our narrator — ICU-bound following a terrifying cardiac incident — has just had an allergic reaction to a new medication, necessitating a Benadryl injection…

I closed my eyes for a minute as wooziness washed over me, not unpleasant, a kind of dullness and heaviness. It can hit hard at first, I heard Frank say, you might drop off for a minute. But I didn’t drop off, I opened my eyes again to tell him that I felt better already, the itchiness was fading. He nodded. I’ll hang out here a bit, he said, just to be sure you’re okay. Anytime there’s a reaction like that we like to be careful, he said, you’re going to be fine but sometimes they can be bad. He went over to the computer again, making a note in my chart, then scanned the bags he had brought in earlier and hung them with the others. When he had finished he leaned back against the sink, folding his arms across his stomach, the first time I had seen him without some task at hand. So tell me what you do, he said. I told him I was a teacher, which was easier than saying I was a writer. I got tired of saying what kinds of books I write, of hearing people’s surprise that poets still existed, I got tired of the questions about success, whether I had had any, which always made me think of an interview with James Baldwin, a clip that made the rounds on Twitter every few months or so, in which he says It is not possible for an artist to be successful, tilting his head to emphasize the words, languorous, faggy, both earnest and bored, wonderful. Here at the university, Frank asked, and I said no, I was teaching that semester at a college about an hour away, or would be if I was well enough, classes started in a week. I know that place, Frank said, meaning not the school but the town, there’s a restaurant that has live music on the weekends, I’ve played a few gigs out there with my band. I asked him what he played, and he said clarinet, that he played jazz with his band but had studied classical performance as a student. That was what I studied here, actually, he said; after playing in his school band in the little town he grew up in he had come to the university on a music scholarship. It seemed like a great thing at the time, he said, and it was, it got me out of my hometown, but when I graduated I realized there isn’t anything to do with a performance degree. He stopped himself. Maybe that’s not true, I could have tried going someplace else, my teacher wanted me to go for a grad program at a big school, Juilliard or Curtis, he thought I had a shot, but I didn’t want to go so far away from my family. Or maybe I’m just a chickenshit, he said. But you still play, I said, and he replied that he did, every few weeks with his band, but now his primary music making was as part of a choir. He had always loved to sing — in a different life, he said, I would have been a singer, but I didn’t realize I had a voice until I started college, and my scholarship was for my clarinet playing, it wasn’t easy to switch. So I never developed my voice, he said, and after college I went to nursing school and started all this. It wasn’t clear what he meant, the little room, the hospital, the trudging back and forth for medicines, he conjured it and dismissed it all at once.

I had been a voice major, I told him then, before I studied literature, I had had a start as a musician and had given it up, too. Really, he said, interested, and he asked me what part I sang, what repertoire. I told him a bit of the story, how I had come to music late, too late probably, that I was never happy with what I could hear, that I could never think in music, that it was always a foreign language; and also that I was a student in a conservative department, that my teacher wanted me to focus on standard rep while my interests drew me elsewhere, to new music and early music; that my best experiences were with an early music ensemble the school was famous for, led by a brilliant lutenist, at whose name Frank lit up. I know him, he said, I’ve listened to him for years. He loved early music too, he said, early choral music, he loved singing it. His entire demeanor had changed now, he was buzzing with excitement as he told me he had gotten obsessed recently with John Taverner, a Renaissance composer I had sung in school. We had studied him in music history, too, when we learned about the use of popular songs in religious music, a mixture of the secular and the sacred, whole masses built on L’homme armé or Westron Wynde, which was what Frank played me now. You’ve got to hear this, he said, he had pulled his phone from the pocket of his scrubs and was scrolling through his music, it was an old recording of Taverner’s mass but he had just discovered it. I miss the real thing, he said, owning records and CDs, but it’s amazing to have everything in your phone, absolutely everything; here it is, he said, holding his phone up to listen. There was a moment of silence then, a pause while the song loaded, and then a solo tenor voice filled the room, tinny on the phone’s speakers but still beautiful, an English tenor, I don’t mean the singer’s nationality but the type of voice. It’s a peculiar sound, bright and unforced, lyric, pure somehow, nothing like Italian or German voices; maybe it’s that you can hear the boys choir in it, in the shape of the vowels. And this tenor was very good, his voice rang out, not operatic but in an early style, mostly straight tone but vibrating just slightly on the sustained notes. It was a warm voice, full of light. Frank had come close to the bed, aiming his phone at me, and he leaned toward me, too, bending his head so we could listen together. I was surprised by how well I remembered the tune; it had been so long ago that I had sung it, and I had come to think of the words free of music. 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. I had taught it for years to high schoolers, I had encouraged them to imagine the speaker, somebody in trouble, a soldier maybe, alone, exposed to the elements, and not just to the elements. 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. It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel; it had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once. The poem goes on, the second half makes an easier kind of sense: Cryst yf my love were in my Armys And I yn my bed Agayne. An easier kind of sense but I heard it in a new way, listening to it with Frank, I felt my eyes fill with tears. After the tenor solo the mass proper begins, the tune in the sopranos first, with the words not of the poem but of the Gloria, Et in terra pax. Frank let it play for a moment, the Renaissance polyphony that always sounds to me like petals opening, a rose blooming in time-lapse photography; I’m embarrassed by the image, it was something I felt as a teenager and I still feel it now.

Well, Frank said, when he finally stopped the music, not abruptly, he lowered the volume first, well. He put the phone in his pocket and moved to the other side of the bed, where he pressed a few buttons on the titration machine. He was back to his earlier nonchalance, shutting the door the music had opened between us. I guess I should get to my other patients, he said, I think you’re doing okay now. You know, he went on, there’s no telling when the ICU will open up, they might come to move you in the middle of the night, you should sleep if you can. He must have seen that I was tired, whether it was the Benadryl or my blood pressure going down or just the stress of the hospital, fatigue fell over me like a shadow, I could feel my eyes wanting to close. We’ll keep you safe, Frank said, I’ll be here all night, you don’t have to worry about a thing. And this too brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, Frank, I said; I meant for everything, for what he had said and for the music, thank you. Oh sure, he said quickly, accepting the thanks but dismissing it, too, a Midwestern reflex, and then he pumped the sanitizer dispenser at the door and was gone. ✹

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Garth Greenwell

is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain (from which the above is excerpted). He writes about books, music, and film at To A Green Thought.

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Behind The Music:

• Eagle-eyed regulars might note that this is the first Tracks that doesn’t have an embedded YouTube video up top. Reason #1: I couldn’t find a correct version of ‘Westron Wynde Mass’ on YouTube. (That is: I couldn’t find a version that could plausibly have been the one the characters in this passage listened to.) Reason #2: my wife has recently started doing quick watercolor sketches, and I wanted them to become part of the Tracks-verse! Expect more of these accompanying future pieces.