Ilya Kaminsky Interviews Garth Greenwell at Paris Review
For the Paris Review's interview series, Ilya Kaminsky spends time with Garth Greenwell, whose latest novel is Cleanness. "I first met Garth Greenwell when we were both undergraduates," Kaminsky explains. "At that time, Garth had studied music and wrote very beautiful poetry." More, from the interview:
INTERVIEWER
As I was reading Cleanness, I couldn’t help but think of lines from Louise Gluck. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved.” I thought also of Catullus’s famous line: “I hate and love.” Your work captures this tension with enviable clarity and precision. Can you speak a little bit about this?
GREENWELL
The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality.
INTERVIEWER
Between is the word reviewers of your work mention most often. Your work is described as mapping the territory between vulnerability and sustainability, between love and alienation, between desire and shame, between passion and confusion. Where do you locate this “between”?
GREENWELL
The “Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds,” Stevens calls for at the end of “Idea of Order at Key West” have always seemed to me like a goal of art. I’m drawn to art that expands and multiplies complexity, art that seeks ever finer gradations of feeling and thought. When do we ever feel a single feeling, or for long? When are we ever wholehearted? How long can we stay in a single place, or stay there happily? Between-ness is the human condition, it seems to me. Certainly itinerancy has characterized my life. Between-ness is also the condition of art. We love to draw lines and borders. Desire and art-making are border-crossing impulses. Promiscuity—an eagerness for mixture, excitement at the new things arrived at through unexpected encounters—is one of the virtues I most admire in thinking, in art-making, in life.
Read on at Paris Review.