May 1

May 1 GEORGE SAUNDERS - A SWIM IN THE POND IN THE RAIN

It’s easy in any line up, to go for the one you know. Ask the Government. But it’s also good to strike out into unknown territory and give a hearing to someone whose book you haven’t heard of, let alone read. Actually it’s a good test of their coherence and a pretty good guide as to whether or not you will reach for their volumne in the bookshop over, say your favourite author’s ‘latest’ offering.

Turns out I did know Tom Gatti, the interviewer in this encounter. He was the editor of The Times Saturday Review – a consistently brilliant publication that knocks spots off the weightier Sunday Times and Observer literary supplements. He’s gone now to be Deputy Editor of the recently revived and now freshly trendy New Statesman. So competent shall we say.

George Sanders himself is an engaging American. His philosophy is more of the ‘be yourself’ advice – yet he managed to practice what he preached. He served himself up as a writer in such a frank unpretentious narrative of his past, he immediately drew the audience ( of two in my house) into the tricky business of being a writer – how to read cannier and how to write better. It wasn’t long before I began to dream of a re-make of my own memoir in the bottom drawer. If such an unassuming ordinary –seeming chap could crack it, how hard could literary fame be?

George Saunders book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a manifesto for literature – how to enjoy it and write it. The title is whimsical. He likes the sound of it. In it he draws on the Russian Classics Gogol, and Tolstoy and especially Chekov as models both for writers and as ways of living our lives as well as we can. It’s a brilliant idea, hard won – he’s been teaching literature at the University of Syracuse for twenty years. George Saunders with what he calls his ‘working class’ sensibility (“ I had to squeeze the peasant out of mec”) seems an unlikely mentor to begin with. He hinted at teaching tricks he uses for his élite students, hand-picked from hundreds of candidates for an all immersive three years ( yes really) live in all expenses paid course; a favourite technique was to present the chosen few super-students with a list of excerpts from unidentified famous authors, and then leave the room for an hour. Revelatory results apparently - it seems to work.

It helps he’s a super-success himself.- and he knows it- he is open and unfussy about how far he has penetrated the literary road and appears to find it rather amusing since he began his writing adventures with some very populist stuff indeed. He’s the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Tenth of December won the inaugural Folio Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, he’s an American Academician he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. In 2013.

I am going right out to Heffers to get A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

And where is that novel of mine, not the drawer after all, must look ?

The Cambridge Literary Festival continues until May 2nd