Just happened to come across this article about Hemingway by Joan Didion (RIP) from the New Yorker in 1998, and it made me think of our exercise here. She's talking about the first paragraph of "A Farewell to Arms" (link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/11/09/last-words-6):
"That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself. Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are “the,” fifteen are “and.” There are are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of “the” and of “and,” creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of “the” before the word “leaves” in the fourth sentence (“and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling”) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season. The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?"
Dec 26, 2021·edited Dec 26, 2021Liked by George Saunders
I am loving your commentary, George S. You really go all out and enlarge everything about the American wife character while simultaneously talking about Hemingway's elements of story, elements you illustrate as the definition of fine storytelling. I mean, in the Bigger Sense, that everything you're teaching is sticking with me. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking the newsletter feels a lot like being in the same room. Thank you.
Confession time: I'm loving Story Club, but am noticing that instead of writing, I'm doing this "writing adjacent" thing... The thing that makes me feel like I'm moving towards writing, but without actually taking the plunge. Reading and thinking about writing, but not facing the blank page myself. All the learning on craft won't help, if I'm not actually putting my own words on paper, creating my own characters, making them specific.
The feeling I get is "I don't know how to start..." And so, I don't.
I'm giving myself an assignment: start your own story BEFORE reading the next installment of Swim with a Disappearing Cat in the Rain. Have fun. Imitate Hemingway. Refuse your main character the gift of a name. Unleash a storm. Drench everyone. Give some of them warm towels.
I felt rather put off by this section. It took me a while to figure out why but I guess I felt the manipulation of how we were supposed to feel as readers was a bit heavy-handed, like the writer—would this be the omniscient voice of the narrator—telling us, as readers, this is how you should regard the American woman, the American wife, the Wife as now being revealed as a superficial and shallow, naïve American girl, not worthy of a name because of her childish behavior. The husband however gets a name, George, and it will be revealed how he is worthy of this, perhaps because he is more intelligent, more mature than she. The kind hotel owner becomes the padrone, the maid becomes unfriendly, and the girl craves importance which makes her childish. However as I write these observations I do notice this is a really powerful way of making a dramatic change in our points of view and it creates a lot tension to prepare us or unprepare us for what might happen next.
Dec 26, 2021·edited Dec 26, 2021Liked by George Saunders
The American wife sets out on a mission but it falls apart almost before it gets started. The maid even questions the very existence of a cat in the rain, laughs at the very idea and that reaction seems to pop the wife's bubble. No one else has even seen the cat. (I'm trying to remember ever seeing a cat in the rain and can't but then I can't remember a lot of stuff.) Everything works to turn the wife around.
The energy threatens to dip here but instead there is renewed escalation as she reenters the hotel, passes in confusion by the owner and into her and George's room. She has failed to save the cat from the rain but she has not gotten wet, not physically anyway. Will the cat reappear in the courtyard? Will the rain stop? Will we learn the American wife's name? Will George redeem himself? Will a new dynamic emerge between the couple?
I noticed that Hemingway takes pains to stipulate that the path is gravel, states it twice and I could hear the women's footsteps as they crunched along through the rain. I appreciated that.
I've never read this story, and reading it this way, not knowing how long it is or where I am in the text is a new experience for me. I keep thinking about it as I go through my day, this spinning ball up in the air, up over my head. When and where will it land?
A thought unrelated to the story, but not unrelated to the work we are doing: I am reading Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, in which the protagonist says that while in prison, she taught herself to read “with murderous attention.” Many thanks, George, for sharing this secret with us. Happy not to be self-taught (nor in prison).
As others are mentioning, what struck me most here is the shifting title of our protagonist: from American Wife, to Wife, to now American girl. There’s a diminishing of her power in that trend, a shrinking from importance to insignificance. This shift happens at the moment she finds the cat gone, and she suddenly feels much younger, much less imperious and powerful than our first impression of her. Similarly, as she heads in again past the hotel owner, I’m struck by the way her sense of self shrinks even more (“Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small”).
And yet, I’m also struck by this line that seems to defy this trend toward smallness (no stasis here!): “She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.” Hemingway breaks the pattern here to give us this glimpse, this sense that she remembers or is still holding on however weakly to this other, more commanding, larger version of herself (how we first meet her, the “American Wife”). My sense of her as a complex character is growing: we see clearly that she has these different sides to herself, and that somehow the loss of the cat has caused this change in her. We also learn that she’s not conducting a straightforward act of rescue but “wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty” which seems to suddenly make this act a much more personal one: there is something personal at stake for her here, in her desire for a “kitty”, and I’m curious what that is!
Another bowling pin in the air for me: The maid’s incredulous response to the wife/girl’s words that there was a cat in the rain. Is this really something so hard to imagine? Clearly the maid hasn’t seen the cat. This reaction from the maid does two things: It creates a kind of divide in my mind between the wife and this maid, adding to the wife’s sense of smallness - her aloneness in her desire to rescue the cat, in her knowledge/belief that the cat was even there. The maid’s reaction also highlights the rareness of the situation - cat in the rain - as not something they see everyday. It would feel very different if the maid said something like, “Oh yes, that cat lives around here”. But this disbelief from her gives the whole situation this aura of specialness, rarity. It’s something that the wife/girl seems to have noticed that others haven’t.
I see a twist in this story, a different background. I have been in jobs where I needed to bow, where I needed to supply people lacking independence and common sense the obvious necessities.
The maid is bothered by the American woman’s immaturity, clearly, closer to stupidity than innocence. I see the woman as a bother to the “help.” Yet, they do what must be done. The old man is more capable, practiced at hiding his disdain.
If she is more frivolous, silly even, like a child, the husband is probably exhausted with her, rather than dismissive. This is a tale of a pampered person unable to wait like everyone else.
Girl! I now see her as quite young, married to an older man. He talks to her as though she is very young--"Don't get wet." Like you'd say to a child. And now I start to see that they are here during the off season--when rates are cheaper. So maybe she thought she was marrying a wealthy older man, but it turns out he's not so wealthy...? And she is bored. He's an adult--reading on the bed. She's a kid, looking for fun, a playmate--the kitty, perhaps. And isn't she the one who calls the cat a kitty? Like a young girl might do. Anyway, I see her reaction to the hotel staff as immaturity--a young girl who is being patronized and doesn't realize it. At the end of this section, we are given the husband's name. He is named--a real person. A man. She remains a girl, unnamed. Can't say I understand why the maid's face tightens when the girl speaks English. Anyway, my view of the entire story changed with the word "girl." Maybe I'm giving that too much meaning, as women have often been referred to as girls despite their age. Still, to me the story really turned on that one word.
While the preceding passage focused on class, this one subtly shifts the emphasis (without removing the earlier one) to tensions between Americans and Europeans in the aftermath of the Great War. The American girl (thrice referenced here!) is contrasted to the (I can only imagine) older European maid, and the former appears full of childishness even as she enjoys a superior position over the latter. The maid is, understandably, put out.
I read this as a delightfully subtle and puckish commentary on American adventurism in foreign policy, with the American girl jaunting out into unfamiliar environs to engage in good deeds (but in fact driven by her own selfish desire for the kitty). She jaunts out under the great umbrella while the maid takes all the rain, even remaining outside to close the umbrella after the whole thing.
Likewise, the death toll of the Great War fell much more heavily on Europe than it did America, and it was Europe that suffered the profound devastation (the empty square of the story) of the war, not the heroic doughboys. I think Hemingway is perhaps reflecting here on what he saw in the eyes of Europeans (not the soldiers, necessarily, but the people) when he was a medic in the war. The young ingenue is full of nobility and selfishness, and largely ignorant of anyone else's conditions.
But wait, she is redeemed by a moment of clarity! As she re-enters the hotel she sees the padrone's quiet and unobtrusive performance of his duties--in stark contrast to her own performative antics--and she suddenly feels small, even while still finding herself in the spotlight. It's a great moment, like an amateur actor onstage for the first time, the spotlight in her eyes.
My read: now I’m contrasting the hotel keeper with George. The wife also comes alive for me when she sees him at his desk. But I don’t read her fondness of him as so much… entitlement as, here is this warm and attentive man who takes her concerns seriously, even when they are silly, and makes her feel seen. (As opposed to the aloof American guy upstairs who only feigns interest, clearly wants to chill out and do his own thing, even if he loves her.) If the hotel keeper were a little younger, I’d argue she’s lusting after him. (Took me a second read to notice he’s old. If you reread that passage assuming he’s young, it almost reads like a trashy romance novel.) OK so he’s old, but there’s a courtliness to their interaction, which European men do so well (and American women often delight in, thinking it’s meant specifically for them!) Sending the maid is a form of protection, caring, from the hotel keeper.. the wife is able to delight for just a moment in feeling feminine, and in « danger », but also someone to be taken seriously.
When the maid tightens at the wife speaking English, it could be her recognizing the dynamic and feeling « there goes the hotel keeper flirting again with a foreigner so he can feel masculine and desired and important and I’m here stuck holding the umbrella for this ditz who can’t be bothered to learn Italian »
Hemingway just got me in the mood to watch Emily in Paris Season 2. 😅
To me the shift from "wife" to "girl" represents a change in the protagonist's perspective, brought about by her failure to find the cat and the maid's mockery for wasting time on such a thing. It lines up with the shift in what the hotel-keeper is called as well - "padrone," which definitely evokes a fatherly/paternal power, inverting the social hierarchy that made her feel empowered earlier. She seems to be or to feel like a child being indulged by parents (the padrone and the maid) more than a person with any real power.
I also suspect that we'll see something more explicit on the subject of having or not having children, or possibly a miscarriage or abortion, soon; "I wanted a kitty" and the rest of that line strikes that bell pretty hard to me.
The more I think about this story, I’m starting to feel like the war is almost an invisible character. Was George in the war? Is that why they are at this town with the memorial, in what is apparently the off-season for tourists?
Her whims and complaints are frivolous compared to the loss and devastation Italians had just lived through.
I don’t despise her for her frivolity, though, She is an innocent (a girl!). To her, the whims and complaints feel big and urgent. However, she is in a position where no one around her can take her seriously.
“…maid’s face tightened.” Those four words create the most tension for me, along with her condescending laughter at the American girl’s mission to save a cat. Sometimes, perhaps, the only weapon a servant has against a rich tourist is contempt? Economic class distinctions seem to have become more stark. And I’m intrigued by the maid’s nationalist reaction to the English language. Is the maid to become a larger character in the story?
I noticed that at the end of the piece, George Saunders is somehow in the room, reading. So that’s cool. Also, as a reader, I at first thought she wanted to help the cat, but now, when the cat is gone and had escaped its somewhat desperate, huddled situation (presumably for better safety from the rain) the woman is disappointed for herself instead of happy for the cat that we thought she cared about. Turns out she wants to trap it, so to speak, even more, but this time for herself. This is when she becomes the “girl.”
Just happened to come across this article about Hemingway by Joan Didion (RIP) from the New Yorker in 1998, and it made me think of our exercise here. She's talking about the first paragraph of "A Farewell to Arms" (link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/11/09/last-words-6):
"That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself. Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are “the,” fifteen are “and.” There are are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of “the” and of “and,” creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of “the” before the word “leaves” in the fourth sentence (“and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling”) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season. The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?"
I am loving your commentary, George S. You really go all out and enlarge everything about the American wife character while simultaneously talking about Hemingway's elements of story, elements you illustrate as the definition of fine storytelling. I mean, in the Bigger Sense, that everything you're teaching is sticking with me. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking the newsletter feels a lot like being in the same room. Thank you.
Confession time: I'm loving Story Club, but am noticing that instead of writing, I'm doing this "writing adjacent" thing... The thing that makes me feel like I'm moving towards writing, but without actually taking the plunge. Reading and thinking about writing, but not facing the blank page myself. All the learning on craft won't help, if I'm not actually putting my own words on paper, creating my own characters, making them specific.
The feeling I get is "I don't know how to start..." And so, I don't.
I'm giving myself an assignment: start your own story BEFORE reading the next installment of Swim with a Disappearing Cat in the Rain. Have fun. Imitate Hemingway. Refuse your main character the gift of a name. Unleash a storm. Drench everyone. Give some of them warm towels.
I felt rather put off by this section. It took me a while to figure out why but I guess I felt the manipulation of how we were supposed to feel as readers was a bit heavy-handed, like the writer—would this be the omniscient voice of the narrator—telling us, as readers, this is how you should regard the American woman, the American wife, the Wife as now being revealed as a superficial and shallow, naïve American girl, not worthy of a name because of her childish behavior. The husband however gets a name, George, and it will be revealed how he is worthy of this, perhaps because he is more intelligent, more mature than she. The kind hotel owner becomes the padrone, the maid becomes unfriendly, and the girl craves importance which makes her childish. However as I write these observations I do notice this is a really powerful way of making a dramatic change in our points of view and it creates a lot tension to prepare us or unprepare us for what might happen next.
The American wife sets out on a mission but it falls apart almost before it gets started. The maid even questions the very existence of a cat in the rain, laughs at the very idea and that reaction seems to pop the wife's bubble. No one else has even seen the cat. (I'm trying to remember ever seeing a cat in the rain and can't but then I can't remember a lot of stuff.) Everything works to turn the wife around.
The energy threatens to dip here but instead there is renewed escalation as she reenters the hotel, passes in confusion by the owner and into her and George's room. She has failed to save the cat from the rain but she has not gotten wet, not physically anyway. Will the cat reappear in the courtyard? Will the rain stop? Will we learn the American wife's name? Will George redeem himself? Will a new dynamic emerge between the couple?
I noticed that Hemingway takes pains to stipulate that the path is gravel, states it twice and I could hear the women's footsteps as they crunched along through the rain. I appreciated that.
I've never read this story, and reading it this way, not knowing how long it is or where I am in the text is a new experience for me. I keep thinking about it as I go through my day, this spinning ball up in the air, up over my head. When and where will it land?
A thought unrelated to the story, but not unrelated to the work we are doing: I am reading Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, in which the protagonist says that while in prison, she taught herself to read “with murderous attention.” Many thanks, George, for sharing this secret with us. Happy not to be self-taught (nor in prison).
As others are mentioning, what struck me most here is the shifting title of our protagonist: from American Wife, to Wife, to now American girl. There’s a diminishing of her power in that trend, a shrinking from importance to insignificance. This shift happens at the moment she finds the cat gone, and she suddenly feels much younger, much less imperious and powerful than our first impression of her. Similarly, as she heads in again past the hotel owner, I’m struck by the way her sense of self shrinks even more (“Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small”).
And yet, I’m also struck by this line that seems to defy this trend toward smallness (no stasis here!): “She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.” Hemingway breaks the pattern here to give us this glimpse, this sense that she remembers or is still holding on however weakly to this other, more commanding, larger version of herself (how we first meet her, the “American Wife”). My sense of her as a complex character is growing: we see clearly that she has these different sides to herself, and that somehow the loss of the cat has caused this change in her. We also learn that she’s not conducting a straightforward act of rescue but “wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty” which seems to suddenly make this act a much more personal one: there is something personal at stake for her here, in her desire for a “kitty”, and I’m curious what that is!
Another bowling pin in the air for me: The maid’s incredulous response to the wife/girl’s words that there was a cat in the rain. Is this really something so hard to imagine? Clearly the maid hasn’t seen the cat. This reaction from the maid does two things: It creates a kind of divide in my mind between the wife and this maid, adding to the wife’s sense of smallness - her aloneness in her desire to rescue the cat, in her knowledge/belief that the cat was even there. The maid’s reaction also highlights the rareness of the situation - cat in the rain - as not something they see everyday. It would feel very different if the maid said something like, “Oh yes, that cat lives around here”. But this disbelief from her gives the whole situation this aura of specialness, rarity. It’s something that the wife/girl seems to have noticed that others haven’t.
I see a twist in this story, a different background. I have been in jobs where I needed to bow, where I needed to supply people lacking independence and common sense the obvious necessities.
The maid is bothered by the American woman’s immaturity, clearly, closer to stupidity than innocence. I see the woman as a bother to the “help.” Yet, they do what must be done. The old man is more capable, practiced at hiding his disdain.
If she is more frivolous, silly even, like a child, the husband is probably exhausted with her, rather than dismissive. This is a tale of a pampered person unable to wait like everyone else.
Just a thought.
Girl! I now see her as quite young, married to an older man. He talks to her as though she is very young--"Don't get wet." Like you'd say to a child. And now I start to see that they are here during the off season--when rates are cheaper. So maybe she thought she was marrying a wealthy older man, but it turns out he's not so wealthy...? And she is bored. He's an adult--reading on the bed. She's a kid, looking for fun, a playmate--the kitty, perhaps. And isn't she the one who calls the cat a kitty? Like a young girl might do. Anyway, I see her reaction to the hotel staff as immaturity--a young girl who is being patronized and doesn't realize it. At the end of this section, we are given the husband's name. He is named--a real person. A man. She remains a girl, unnamed. Can't say I understand why the maid's face tightens when the girl speaks English. Anyway, my view of the entire story changed with the word "girl." Maybe I'm giving that too much meaning, as women have often been referred to as girls despite their age. Still, to me the story really turned on that one word.
While the preceding passage focused on class, this one subtly shifts the emphasis (without removing the earlier one) to tensions between Americans and Europeans in the aftermath of the Great War. The American girl (thrice referenced here!) is contrasted to the (I can only imagine) older European maid, and the former appears full of childishness even as she enjoys a superior position over the latter. The maid is, understandably, put out.
I read this as a delightfully subtle and puckish commentary on American adventurism in foreign policy, with the American girl jaunting out into unfamiliar environs to engage in good deeds (but in fact driven by her own selfish desire for the kitty). She jaunts out under the great umbrella while the maid takes all the rain, even remaining outside to close the umbrella after the whole thing.
Likewise, the death toll of the Great War fell much more heavily on Europe than it did America, and it was Europe that suffered the profound devastation (the empty square of the story) of the war, not the heroic doughboys. I think Hemingway is perhaps reflecting here on what he saw in the eyes of Europeans (not the soldiers, necessarily, but the people) when he was a medic in the war. The young ingenue is full of nobility and selfishness, and largely ignorant of anyone else's conditions.
But wait, she is redeemed by a moment of clarity! As she re-enters the hotel she sees the padrone's quiet and unobtrusive performance of his duties--in stark contrast to her own performative antics--and she suddenly feels small, even while still finding herself in the spotlight. It's a great moment, like an amateur actor onstage for the first time, the spotlight in her eyes.
It takes all my strength not to just find the story and read the damn thing all the way through now. I'm done with guessing what's next.
My read: now I’m contrasting the hotel keeper with George. The wife also comes alive for me when she sees him at his desk. But I don’t read her fondness of him as so much… entitlement as, here is this warm and attentive man who takes her concerns seriously, even when they are silly, and makes her feel seen. (As opposed to the aloof American guy upstairs who only feigns interest, clearly wants to chill out and do his own thing, even if he loves her.) If the hotel keeper were a little younger, I’d argue she’s lusting after him. (Took me a second read to notice he’s old. If you reread that passage assuming he’s young, it almost reads like a trashy romance novel.) OK so he’s old, but there’s a courtliness to their interaction, which European men do so well (and American women often delight in, thinking it’s meant specifically for them!) Sending the maid is a form of protection, caring, from the hotel keeper.. the wife is able to delight for just a moment in feeling feminine, and in « danger », but also someone to be taken seriously.
When the maid tightens at the wife speaking English, it could be her recognizing the dynamic and feeling « there goes the hotel keeper flirting again with a foreigner so he can feel masculine and desired and important and I’m here stuck holding the umbrella for this ditz who can’t be bothered to learn Italian »
Hemingway just got me in the mood to watch Emily in Paris Season 2. 😅
Signed,
The girl with one too many European exes
To me the shift from "wife" to "girl" represents a change in the protagonist's perspective, brought about by her failure to find the cat and the maid's mockery for wasting time on such a thing. It lines up with the shift in what the hotel-keeper is called as well - "padrone," which definitely evokes a fatherly/paternal power, inverting the social hierarchy that made her feel empowered earlier. She seems to be or to feel like a child being indulged by parents (the padrone and the maid) more than a person with any real power.
I also suspect that we'll see something more explicit on the subject of having or not having children, or possibly a miscarriage or abortion, soon; "I wanted a kitty" and the rest of that line strikes that bell pretty hard to me.
The more I think about this story, I’m starting to feel like the war is almost an invisible character. Was George in the war? Is that why they are at this town with the memorial, in what is apparently the off-season for tourists?
Her whims and complaints are frivolous compared to the loss and devastation Italians had just lived through.
I don’t despise her for her frivolity, though, She is an innocent (a girl!). To her, the whims and complaints feel big and urgent. However, she is in a position where no one around her can take her seriously.
“…maid’s face tightened.” Those four words create the most tension for me, along with her condescending laughter at the American girl’s mission to save a cat. Sometimes, perhaps, the only weapon a servant has against a rich tourist is contempt? Economic class distinctions seem to have become more stark. And I’m intrigued by the maid’s nationalist reaction to the English language. Is the maid to become a larger character in the story?
I noticed that at the end of the piece, George Saunders is somehow in the room, reading. So that’s cool. Also, as a reader, I at first thought she wanted to help the cat, but now, when the cat is gone and had escaped its somewhat desperate, huddled situation (presumably for better safety from the rain) the woman is disappointed for herself instead of happy for the cat that we thought she cared about. Turns out she wants to trap it, so to speak, even more, but this time for herself. This is when she becomes the “girl.”