‘Swimming In The Dark’ by Tomasz Jedrowski — A Minutely Crafted Aesthetic Fantasy

Swimming In The Dark tells the blighted/self-blighted love story of a patchy fling in Poland at the time of Solidarity — Polish union resistance to the Soviet imposed authoritarian government. It’s a pity to call it a fling, considering how touching a lot of the story’s moments are, but the sketchy relationship described doesn’t quite fit the emotional profundities its adolescent protagonist propagates out of it. Equally, I had hoped this novel might focus more on the socio-political dimensions of its setting, as promised in the blurb, but instead, like so many ‘gay’ novels of its type, it turns inward. Just when you thought tropes of the lonely, disaffected, interiorised, persecuted homosexual were dead and we’d moved on, along comes another.

In the narrator’s still closeted voice, there is no expansion into the confident, outgoing and deconstructive understandings brought about by gay and lesbian studies and queer theory over the past forty years. We already know what gay loneliness was and is, thanks. In fact, it is by now such a clichéd theme, the constant repetition of it has itself become dubious and questionable — why provide this worn image again? Although, in Swimming In The Dark, this is a trope often committed in sentences of aesthetic beauty, that aesthetic itself is a well fetishized marker of the socio-political position of author and reader. If you’re tired of this painful beauty, this book shows it’s not yet safe to go back into the water of ‘gay’ literature. This is a book written now but set temporally, thematically and stylistically in 1982.

Perhaps the repetition of this type of novel has something to do with the market it serves. Older, white, middle class, aesthetically conditioned and socially damaged gay men with a conservative political outlook form a large part of the gay-novel buying demographic. This is exampled by the continued commercial success of the novels of Alan Hollinghurst or pseudo-memoirs such as Call Me By Your Name. Gay misery, exquisite nostalgia, lust for youth, and shame, have become consumer fetishes for a certain market share and Swimming In The Dark tolls all these themes like beads on a rosary. In cliché after cliché, it becomes hypnotic, luxurious, indulgent: ‘There were moments when I wanted to lie on the ground and feel the street’s concrete against my face.’ Indeed. This novel performs sadness, beauty and bitterness in a peculiarly self-conscious way. What’s going on here? Could it have been deliberately engineered, the whole novel a self-conscious marketing gimmick, like the inevitable picture of a shirtless youth on its cover?

There’s a clue in the book’s acknowledgements, thanking various inputs to a novel that was ‘seven years in the making’. Swimming In The Dark feels like a book that has been made, it is highly wrought and crafted in multiple ways. It is made up, and made up in a way that is performed rather than real. It’s not a real memoir, it’s someone fantasizing a memoir and constructing it through pink flavoured spectacles, pitched to the middle class demographic of the market place. There are multiple unbelievable scenes where I found myself going, ‘Yep, that didn’t happen. Never happened mate. You just made that up entirely.’ It is a posed fantasy. The main characters, in their bubble romance, feel increasingly deliberately imagined: ‘When I woke in the morning, I saw your body rising and falling peacefully with your breath. Through the cracks between the wooden boards, strips of light entered the barn, illuminating you. Your shoulder was covered in little freckles I had never noticed, random and beautiful, like a constellation of stars.’ You had never noticed them before because you just made them up now as you were writing. You conjured them for this book which offers poetic simile after poetic simile. Very pretty, often stunning, but: never happened. The words, the events, both reek with artifice. This novel is a performance as much as the masturbatory durations of Jean Genet. Equally, factually, its knowledge of Polish political history at the time of Solidarity feels shallow and second hand, not lived.

Formally, the novel poses as a break up letter, looking back on a recent relationship. It is an un-love letter, full of the narrator’s self justification for his actions, that he then sends to his ex — you know, one of those that you send and then can’t retract. It is by turns poignant and spiteful, cherishing and unforgiving: the author concludes that he was right all along and his lover in error. The lover was especially wrong about politics, advocating for an outdated socialism when dissident style, neo liberal (American) political allegiances are what should be followed and the way to go. This obvious political pandering sits as uncomfortably as the use of the word ‘ass’ in a Polish location. The political disagreement between the lovers is clichéd and naïve, a two dimensional sketch of neo-liberalism versus authoritarian communism, patently written from an American perspective. This lack of human complexity in the midst of a lived situation is because the author wasn’t there.

Posing simultaneously as a break-up/love letter and as a memoir, the novel is a double fiction, a fantasy which pretends to address the former lover, Janusz but, of course, is addressing us, performing its handsome, lost youth for us, dancing extortionately as if we were eavesdropping on reality but the simultaneously florid and spare prose is so wrought in its performativity that it’s obvious we aren’t. I could not suspend my disbelief. Though I often went, ‘wow, look at that sentence.’ Equally, there are some great set pieces — a party in a swanky apartment and another in the woods while high on poppy stem soup are superlative. It is often a virtuoso performance but it’s performativity makes even the best bits feel inauthentic.

In addition to the relentless tone of nostalgic, gay shame we are all familiar with, sold to us through novels like this as some sort of panacea, the behaviours of the main characters — Ludzio and Janusz — necessarily have more than a hint of implausibility. Would the narrator really take several weeks to read Giovanni’s Room once he’d got his hands on it, his first gay novel procrastinated? And, strangely, the narrator explains to Janusz what Janusz’ own house looked like ‘you remember your house with the Madonna with the cracked paint standing with its arms stretched over…’ A beautiful description but so obviously for our benefit, we feel the constructed nature of the whole novel rear its head once more. And then, there is a sudden discussion of Foucault between boys who a moment before were critically naïve and sequestered. Further, the narrator’s complaints about censorship in Poland under the Soviet contrast strangely with the amount of Western music being played at the parties described. Also, a wealthy apparatchik drives a ‘panther-like’ Mercedes, a styling more akin to present models than those of the 1970s. Similarly perpelxing: was it possible to dial Wroclaw direct from a New York street phone in 1982? How many quarters would you have had to have had in your hand?

Struggling with anachronisms? Reading the prologue to the break up letter that is the story, I presumed from the immediate laconic tone of the narrator, that the novel was looking a long way back, looking back from now, 2020, to events in 1980. But actually, the narration takes place only a year after the putative events reflected on, its author is still on the rebound, at 23 not 63, and the letter (the book) was written in 1982. Why is Tomasz Jedrowski writing a forty year old book? Who discovered this old artefact of gay persecution and self loathing in the back of a drawer somewhere?

The book feels episodic and there were times I — like the narrator — struggled to continue. I frequently got the sense that the author may have been responding to something that had been picked up on in a creative writing circle: How are you going to get a feeling of progress? Why don’t you use the seasons? And: ‘It surprises me that I shared the book’s existence (here the narrator is referring to the illicit copy of Giovanni’s Room) with you so early. But I felt a strange trust there by the riverside.’ Ah, right, glad you explained that inconsistency of characterisation. Writing becomes a very self-conscious, mentor oriented performance.

Ludzio sneers at Janusz for being in the closet at work while he himself continues to be so, even among his supposedly closest friends. Clearly, the narrator has not yet worked himself out. This is an unconventional contrast to our expectations in this sort of reminiscence. Generally, in memoir, we are in the hands of a narrator who has grown or understood something fundamental about themselves from the experience. Not so here. In repeatedly assuming the moral and political high ground for himself while remaining oblivious to his own questionable behaviour, the narrator becomes increasingly unsympathetic. There’s no personal growth here, no learning, we seem to end where we began, stuck in a 20th century trope of homosexual exile and isolation, the dubious consolations of self absorption and the fetishization of untouchable beauty. Compared to something like The Queer Diary of Mordred Vienna, this is very straight stuff.