Love Is Political in Tomasz Jedrowski’s Debut Swimming in the Dark

The separate yet sometimes inextricably linked spheres of politics and desire make for doomed bedfellows in Jedrowski’s debut novel.

Swimming in the DarkThe separate yet sometimes inextricably linked spheres of politics and desire—especially when it comes to queer sexuality—make for doomed bedfellows in Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark, an intricately structured coming-of-age romance between two young men living under the autocratic rule of the Polish United Workers’ Party in the early 1980s. The novel is written as an address, with its narrator, Ludwik, referring to his former lover, Janusz, in the second person as he recounts the highs and lows of their affair, as well as the ideological differences that led to its end. Ludwik has been in the United States as a political defector for a full year when he begins to tell his story—a year since he has last seen Janusz—and he follows daily news on the radio of escalating political strife at home in the present even as he looks achingly back into the past, wondering what might have been.

The novel begins with a confession. Nine years old and on a religious excursion with others his age, Ludwik tells of how he developed a close kinship with—and first real crush on—a Jewish boy named Beniek. During a party on the last night of the trip, when the lights suddenly go out without warning, Ludwik finds himself on a dance floor in the dark, pulling Beniek’s willing body against his own. But when the lights are thrown back on and everyone can see what he’d done, he experiences for the first time the familiar marriage of desire and shame.

Beniek’s family abruptly moves away following the trip, and Ludwik later comes to understand, during secret listening sessions of Radio Free Europe broadcasts with his mother and grandmother, that the PUWP had turned on Poland’s Jewish population, implicating them in the country’s involvement in the war and forcing them to flee. Ludwik’s sexuality is thus connected to politics from the start, represented in a carefully and skillfully constructed montage of linked scenes chronicling both his sexual and political development in turn: “Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much darker and uglier.”

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After an encounter years later with a man in a public park leads him to think that submitting to what he believes is deviance will lead only to a life of loneliness, Ludwik vows to conceal his sexuality at all costs, renouncing his desires and choosing to live instead through books, which were “armor against the hard edges of reality.” And when he overhears a conversation between two obviously gay men at a speakeasy, he’s prompted to seek out a copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. He eventually reads the book himself, and he feels immediately projected into its world: “It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and pain, simply by existing.”

Ludwik reads Giovanni’s Room over a course of days otherwise spent doing grueling manual labor at a work education camp, where he later begins his courtship with Janusz after spotting him enjoying a solitary swim in a river. Eventually, Baldwin’s novel becomes a bridge between them, its fictional world of pain and fear creating a shared space allowing for the possibility of love. Upon their release from their work assignments, the two spend an almost dreamlike few weeks camping together in the woods, exploring the nature of desires they’d mostly kept hidden and out of sight until then. But the first glimmers of strife between the two men, who are otherwise blissfully in love, surface in conversations that enter the realm of politics.

There’s a tendency toward the figurative in the novel’s language that sometimes feels forced, but the claustrophobic interiority of Ludwik’s psychological turmoil elevates Swimming in the Dark to startling and moving heights. The looping in of Giovanni’s Room as a meta text also deepens rather than deflects from Jedrowski’s central themes. Reflecting on the impossible choices facing Baldwin’s protagonist, Ludwik explains at one point that “suddenly the narrator’s pain didn’t soothe my pain anymore. His fear fed my fear. I was like him, David, neither here nor there, comfortable in no place, and with no way out.”

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“I should have known you’re one of them,” Janusz says when Ludwik brings up the prospect of leaving Poland for the West in search of freedom—freedom from the state, freedom to live a life of choice. Janusz would rather follow the rules and participate in the system, corrupt as it might be, rather than take the risks associated with rebellion. And when they return to Warsaw after their time alone together, Janusz to begin work with the PUWP and Ludwik seeking a possible future as an academic, the disparity between their two political views—amounting to a disparity between how they envision possible futures for themselves—only escalates.

There’s danger in staging ideological difference as the basis for dramatic conflict in a fictional narrative, because the possibility of reconciliation and resolution hinges so completely on the notion that characters must renounce their views—or not. But in Swimming in the Dark, there’s little hope for Ludwik that Janusz is going to suddenly transform into a revolutionary, as he quite purposely builds a comfortable life for himself within existing constraints. And so instead of staging a political impasse between two men in love as a tragedy, Jedrowski adroitly provides readers with the pleasure of observing the development of a personal politics, Ludwik’s coming of age less a coming-out narrative than one of gradual radicalization.

In the end, Janusz is drawn not as a patriot blinded by the propaganda of his government, but as a man unwilling to risk everything for the uncertainty of a future elsewhere—and he serves as a necessary foil for Ludwik’s developing political perspective as the novel’s protagonist and narrator, whose own resolve is only strengthened by witnessing Janusz’s consenting negotiation of the only future available to him without radical action. The novel’s indelible complexity ultimately lies in its representation of a mind in conflict with the body.

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Swimming in the Dark is available on April 28 from William Morrow.

Richard Scott Larson

Richard Scott Larson has earned fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his debut memoir is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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