One of the most recognisable voices in American radio belongs to a thin, tall
Minnesotan with impeccable manners and the mournful face of an undertaker.
On a recent Sunday morning in Manhattan, after delivering coffee to his guest,
this unlikely music box of a man folds himself on to a sofa and begins
struggling with a task that clearly makes him uneasy: talking about being
Garrison Keillor.
“I'm from the Midwest,” says the 66-year-old host of the beloved Prairie Home
Companion, which runs in the UK on BBC7 as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show.
“People from the Midwest are trapped in a kind of self-effacement, brought
up to be virtuous and self-denying, and their struggle against that is maybe
one thing that is funny about them.”
Once a week, for the past 30 years, Keillor has turned this neurosis into a
great source of laughter and entertainment, deflecting attention from
himself on to folk and bluegrass singers, sketch actors, make-believe
cowboys, and, of course, the residents of a fictional corner of Minnesota
called Lake Wobegon.
It is “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve”,
Keillor says each week, as he delivers the news from Lake Wobegon, “where
all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children
are above average”.
The success of Keillor's show, which draws upon his upbringing as one of a
family of six children in a small Minnesota farming town, has been so
overwhelming that it's hard to overestimate the importance of this fictional
hamlet in the American mind. It is heard by nearly 4 million listeners every
week in America, and in 2006 spawned a film directed by Robert Altman.
His broadcasts are to America what John Betjeman's journeys to churches,
cathedrals and old buildings were to England: a slice of a vanishing past,
presented in its gloaming, by a supremely gifted raconteur and radio
personality.
And yet, like many supremely successful performers, Keillor has a complicated
relationship with the source of his great popularity. “I set out to be a
writer, and writing is what I do,” he says today, still groggy from the
previous evening's show, broadcast live from a Broadway theatre.
“So to go on stage with a band, and to sing with them, and to do a sort of
radio version of stand-up seemed clownish to me, and undignified at various
times, and also a huge waste of time, because with radio you do it and then
it's gone.”
The vicissitudes of this self-doubt, which culminated in a brief hiatus from
the show in the 1980s, seem to have kept Keillor sharp. They also find some
echoes in his plangent new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty, a comedic tale about
regrets and the road not taken. Clint Bunsen, the town mechanic and hero,
wonders if he made a mistake many years ago when he returned home to marry
his high-school sweetheart, grind away at a job, and host the town's
increasingly ambitious July 4 parade.
Readers expecting a twee novel about home-town life are in for a surprise.
Liberty is full of marital discourse, empty American ritual, and the
ridiculous kitsch of what has essentially become a barbecue holiday.
Visiting dignitaries to Lake Wobegon are welcomed at Art's Bait & Night
O' Rest Motel, an establishment run by a militiaman with a cranky streak.
Gaudy floats and living embodiments of American historical figures jostle to
get in range of CNN cameras. Meanwhile, Clint Bunsen struggles to keep his
eyes off the 28-year-old who dressed up as the Statue of Liberty, but
neglected to wear underwear.
As silly as it sounds, Keillor says the book is a comedy, not a satire, of the
patriotic American holiday.
“I think we are not as jingoistic a people as we are thought to be,” he
opines, ladling his words out like soup from a tureen. “We are a nation of
private people, private, serious, industrious people; and it's very
difficult to get Americans to come out and cheer for themselves and for
their country.”
This is not to say that Keillor remains unscathed by the nation's slightly
kitschy celebration of its history. As a symbol of Americana, he has been
thrust directly into such events. One July 4 he was invited out to
Independence, Missouri, the home of the former US President Harry Truman, to
read the Declaration of Independence. “I asked for permission to abridge the
Declaration,” Keillor recalls drily, “and they said they would really rather
not.”
So he read it all, including the long “tedious” list of complaints against the
King. Towards the end: “I could see they were all sort of looking up over my
head. And they got very excited when I came to the end, because of course,
then the bombs would go off in the air.”
What makes Keillor's observatory stance toward America so popular is that he
is accurate without being damning; disappointed, yet still open to wonder.
He recalls the most impressive July 4 parade he ever saw, in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. It featured a string “of beautiful antique circus wagons, carved
and molded wood wagons” pulled by “sixteen, twenty-four, and even
thirty-four horse purchases made by some Belgians”.
“There was nothing commercial in it,” he marvels, “no promotion of a brewery,
or frozen custard, or Harley Davidson motorcycles, or anything else. It was
just a pure, blazing display. Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is a piece of
crap next to it.”
Keillor's antipathy for crowds, his Midwestern disdain for puffery, his love
of small-town Americana all ought to make New York an odd home away from
home for him. Yet he loves it. “If you're tired of New York, you're tired of
life,” he says.
He first moved to Manhattan in 1966 at age 24 to try out for a position as a
Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker magazine. He didn't last long.
“It just seemed to me this was not a good city to be poor in. And my
interest in suffering was pretty minimal at that age.”
Keillor returned to Minnesota, took a job at a local radio station and made
his assault on the pages of The New Yorker more gradually, writing humour
casuals from an upstairs desk in a farmhouse. Meanwhile, his show became a
hit. “If you came on to the scene with musicians, actors, sketch comedy and
a story,” he says, deflecting again, “there was a feeling you were starting
something new.”
In those early years, he would often write his monologue the same day it was
performed. For all its success, “I was perpetually on the verge of
quitting”, he remembers. Finally, his second wife, a Danish woman, convinced
him to move to the city.
For the first time in a while, Keillor even had some anonymity of a kind. For
several years the author of the international bestselling novel Lake Wobegon
Days wrote unsigned Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yor-ker. Eventually,
however, the radio show was relaunched under a different title, and then
went back on air again as the Prairie Home Companion. He sold his New York
apartment, only to recently buy it back, at a much higher price, with his
third wife, the violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson.
Since then, Keillor seems to have solved his restlessness by keeping busy. He
has written a syndicated column on political matters, hosted a brief, weekly
radio spot on literary trivia and poetry, opened a bookstore, and published
several novels.
Next year he will publish two new works; a book of 70 sonnets and a new novel,
“which is coming along well, but slowly”, he says, as if there is all the
time in the world. A Garrison Keillor reader is on the cards for 2010. He is
also writing his first play, which is scaring the hell out of him. “I don't
want to embarrass myself,” he says. “If you come from the Midwest, you will
never, ever lack for discouragement,” he adds. “It'll be there, inside your
head, and it's planted there once you are a child, and it will go on for
ever.”
Even, apparently, when the voices outside have nothing but applause.
Extract:
“I am not from here,” Clint said. “ I am Spanish. My people brought horses to
North America. They were poets at heart, singers, wanderers, so they valued
their mobility. They were civilized people who knew when society gets stale.
I may be leaving, who knows when, perhaps tonight. I am tired of sarcasm.
I'm looking for a more merciful way of living.” The horse listened to his
confession with supreme gravity, though chewing corn. He licked the white
froth from his lips and waited for Clint to say more.
“The firemen are all mad at me because I said there was no need to blast the
siren every time there's an emergency call. The firemen all have pagers and
that works just fine. They love the siren for the drama and everybody gets
excited and sees them hustling off to whatever it is and it makes them look
like heroes. But it's a pain in the butt. So I said so, and those guys are
never going to forgive me for it. Damn it, you pay a high price for speaking
your mind in this town.”
The horse regarded him with sympathy and Clint stroked the long forehead and
scratched up around the forelock. He wanted to put his arms around the horse
and feel its head next to his own. “I did all I could do here. Married,
raised kids, buried both my parents, fixed thousands of cars and started
cars on cold mornings, flooded the ice rink and got up early in the morning
to coach peewee hockey, shoveled old people's sidewalks, cleaned the church,
gave money to some who needed it, bought rounds of beer when it was my turn,
ate dinner at people's houses and tried to make conversation though I didn't
care that much for them, was president of the Boosters Club, and for the
past six years I ran the Fourth of July. And now I need to do something for
myself.” The horse seemed to understand.
Liberty by Garrison Keillor
Faber & Faber, £16.99; 288pp Buy
the book here
