THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:His long career on radio and in writing has made Garrison Keillor the quintessential American storyteller, write
BELINDA McKEON.
BORN:Anoka, Minnesota, August 7th, 1942
FAMILY:Wife Jenny Lind Nilsson, an 11-year-old daughter and 40-year-old son
BEST KNOWN FOR:His live radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, which last month celebrated its 35th anniversary and broadcasts on American Public Radio and on stations across the world. Keillor also wrote the screenplay for – and starred in – the Robert Altman film of the same name in 2006
WHAT'S NEXT:The latest in his bestselling Lake Wobegon series of novels is set to be published in the US by Viking in September. Liberty(2008) is due out this month in paperback from Faber
IN THE ELEVATOR, I’m sceptical. He can’t always talk in that voice, can he? At 11am, in the middle of a busy two-day trip to New York, at the end of another long season of the radio show which requires him to riff and revel and recite in front of a live audience for two hours every Saturday night, and reportedly right up to the wire with the deadline for his latest novel, surely Garrison Keillor won’t really sound like . . . well, like Garrison Keillor? With that richest of radio voices, that voice that slides slow into the deepest of timbres, cushioning the consonants and drawling the vowels? I ring the doorbell. The steps that approach the apartment door are leisurely, almost ambling.
“Hello,” says Garrison Keillor, in Garrison Keillor’s voice, evoking the bullfrogs and cicadas and bumblebees of yet another quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It’s all I can do not to tell my ears how rude it is to stare.
Keillor, who will appear next month at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, spends part of his year in this Central Park West apartment, but mostly lives in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, who is a violinist in the Minnesota Opera orchestra, and their young daughter (Keillor has been married three times, and also has a 40-year-old son from his first marriage).
He is most famous firstly for that voice, and secondly for that line. The words "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon" signal, each Saturday night, the beginning of the 20-minute monologue that is the adored centrepiece of A Prairie Home Companion, the live radio variety show written and hosted by Keillor since 1974. With this line, Keillor launches into the storytelling style that has become his signature over the past 35 years, a wandering through the anecdotes and the enigmas of everyday life in a small community that seems, on the surface, largely whimsical but which is sharpened with a wryness that allows little to escape its grip. The daily doings of the people of Lake Wobegon, a Minnesota town "out on the edge of the prairie", become in themselves the edge from which Keillor casts smoothly off to reflections and recollections that reach from the quotidian towards the universal.
The fictional town of Lake Wobegon – based in part on Keillor's actual Minnesota home town of Anoka – has been the setting, too, for several of Keillor's novels. The most recent, Liberty, was published in 2008 and told the story of a sixtysomething Wobegoner falling unwisely in love with the pageant queen whose commando take on Lady Liberty in the previous year's Fourth of July parade set the whole lake talking. Like all the Lake Wobegon novels, it bubbles over with gossipy subplots along the way to an antic denouement.
The next novel in that series is the one on which Keillor is currently working, and on which, yes, he is right up against his deadline. "Closer to the cliff you cannot come," he says of the September publication date for a novel on which he's still very much at work (when I arrive, he immediately brings me for a brief glimpse of the desk at which he's been writing all morning, as though we must visit the work before settling down to conversation), but he doesn't look too worried. Keillor is hair-raisingly prolific, producing a novel almost yearly as well as penning most of the items on A Prairie Home Companionand writing a weekly column which is syndicated to newspapers around the world, including The Irish Times, and which analyses everything from Sarah Palin to potato salad and the debatable distance in between.
It's not an output of which everyone is a fan; in a vicious take-down in a 2004 issue of Poetrymagazine, poet August Kleinzahler described Keillor as an "indefatigable and determined purveyor of homespun wisdom . . . all appetite, irrepressible, the hardest-working 'thoughtful person' in show business". And Kleinzahler wished, it was clear, for the hard work to stop. A round-the-clock tape of Keillor reading poems on a second radio show to which he lends his "burnished caul" of a baritone, The Writer's Almanac, would make for a good torture weapon, Kleinzahler suggested.
But Keillor’s not for turning. “I live in a state of mania, maybe too strong a word, but a state of hyperactivity,” he says, “and it’s brought on, in part, by a sense of time passing.” He will turn 67 next week. “It’s a very comfortable age,” he says, “and that just has to do with having all of these projects that one wants to accomplish. I have a screenplay that I’m promising myself I’m going to get done in August, and my great dream and ambition is to write a play, and I’m contracted to write a few more books, and the radio show is tumbling along.”
It’s a hectic life, and it’s a life, he admits, which bears little resemblance to those lives he dreams up and draws out every Saturday evening. “I live a life which is so distant from Lake Wobegon,” he says. “I lead the life of a writer, and I travel a lot, and I’m in a lot of airports and hotels, none of which can figure much in the life of Lake Wobegon. I’m a nomadic, a migrant worker, telling stories about a very settled people.”
KEILLOR HAS KNOWN distance from the community of his birth for a long time now. At 20, he broke completely with the Plymouth Brethren, the fundamentalist sect in which he and his five siblings were raised in the then-rural community of Anoka (and which, according to some sources, had its origins in Dublin in the 1820s). He has, he says, no bitterness about his upbringing, or about the strict confines which the sect placed on daily life – dancing and other entertainments, such as movie-going, were strictly forbidden. Rather, he has fond memories of the one form of entertainment which was permissible in the eyes of the Brethren: storytelling.
“I remember sweet occasions when we would be sitting in a room, or perhaps outdoors under the trees at my grandma’s farm,” he says. “And there was very much a hierarchy of precedence, social precedence, so that the eldest person was deferred to. Which would have been my Great-Uncle Lou, and he would have the floor, and he loved to tell stories. And they would sit and reminisce.”
As Keillor talks, his voice slips deeper into those familiar, lulling rhythms of his own storytelling, sometimes pausing deeply between words, never rushing a line, never having to grasp for a transition. “Children were much lower down the scale, so you just sat and you listened, you listened to your elders talk in this stately sort of twangy Midwestern style. Finishing each other’s sentences, and laughing, it was all very pleasant, and very sweet. And as a child, you might be allowed to ask a question, but you were not asked, in this circle, what you had done last week. You were not on display.”
The storytelling, the reminiscing, the laughter with a touch of sweetness – it sounds familiar. Yet if Keillor developed the format of A Prairie Home Companionas a tribute of sorts to that realm he had known in childhood, then he must have done so unconsciously, because, for him, the two worlds could not be more firmly separated. In fact, it was by becoming the writer and broadcaster who would devise Prairieand Lake Wobegon's quiet weeks that the young Keillor made his break with the world of the Plymouth Brethren. In the eyes of the elders to whom he still refers as "my people", his striking out for the world of the page and the stage was nothing less than an irredeemable sin.
“I make my living in a field in which there is a kind of self-display,” he says. “But to my people, this is absolutely alien.” The Brethren had, Keillor says, “no social skills among strangers”, and only within their own circle did they wish or feel confident enough to speak.
"I was astonished, when I was a kid, to see how awkward they were, trying to make small talk with neighbours, with a delivery man . . . we really were set apart," he says. "And when my people dealt with strangers, they were very curt and uncomfortable. They distrustedsocial skills, that sort of blather, that sort of easy confidence in strangers." He pauses, and gives a sort of shrug. "What I'm doing right now, with you, for example, they would think was the strangest behaviour. To talk about yourself in any intimate way with someone you've never met before."
Maybe they’d be right, I say. Keillor nods readily. The principle of separateness by which the Brethren lived, he said, was extremely strong – “true Christians were to separate themselves from those who did not adhere to the truth” – and the children of the sect also had “a kind of hostility bred into us, a sense that we were to tune ourselves to the next world and not to this one”. It was a “skewed vision”, he says, but part of it has remained with him. Which part? “The idea of separation. And I think part of what the Brethren bake into you makes you a satirist. It’s an interesting subject, and one that other people have written about. I haven’t. Maybe I don’t want to know.”
Though his mother, at 94, still lives in the family home at Anoka, and though he speaks of her with warmth, his relationship with his father, who died in 2001, grew more and more distant with the years.
“I did not do anything, past the age of 11 or 12, that impressed my father,” says Keillor, “and I think you had to achieve that, to be close to him.”
What was the young Keillor expected, by his parents and his community, to be when he grew up? His answer gives some insight into how far his people lived from a world in which identities are defined in terms of careers.
“You were expected,” he says simply, “to be good. You were expected to accept Jesus as your saviour. You were expected to grow into a life within the Brethren and to become one of them. They also wanted you to do well in school, but they were very fearful of one of their own going too far in that direction.”
COLLEGE WAS NOT looked on with favour. It was just about tolerable for Keillor’s older brother to go to university to become an engineer (tragically, that brother, Phil, died earlier this year following a skating fall). But Keillor’s path was looked upon by his elders with something like horror. That path began with boyhood bicycle rides to the library in downtown Minneapolis, continued to high-school attempts at poetry and a name-change from Gary to the more literary Garrison, and carried on through an English major at the University of Minnesota, where he worked at a radio station for the first time.
Soon after graduating from university, Keillor began to broadcast a morning radio programme on Minnesota public radio, much admired for its eclectic mix of music, medieval chant frequently sharing airtime with contemporary rock. The Atlanticpublished one of his poems, and in 1970, the New Yorkeraccepted one of his stories, Local Family Keeps Son Happy. The title seems almost a painful tilt at the reality of his family situation, but Keillor, by that time already married with a young son, had left Anoka well behind.
Or so it seemed. In 1973, the New Yorkerassigned Keillor to write about the Grand Ole Opry, the weekly radio programme which had been broadcasting out of Nashville since 1925 (and continues to do so today). Keillor went along, and in the wings of the old Ryman Auditorium, he found the germ of a radio show he would make his own.
“It was people doing radio,” he says, “which I’d been doing for a while. But they were doing it with a real sense of camaraderie, and I missed that, working alone in a studio.” In contrast to public radio, which seemed, he says, “always on the verge of being pretentious”, the Opry was friendly – though not necessarily onstage. Nashville was a doggedly commercial operation, and the stage was for making hits. “But there was this wonderful, warm, friendly atmosphere backstage,” Keillor says. “These people loved talking to each other, telling stories backstage. Onstage, they were just pushing their latest record. It was radio twisted by commercial, irrelevant factors.”
FROM THE BEGINNING, Keillor's A Prairie Home Companiontook a swipe at those commercial pressures by including spoof commercials in its line-up of music and comedy sketches. "Powdermilk Biscuits," he recites for me now, "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done."
The first show played to an audience of just 15 people, but the numbers steadily grew, and when Minnesota Public Radio joined with other national stations to form American Public Radio, an enormous audience began to tune in to the show. Keillor’s monologue was already a highlight; Lake Wobegon, with its traces of old Anoka, was finding its way into homes across the country.
Though he never uses a script as he delivers the monologues, Keillor plans them carefully in advance. And for the stories necessary to build an imaginary community, he has his sources, among them a number of relations in Minnesota who e-mail him weekly to provide him with nuggets of local news.
Then, on Saturday mornings, he makes notes for a couple of hours, and that evening, he leaves those notes behind. “It gives you an odd freedom, having all this preparation, to improvise and to invent new things that you hadn’t thought of. Sometimes the notes that you write out for a monologue are a way of discovering all the things you don’t need to say, or don’t want to say, and then it leaves you free to go to the thing you want to do.”
Does he ever go blank? Standing up there, without notes, in front of an audience of hundreds, sometimes thousands (the July 4th show, which also marked the 35th anniversary, was attended by some 10,000 people), not to mention the multitudes listening in around the world? "No," Keillor says. "There are moments, yeah, when your mind feelslike it's blank. And you learn how to do a kind of circular talking. You could always slip laterally into something. You'd always remember something. Something would happen."
Especially during the years of the Bush presidency, and most intensely in the months running up to last year’s presidential election, that “something” was often less a sideways slip than a slam-dunk into a political and cultural commentary which railed against Republicanism – which he describes as “a psychological gated community” – and, in particular, against Sarah Palin.
Keillor travelled to Wasilla to try and make sense of the Palin phenomenon, and what he saw there gives him some understanding of why she decided, earlier this month, to announce her resignation as governor of Alaska.
“Alaska can do Palin no good whatsoever,” he says. “It’s very small, and so scrutiny is very sharp. She’s an act that does really well on the road, not at home. The audience that loves her is in the lower 48, and any prospects she has of running for president are there.”
Propped up against the living-room wall is a framed front page of the New York Timesfrom November 5th, that edition emblazoned "OBAMA", which sold out in the city before 6am. Keillor's admiration, even adoration, of the Democratic nominee was evident in his columns in the run-up to the election, and it's an admiration which remains firmly in place now that Senator Obama has become President Obama. "Though," adds Keillor, intriguingly, "I don't entirely understand him."
What does he not understand? “Well, a politician is a created persona,” he says. “And I think that his is carefully created. I don’t really know what’s behind it, or underneath it. It’s a great mask, and it’s a mask that I believe reflects some of him. But this is a guy who didn’t enjoy campaigning.” And who made it seem as though he did? “Yes. I think he’s a serious person, and he made a very important choice, that the racial symbolism would be other people’s symbolism, not his. That was a big choice. That separated him from everything that had come before.”
Keillor may no longer be of the Brethren, but he is still a church-goer, a practising Episcopalian. “Though I’ve been very irregular of late, and my priest has written me a note about this,” he says. He may be a passionate Democrat, but he also describes himself as culturally conservative. What does that mean?
“It means, I guess, that I believe in hard work, and in achievement, and I believe in rewarding it,” he says slowly, after a considerable pause. “I prefer honest non-fiction, diligent non-fiction, to edgy memoir, and I believe in the classics, and I believe in the classic virtues. And I think that not all that much has changed.”
He nods. “I think that the drama of change is much overplayed.”
