George Saunders
Author
of In Persuasion Nation talks with Robert Birnbaum about
the White Sox, the next Buddha, Nike commercials and much (much)
more
On the basis of three story collections, CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and the latest, In
Persuasion Nation; a novella, The Brief and Frightening
Reign of Phil; and an all-ages kid's book, The Very
Persistent Gappers of Frip, George
Saunders
has, uh, rocketed, uh George has, uh, been acclaimed, uh, has uh,
taken some time out of his busy life to talk with Rosie [whom he
brought a box of treats] and me a second time.
Robert Birnbaum: So what do you think of the White
Sox?
George Saunders: I saw them in Spring Training
this year and they are looking pretty good.
RB: Were you excited last year [when the White Sox won the World
Series]?
GS: A little bit—it's stupid though. They are all millionaires
that I've never met—
RB: [laughs]
GS: But sentimentally, just seeing the uniform was an, "Oh!"
RB: I am a North-sider and have never been a Sox fan, but that
team got to me—it took me two months to find a White Sox hat
in New England—finally, I found one at a national department
store.
GS: I was here when they beat the Red Sox—I was doing a reading.
And it was very sobering, the introduction was, "The Red Sox
just lost." And you could see everybody go "Ugh"
and then I had to read.
RB: I like Ozzie Guillen [the White Sox manager]—he's fun
and funny.
GS: They were a very Chicago team. They reminded me of the '59
team—whatever it takes to win.
RB: Remember Juan Pizzaro? The WS Cuban pitchers Hernandez and
Contrares are like him.
GS: [And] Louie Aparicio. Minnie Minoso and those guys.
RB: I loved "Minnie" [as did all right-minded
baseball fans], Orestes "Minnie" Minoso [pause]. So, how's
it going?
GS: It's good. Very good.
RB: Meaning? No complaints—
GS: No complaints. Busy, but good. We just had our third-year graduation
ceremonies [at Syracuse] for our grad students and that is always
kind of nice, sentimental.
RB: Is there some plateau before that?
GS: No, it's a three-year MFA, so at the end we have this
big formal—they read and their thesis advisors introduce them
and their parents come and it's kind of a cathartic thing—nerve
wracking, you have to read in front of your girlfriend and your
ex-girlfriend—
RB: [laughs]
GS: —your friends and your mother and your grandmother.
RB: Is it my imagination or have you been doing a lot of more talking
and outreach and—
GS: I think maybe—I've been trying to.
RB: For people who are part of the growing legions of George Saunders
readers, there is a rich pool of information available. What could
we discuss that has not already been hashed over?
GS: Yeah, I don't know.
I remember
thinking when I worked for that corporation, "Oh man,
the American corporation, it’s soul sucking." But
then to have two little kids and get inside that citadel was
very nice. To have insurance and to know if you just showed
up and were competent and decent your kids would make it. |
RB: Maybe we should qualify this as a level one,
as an entry-level chat.
GS: [laughs] No, I'll just make sure to contradict myself.
RB: Good idea.
GS: "All stories should be completely planned out from beginning
to end."
RB: Exactly.
GS: "The Bush administration is a paragon of wisdom."
RB: Oh my God. Who will believe that? Do you ever get readers who
take seriously or are convinced by some of your stories? Like the
Sameness Sex Scale in "My Amendment."
GS: I got a couple letters on that. It's funny—from
The New Yorker you don't get it. People understand from
the context. But that one made it out on the Internet and I was
getting some pretty irate emails from people. One guy said, "You
are the new Goebbels."
RB: [laughs]
GS: It was funny because then I got an e-mail from him right after,
"Sorry, sorry, a friend just told me that was a satire—I
didn't realize it."
RB: That was nice of him. After you call someone Goebbels—
GS: Where do you go from there, really?
RB: For me your great forte is the employment of the reductio
ad absurdum. I mean, what gives you the right to tell people
they can't commit genocide? Or that their silly ethnic squabbles
are a blot on history as in Brad Corrigan, American, where
the burned corpses are talking and recounting the reasons for the
war they died in—which seemed like every other war, incomprehensible?
GS: This book, it took a weird turn, because in spite of myself
I had this 9/11-Iraq thing on my mind and I kept trying to write
those political essays to get that out of my system. But it didn't
quite get got. So I think what I was doing was a lot of—
RB: —the Filipino children—
GS: —that story just—I had a dream of that first page,
it got cut later, but it was real vivid, with those TV voices like,
"Well I guess we all learned something from…" That
kind of stuff. And I just transcribed it and then I just said, "For
once just fart around, try to make it funny and just let that pop
culture in and try not to filter it at all." And it kept going
and going and going and then without even me planning it, those
corpses showed up—
RB: It's amazing that you could have these harrowing images
and still cause laughter.
GS: I wonder. I have been thinking about this whole idea of darkness.
I'm forty-seven and kind of feel like, "Okay, I am going to
go off in some new direction." I am not sure what it is. But
I always hear, "He's dark, he is dark." And to me, I don't
quite [pauses] see it. So for me to put in a corpse and have him
be funny seems like we have been prepared for that. There is all
kinds of stuff like that out there. It doesn't seem to me
to be particularly dark. What seems dark to me is CSI Baton
Rouge or whatever—where there is no mitigating humor,
no sense that the absurd is absurd, it's all just murdering midgets
and no one ever calls those shows dark. You get to a certain age,
and God willing you see that the ratio of murders in your life is
very low [laughs]. It's not one a week and it's not
these kinky crazy premeditated diabolical things—so to me
that's dark. Now to have a talking corpse saying things—that
could be dark, but I have been thinking about where does darkness
reside in a story? Is it just that bad things happen? No. Look at
the Grimm Brothers—any of that. Maybe it's the frequency
of bad things happening? But then you look at Shakespeare, the density
of misfortune is very high. So I don't quite understand what darkness
is anymore.
RB: The last Batman was a rated as a kid's movie. My son was terribly
upset at the shooting scene of Batman's parents.
GS: Right.
RB: We walked out. Was that supposed to be okay? Not to mention
that there are Army commercials with the coming attractions for
kids' movies. Maybe that is the culmination of Neil Postman's ideas
in Amusing Ourselves to Death, "And now, this just
in…"
GS: I see it in my own very limited brain. I can't really
do two things at once. In my view the whole O.J. and Monica thing
was a kind of prep—a stupidity prep. And we said, "Oh,
that's important? It's interesting? I can really lower myself to
worry about the sperm-covered dress and not have to stop myself
and I can actually pretend that's serious cultural stuff?"
All right, so then you lower yourself into that vat. And then 9/11
comes. And we are totally ready to be fed this bullshit and I don't
think it's a coincidence. So a lot of that stuff was coming
out in this book. And some of the reviews are, "Oh, it's
a poke at advertising." Which to me—that's not enough.
Something about this idea that you said—you can't wallow in
shit and then come out smelling clean. I think culturally we somehow
stupified [or stupidized] ourselves and now we are paying the price.
RB: The ubiquity of marketing is the most obvious thing. Consumerism
seems to be a [government-sanctioned] religion.
GS: That's right. We are of the same generation, and I remember
thinking if we could just get rid of this religious stupidity, our
wonderful humanist nature would rise up. And that didn't happen.
What happened was our materialist nature rises up.
RB: And in some form or other you adopt a new religion—something
to believe in.
GS: And you have all the same moves—you bow to it and you
have icons and ceremony. But you also have beauty. For me part of
this advertising thing is that it is very seductive and I kind of
like it. And as person of my generation I have been programmed to
it, so when I go to think up this advertising stuff it's really
fun and very easy.
RB: Sounds right. Some of those Nike commercials are really compelling.
GS: They are really compelling.
RB: And their product design is great. Colors, packaging—
GS: Absolutely.
RB: And then you have to reconcile their labor practices around
the world [laughs].
GS: Aesthetically—there is a Nike commercial for soccer—it
doesn't ever say the word Nike. And never says the word soccer.
And has all these really charged political things. Very compelling.
And in some ways it's a little minimalist masterpiece. And
the only things that I guess are off is—what—it's meant
to sell something and it's sort of a committee effort. That's the
difference between it and The Dubliners, I suppose [laughs].
But the thing is, when I was younger I had this kind of vaguely
paranoid vision, which was, the Man is doing this to us. Now I am
much more a fan of that Pogo thing—"we have met the
enemy [and he is us]"—the people who are doing that
stuff are brilliant.
RB: What do you make of the mobile phone service provider ad where
a young guy is talking to an older CEO type and he has a new phone
and new calling plan and he claims he is—
 GS:
–going to stick it to the man. And the kid says, "But
you are the man?" "Yes." "Aren't you sticking it to yourself?"
RB: "Maybe."
GS: Very funny.
RB: I don't know what that means.
GS: I don't either. But you laugh. And you feel like, "Yeah,
that's a very rebellious attitude." There's another one that
kills me—I don't know who it's for. But it shows a young couple,
thirteen, fourteen years old, very beautiful Indian music thing
and then it just shows them at different stages of their life and
it's beautiful and I cry every time I see it. It's like for
Nextel or something. And I'm thinking, "You didn't do that,
you didn't cause that."
RB: I don't think about these small masterpieces anymore as much
as I think about the people who create them. I fear that some how
they have deluded themselves into thinking they have done god's
work.
GS: Right, right. The thing is—here I'm
playing devil's advocate—in a sense, they have. They did make
something—I don't know. Maybe it comes down to a question
of pure form. Look at a movie like Sin
City. Which has no redeeming moral value but it is beautiful.
What's the difference between that and a Nike ad really, when you
get down to it? Honestly, I don't think that much about this stuff.
But I know it's a really enjoyable guilty pleasure to just say,
"Okay, I'm going to think of fifteen commercials."
RB: As when Spike Lee was doing Nike Commercial and Ridley Scott
was doing Chanel—has anybody approached you to write ad copy
or come up with a campaign?
GS: No, I am too much of a small fry. They would
never—but if there is anybody out there listening...
RB: You never can tell.
GS: Vonnegut did a coffee ad.
RB: There has to be some hip, young advertising executive who is
writing his novel at night and fancies himself a littérateur
and he pipes up at a meeting, "Let's get that dystopian
satirist Saunders and Lethem and that guy—"
GS: It's funny we have been marketing the hell out of this book.
In really unconventional ways. Like with tattoos—so it's
a little bit a wink and a nod.
RB: Didn't you write me and say the next book would—
GS: —right, no words, just reflective surfaces.
The other side of it is for anybody making something, you have to
move it, and these days—I remember thinking when I worked
for that corporation, "Oh man, the American corporation, it's
soul sucking." But then to have two little kids and get inside
that citadel was very nice. To have insurance and to know if you
just showed up and were competent and decent your kids would make
it. And when the possibility of them not making it—and of
us being really low was very real, I thought a corporation is group
of people banding together for mutual—
RB: —no, that's called a community.
GS: But it was very similar. We were a community.
RB: It may exude that sense—
GS: Honestly I think it really was. But the only difference was—and
this is the funny thing—it's just at the last turn of the
dial that it's not a community. Because they will kick you out.
They will kick your ass right out if you don't produce. Which I
suppose in a real community they would do that.
RB: The Inuit would do that.
GS: Eskimos would. They are brutal. But you get to that point where
you are hearing about someone's sexual problems at work. Their kids'
problems and then one day every one has to go [makes a throat clearing
sound] "Uh hmm, Miss Smith has too many unbilled hours and
she will have to go." So I don't know.
RB: Work is no longer 9 to 5 for many people.
GS: —right—
RB: —and they are forced to make it seem more humane in a
sense. Or more something—Life seems co-equivalent with work.
24/7, what the hell is that?
GS: The other thing is that work for very few people and certainly
when I was at the engineering company work had nothing to do with
me except for money. Now it's not true for me and I think it's
not true for you, but we are fortunate to be in that position. But
at that time I remember thinking, okay I have nine hours blocked
out here to do whatever they tell me and I have to do it in a cheerful
spirit and efficiently so that I can go back to my real stuff.
RB: Another aspect of the modern American work culture is that
the work is frequently about simply keeping one's job. Not about
being productive at anything.
GS: When I was writing that first book at work,
there was always that feeling of "Oh god, I have been in here
for forty minutes, get out, get in the coffee area and make some
propaganda and really consciously say I am going to talk enthusiastically
about this project I am working on—go out here and do it loudly
so people will hear."
RB: This is like the first story in In Persuasion Nation,
the salesman for this absurdist simulated baby talking mechanism/mask.
I hadn't had any contact with her work since her impressive memoir
Liars' Club—I had a look at Mary Karr's recent volume
of poetry—she's a colleague of yours. Yes?
GS: Oh yeah—a friend too.
RB: I had not realized that she had a serious conversion to Catholicism.
GS: She has.
It’s amazing
how the pleasures of the language and the pleasures of the
physical world are one and the same thing. You can’t
just describe something in a lame, flat sentence and have
it come alive. It won't. But if you can do it in the right
way then it does come alive. |
RB: In a very serious way. It's all over her poems.
GS: It's a beautiful book.
RB: Is it?
GS: Yeah, yeah, I loved it.
RB: You are a lapsed Catholic—
GS: I am a reformed Catholic [laughs]. I'm a Buddhist in other
words [both laugh].
RB: It's interesting to hear you call it a beautiful
book. I just can't get my mind around all that stuff laced with
those religious references. Is there a payoff if I can get past
it?
GS: I can because—I think the whole book paid off. I have
an old habit from the time I was a kid, I do this mental Catholic
concession. When someone says, "The healing blood of Jesus
Christ," I am already thinking metaphorically. Even when I
was a little kid. Or when they say "crucified and rose again."
I am not thinking so much—I'm thinking miniature. Have
I been crucified today? But also, in the Buddhist thing, resurrection
is commonplace.
RB: As reincarnation.
GS: Yeah, exactly. This year I went
to Nepal for GQ and saw this little kid—
RB: Are you on a world tour for GQ? You went to Dubai—
GS: I did two. There was this little kid—he had meditated
for eight months, supposedly without any food or water. And I went
out and saw him and, man, it was something. In other words, it got
me thinking, "Maybe it's not all metaphorical because
there was something about that—he'd sat there for so long
that his hair went from your length [short] to over his nose. And
everybody in the town said, "When he sat down we thought he
was insane and we were harassing him and poking him with sticks
and now he has been sitting there for six months and he hasn't had
any food or water—promise you." So I spent the night
out there one night and nobody came or went and that supposedly
was when he was getting fed. So who knows.
RB: Does he claim he is the next Dalai Lama?
GS: He doesn't claim anything. He just had a dream one night. He
said a god came to him and said if he didn't get out of his house
he would die. And he was a Buddhist monk. So he went out under this
tree, the same type of tree that Buddha sat under and he hasn't
claimed anything. People claim that he is the next Buddha and so
he actually said at some point, "I am not Buddha." Meaning
I am not enlightened yet. He said I'm at the level of Rimpesahat,
which is like an accomplished master. And he just asked for six
years of quiet and then it was too noisy so a couple of months ago
he ran off and went deeper into the jungle and they haven't
seen him since. So, I don't know. It was pretty amazing. His body
looked unlike any body you have ever seen. It was thin but muscular
and had a weird color to it.
RB: No food or water for six months—that's impossible.
GS: I know. I know.
RB: You went to Nepal for him specifically?
GS: Yeah, GQ had heard of him and said, "You want
to go see him?" So I went to Katmandu, and if you drive it's
about eleven hours. We flew. It's right on the Indian border in
this beautiful grove of trees. Pretty, but the poorest place you
could ever see. So the idea that it was a hoax didn't make sense
for a lot of reasons. People are so simple there—
RB: Not like David Blaine, who I am convinced failed on purpose.
GS: I didn't see it—did he fail?
RB: I heard he did—that so-called news that was unavoidable.
It was all kind of off-putting—someone was going to do a two-hour
show. On what?
GS: [laughs] It's a bit like when Geraldo went into Al Capone's
tomb [both laugh].
RB: You are probably the only person who remembers that—
GS: [TV announcer's voice] "There's nothing in there."
RB: This stuff is destined to be forgotten immediately. As hopefully
Geraldo and his ilk will be. Anyway, I read somewhere in the storm
of interviews you have done that you look at In Persuasion Nation
as the third in a trilogy of short story collections. What
does that mean?
GS: Really, what I meant is this is everything that—it feels
to me a little bit like—I don't know why three would matter.
RB: Right. Why three?
GS: It feels like now I want to try something a little different,
at least in flavor if not in length. It's a mid-life thing, I think.
To say, these three I am really happy with them, proud of them.
Now let's take a breath here—what I usually do is write stories
back to back— six or seven at once and so what happens is
an aesthetic approach will kind of wear out as I am feeling a book
coming. So now this aesthetic approach is worn out and I am just
thinking, just relax a little bit. And I have this Guggenheim so
I have the next year and a half off.
RB: Apparently you were one of the 188 people that aced me out
this year.
GS: [laughs] Actually, you were 189 and I was 188. So I hope that
doesn't affect the interview.
RB: I also looked at the numbering on this chapbook you sent out.
GS: What, did you get 151 out of 150?
RB: 419 out of 500. And I thought we were better friends [both
laugh].
GS: I didn't make that selection, man. You'd'a been
number one.
RB: Sure, sure.
GS: Sean McDonald [Riverhead editor], talk to him.
RB: I didn't know Sean was a photographer [he did the cover art
for the chapbook], he's multifaceted. I guess he has a safety valve
in case dissembling writers do him in—[fumbling around in
a pile of papers] where is that thing?
GS: You lost it. If you had a higher number—there it is.
RB: It's very nice to give away 500 copies of this.
 GS:
Yeah. Yeah.
RB: It's of some value—these pieces, essays and tidbits,
are hilarious.
GS: Thanks.
RB: So what's up with the benevolence?
GS: I-I-, uh
RB: [laughs]
GS: Actually, we are going to put these out in book form someday.
RB: Enhancing the value of this—maybe I can cross out the
'4'.
GS: I'll do it for you. It was the end of a period, so I wanted
to get everything out—that was the political stuff that spun
out of this book. The nonfiction stuff, so—
RB: Are you being identified as a lefty?
GS: I think so [laughs]. My goodness.
RB: How could that be? You haven't had any stuff in the obvious
places like Slate—
GS: Two of those were on Slate. At some point, that valve
switched off. The last couple things have just been funny, like
that nostalgia piece in The New Yorker. I don't think this
stuff through very much. I am writing six or seven things at once
and whatever gets done goes out—so there is probably some
mapping of the subconscious in all this but I don't have any big
plan.
RB: We have talked about this before—I cannot read more than
one of your stories at a sitting—
GS: We did talk about that. You were actually the first person
who made me realize that about myself—THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
[both laugh]
RB: When I am reading one of your stories and laughing hard I wonder
if you were laughing?
GS: No, I usually get a little laugh the first time I come up with
something—not even a laugh—a little ‘heh'
in the chest and then I make a mental note that that's good enough—
RB: Going to show that writing funny is very serious business.
GS: I never think about it being funny but I think a lot about
compression—if you compress things—the compressed truth,
that's what funny is.
RB: Do you ever laugh hysterically—or reread your stuff?
GS: Sometimes, if I have do a reading. I don't usually laugh—and
I never laugh hysterically at it. Sometimes I'll get a little nose
snort kind of response [both laugh].
RB: "Nose snort"—good one. I like "chuckle."
GS: It's a little more honest. For me compression is very close
to regular old prose compression. It'd be like a boa constrictor
with a couple of pearls in it. The idea is to get the snake shrunk
down so that the pearls are adjacent to one another—then what
you get, you get more of it quicker.
RB: I do wonder why there is this limiting thing about reading
your stories—maybe it's that the density of a story
is as if it were a novel. And I only have so much head space available—
GS: When I am imagining it, I will have a longer description and
my feeling is that I'd have the physicality in my mind, then it
will kind of unpack for the reader—but only at a certain pace
of reading. If it's too fast, my experience is that the physicality
doesn't have time to unpack, but if you take a story—the story,
if you read it slow enough, then you are supplying physicality to
it. That's maybe when I talk about the trilogy thing, I'd like to
go back and reinvestigate that. These GQ pieces have had
a lot do with it. There you have to describe physical things. And
you find out that there is actually a pleasure in that and I am
not actually so bad at it. Early on, as a reaction against my own
bone-headed MFA early stories, I said, "No more description.
How many times do we need a kitchen described? We know what a kitchen
is, let's get going." So now I am taking a bit of a step back
and saying there are pleasures of language in describing a kitchen
and the type of kitchen matters and so on—
RB: I just came across a new novel by Joan Frank [Miss Kansas
City] and in the open passages she describes the protagonist
as resembling Alice from Alice in Wonderland and talks
about her hair color as a "conference" of various shades
and hues. That stopped me. It wasn't stilted and I just perked right
up.
GS: Right and that's one of the pleasures of reading. I went back
and read the beginning of Great Expectations and it's
amazing how the pleasures of the language and the pleasures of the
physical world are one and the same thing. You can't just
describe something in a lame, flat sentence and have it come alive.
It won't. But if you can do it in the right way then it does come
alive. For me, partly I am just taking a little bit of a step away
from, whatever is the reigning aesthetic of the three collections
and saying, "Okay, let me now reconsider this a minute."
I know I am always going to believe in speed and velocity and humor.
But is there a way that I can get a little more of the world in
there—without sacrificing those things?
RB: If you have been a hard core short story writer it strikes
me you become a junky for the quick satisfaction of closing down
a story and the—
GS: Right.
RB: —whereas a novel—
GS: —see what I have trouble with is that I don't have long-term
faith in any one idea. I don't mean that as a diss on myself. I
love the multiplicity of saying, like this Brad Corrigan story,
79 or 80% of the time I was going, "This is a stupid ass idea.
This can't sustain a story." Then I kept saying, "Try,
try." And finally at the end I was convinced it was, but I
didn't want to spend four years doing that. And part of the reason
I could do it was I knew it wasn't forever. It was a five month
thing and then if I wanted to—which I did, I could back and
react against it with something like Bohemians
which is more realist. In a way being a little bit indecisive or
maybe schizophrenic aesthetically you can say, "I believe in
Thing A 100 percent." Knowing that you can believe in Thing
B 100 percent next week. So the idea of sustaining some aesthetic
principle for 500 pages, I am not sure I have the character for
it.
RB: It doesn't have to be 500 pages.
GS: It DOESN'T—all right, great.
RB: Apparently your model is in the 19th century.
GS: How about 76—would 76 pages be all right?
RB: You haven't done or maybe it's escaped me—you haven't
lampooned the Great American Interview.
GS: Because interviewers are basically the best people on earth
[both laugh]. I know where my bread is buttered.
RB: You have been reading Dickens and Gogol and who else? Is that
it?
GS: That's pretty much it. I read Dead Souls a lot. I
read A Christmas Carol a lot. That is one that sticks with
me. What have I been reading lately—I am actually not very
well read. I came to it late, from an engineering background. Isaac
Babel I read over and over. I am reading the Tales of the
Genji—I just started reading that. That's pretty interesting.
I tried to read Tristam Shandy again this year. It didn't
quite work out.
RB: Because?
GS: I get busy with tracing and everything, and I get distracted,
so I just read something and get a taste of it and then I'll go
teach.
RB: What about the journalism—has that been helpful?
GS: I think it has.
RB: It gets you out of the house.
GS: I had three things: the Dubai piece and the
Nepal piece and I wrote my 8th grade daughter's graduation speech
this year.
RB: Is that available somewhere?
There is something
in the DNA of a paragraph—for me anyway, that the length
of the piece is predestined in the tone of the paragraph. |
GS: No.
RB: I came across Rick Russo's Colby College commencement
speech last year and it was quite wonderful.
GS: It was so much fun for me to do this.
RB: Well you cared.
GS: I always care—I care about the stories but there was
something about projecting your audience, it's something I don't
understand and I am a little afraid of it. But I noticed that I
knew the audience was going to be 2nd graders, 90-year-old Republicans,
people who didn't want to be there and somehow that changed, that
threw a switch in my head and I know for me there is something in
that, that pertains to novel writing and I don't quite know what
it is yet. Same thing with the journalism pieces. There is a willingness—it
might be like this—I started out, because I had a bunch of
years of failed book stories when I was at Syracuse and then when
I left, I got a really rigorous aesthetic for speed and whatever
it is that CivilWarLand is about. And I was really OCD
[obsessive compulsive disorder] about it. And I didn't let anyone
read anything except my wife and I was fighting over commas and
it was good—
RB: What was that abbreviation you threw out?
GS: Obsessive Compulsive. I had superstition and a certain [type]
font.
RB: A certain font?
GS: Oh yeah, 10 point, Times Roman, everything had to be just right
[both laugh]. I wanted to distinguish it from the corporate documents
that were in 12 point. So what I said was, that if I inhabit the
highest version of my aesthetic then it might be good enough for
people to read. So now when I am trying to say is—okay, actually
it turns out I can relax a little bit and still have something to
say. And so I am easing myself down into being a little bit more
of a relaxed writer—maybe in some ultimate way it's a little
more trusting of the audience. The graduation speech was interesting
that way.
RB: It occurs to me that this has shades of Sally Fields [at the
Academy Awards].
GS: [laughs]
RB: Accepting that people really like you. And that must somehow
mean something to you?
GS: It does—if it's true. But I doubt it [laughs].
It's not about "like" but it's about—
RB: People seem to be involved in your writing and seem to
be dedicated to it. Going through the ashes and such—
GS: To have a body of work out there and then courtesy of the internet
start to see a given story will be called his "best"
and his "shittiest." And you go "Wow, how amazing."
So then I think it's not really my job to figure in advance to only
give them the best. ‘Cause you can't. So then you just start
taking some swings at some pitches and as I am getting older I am
thinking, "God, don't let me die before I get my swings in."
RB: You want to leave it all on the field.
GS: And that means you have to take a few wild swings. Or else
you are not really alive and you are not really an artist. So that's
something I am learning and I am really trying to grow into that
idea. That I'd rather fuck up a few things than get to the
end of my life and go, "Very nice. Very tidy!"
RB: There are, I suppose, many examples of grand failures—which
may arguably be greater than some neat perfection.
GS: Somebody said a novel is a long work of prose with something
wrong with it. When I read Dead Souls I realized I had
never finished it until last year. I thought I had, but I hadn't.
It's kind of fun. It's real loose at the end. It's not like
everything gets tied up beautifully.
RB: I'm jealous of people who have taken the time to read significant
works of the19th century. I never seem to get to that—
GS: That's my big one for last year. I read that Chris Hedges book
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and the Paul Fussel's
The Great War and Modern Memory—that was good.
RB: There's a new book by Jay Winter called Remembering War
that I am interested in-- that play of memory against what is claimed
to be the objective reality.
GS: In the Fussell book, if I remember correctly, he makes the
point that people's memories were kind of frontloaded by the poetry
of the period, so what they remember about the war is what they
had brought to the war from their reading of poetry. And there is
another book—I don't remember the name—they just found
a bunch of tapes in the British War Museum of reminiscences of WWI
veterans and they are just gory and sad and beautiful and they just
transcribed a bunch of them and it's pretty interesting stuff.
RB: There is a new translation of War and Peace [by Anthony
Briggs]—
GS: I have it.
RB: I never read it, and looking at the first chapter now, I still
think giving high school students Tolstoy or Dostovesky or Melville
doesn't make any sense to me.
GS: No, no.
RB: What's the experiential connect supposed to be? But anyway
I started reading the Tolstoy book and I'm thinking, "Wow,
this is quite good."
GS: It's great. I was sick once when I was working
at that corporation and took about three or four sick days off and
just read it and the first hundred pages were really impossible
and then it was like the best movie I have ever seen. I couldn't
stay away from it. I was sneaking it in to work, just to find out
what was happening.
RB: Sneak it into work?
GS: They didn't mind if I brought it, just if you read it there.
RB: Back to the journalism—is that a different muscle?
GS: It is‚ and I don't really have it yet. I am trying to
figure it out. These two pieces weren't really strict journalism.
They were kind of experiential, get-there-and-be-a-little-funny-about-it.
For me the stories are‚ when I'm doing it I can feel myself
going in the direction of the most interesting language for me at
that moment. And the story goes in that direction. Whereas this
stuff is more like, it happened this way, what's the most
truthful vivid way you can say it? And that's a nice way to write
for me. It takes some pressure off. It says, "Look, if I am
writing this moment between you and me, I can't fabricate it. I
can slant it and I can filter it but I can't totally make it up."
There is something about that that is a stepping stone into novel
writing. I notice there are books that I love, novels, big novels,
and there are entire chapters that are by my existing standards,
too workmanlike or something?
RB: Contrived?
GS: No, necessary but somehow maybe banal. A little bit flat in
tone. Because they are doing serious work.
RB: So what makes them necessary?
GS: Well, just plot. The assumption of the novel is that it is
fairly naturalistic. That if Jim has a job, that he has to get fired
from the job.
RB: The rifle is in the room so that—
GS: Something like that. And there are scenes that I just can't…I
don't want to write them. They are too familiar. Now that's a defect
in me. So the journalism is a nice way of saying, "Well, look,
you really did talk to the guy." So you have to describe it.
And the definition of a good writer is, can you describe the banal
in a way that makes it work? It doesn't have to be brilliant.
RB: That's right.
GS: So the payoff is if you do the groundwork, then you get a bigger—in
screenwriting, I am learning the same thing. I have been writing
the CivilWarLand script. There are scenes I would never have written
that are not in the story. I thought they were just too dull. But
you put them in, a husband and wife talking at breakfast and suddenly
the emotional stakes go up. So for me it's a little bit, like
I have this prissy part of myself and he had to hold his nose while
I do the groundwork. And then I can get into the bare-bones stuff.
RB: This is your obsession with perfection?
GS: With stylistic—
RB: Having to do with the highest achievement?
GS: I remember even as a kid being very put off by sentences that
sounded like anybody could write them. And I was very entranced
by Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes because she has those
pearl-like beautiful little sentences. So we get…
RB: Well some people do talk in a certain ordinary ways and sometimes
that's all you get—
GS: There is a dialogue concession that my inner nun makes. But
something about—the kind of sentences that are just workaday
sometimes—
RB: "Then they walked into a room."
GS: Yeah, ich. So even as a kid when I got those early grade primers
or whatever. I couldn't read them because they were so—but
then Esther Forbes, I dug her. You could tell she worked over every
sentence. So that kind of care for sentences also has a down side,
which is sometimes life is—
RB: Sometimes life is desiccating—
GS: I read an essay that Hunter S. Thompson wrote
about Hemingway. His point was—and I don't think he is correct
in this—but his point was that one of the reasons he went
nuts at the end was because he had this highly honed style and suddenly
the world had gotten bigger and the style couldn't encompass the
world. And I felt that sometimes you think in order to get the scope
of the world you have to be willing to do some workmanlike sentences.
Everything can't be a pearl. That is something I am trying to—the
journalism helps a lot.
RB: And is the journalism going to be a permanent part of your
repertoire?
GS: I think so. It's really fun. I work with this guy at
GQ, Andy Ward, who is a fantastic editor. He has a really
great way of—he just turns me loose on stuff. And when I hand
stuff in he is always so positive and then we still work on it and
it gets better. So as the kids get older it's been a nice
way to reconnect with the world a little bit and see if my assumptions
have any truth to them. As you get older it seems to me that my
projections get so big and sort of bossy and it would be possible
for me to sit in that room and write my shit without ever consulting
the world. It's real useful to get out there and bang your
shins against it a little bit.
RB: Out of the bubble. Interesting you stay that. I have such a
sour taste about American magazines—every once in while I
will find a gem—Jim Harrison wrote this impassioned story
about life on the Arizona border that was centered on a dead pregnant
19-year-old Mexican girl—I found it in Men's Journal,
which is mostly about men's toys and libations and grooming devices.
It's like when Playboy had these important interviews.
GS: For my point of view I would rather have—or you get behind
a powerhouse like GQ, they send you places in style —not in
a trivial way. They give you the resources you need. So for my point
of view it's very exciting to be in a kind of writing that
is not marginalized—in other words, they really want these
pieces to be good. They are giving me lots of room. So I feel empowered
by that.
RB: So what's the connection with the quality of your work
there and what they are using to sell the magazine?
GS: It ties in with what we talked about earlier. I'm not
sure about GQ but my sense of the larger industry you have really,
really intelligent people at every level working hard to do great
stuff but what are they [working] against, they are working against
the basic —it takes money. So I find them very heroic there.
They will say we have been talking about doing this piece where
I go back to my hometown. That's the pitch—
RB: Chicago.
GS: Yeah, Oak Forest. And they say, "Okay, if you say you
can do it we know you can do it. Go get it." So I am like,
"That's terrific."
RB: The best editors and art directors are the ones who pick talent
they have confidence in—once they have made their choice,
they let them go.
GS: It takes a lot of confidence.
RB: If you sit on talent and micro-manage, I think that's
a deficient personality.
GS: I had the same experience with The New Yorker. They
have been so good to me over the years. And it always just wants
more. Give more of yourself, write better stories. In that part
of the business I am really encouraged. Now the book side of it,
I don't know how that works. What I mean—
RB: You have only been at one house, Riverhead?
GS: And they have been great to me.
RB: The two women who started it left.
GS: What I mean is—the book side has to work harder —Sean
is busting his butt on this book and did on the Phil book. And I
think—I don't know what I mean, really—
RB: Maybe that's the trap of book publishing. That the book
publishers are treating books in the same way as other commodities—like
the movie business treats movies. It's a totally different
mechanism of appreciation and consumption. Even more mysterious
is how a book becomes a "big" book. Unlike a movie,
I don't think you can front load the advertising and hope
for incredible first day sales.
GS: What I have been so happy with Riverhead is that they understand
I'm not a million seller and no matter what we do that's
not going to happen. But they have been really, really good at the
guerilla tactics to say, "Okay, granted, you are not going
to be in every house in America, but let's make sure you are
in the houses that want you and maybe don't know about you
yet." They have been really creative and energetic about that.
As a mid-career person it makes me think, "God, I am cared
for."
RB: That's all smart stuff. That's all one can expect,
that the books be put in front of the potential readers—no
crusades to convert people to the George Saunders creed—
GS: No, I am all for that [both laugh]. There is a special drug
that is on the cover of the book if you touch it—
RB: It sounds to me like there is this fierce and animated internal
dialogue going on in a way that other people don't talk about
[or admit].
GS: Oh yeah, very neurotic. I feel really lucky to have had this
much play. And I want to make sure I don't screw it up.
RB: What does your wife say?
GS: About what?
RB: Do your interior conversations get out into the air?
GS: Sure. She knows me and she knows when I am full of shit.
RB: That's key.
GS: Yeah, and she had high hopes for my writing and she–she's
my first reader and I really trust her reaction. So if she says,
"This is good," or, "You're doing good,"
then I know I am on the right track. Other times she'll say,
"I am not quite feeling this." And I always feel she
had put her finger on a certain bit of falseness. I am always writing
to her, in certain ways. Like I would like to write the big book
and she would go, "Now that was really something." That
would be the dream. She is a very good reader, and I really admire
her way of looking at the world. And I aspire to it.
RB: What is her way of looking at the world?
GS: A lot of things —she is an ex-fundamentalist. She was
raised in South Dakota and they were on the Baptist side of things.
Uh, I think she has a really expansive view of the world but also
has very high standards. She was a ballet dancer. She knows when
something is technically sloppy and she also knows when it is not
properly animated emotionally and she is not invested in a lot of
intellectual gamesmanship. So if you show her something that is
merely clever, it doesn't do it for her. She knows when I
am really putting my soul into something. And she can't hide
her reaction. So when I bring her something, it's always a
big day. And if she doesn't like it, it's a bad day.
But I know what I have to do—which is go fix it.
RB: Do your kids read?
GS: Very much, a lot, they read better stuff than me. They read
Nabokov and my younger daughter is a big fan of Art Spiegelman—she's
big fan of Maus. My older daughter has read the collected
works of Nabokov—so if they are reading me they are slumming
a little bit.
RB: There is the self-effacing former sort of Catholic I know—I
am not exactly sure about your Catholicism, "failed?"
GS: Not failed, it worked [laughs]. I am probably still a Catholic.
RB: So you are taking a break from—
GS: Teaching. Syracuse, if you get a Guggenheim they pay your salary
for the year.
RB: No! Sweet. Well, you won't be applying next year—so
maybe I'll move up in the ranks.
GS: You'll be up to 180—basically, I don't have
to go back until a year from August. Fifteen months of time to experiment
and write some things.
RB: More GQ stuff?
GS: I am going to be doing them pretty regularly, but I don't
know what they are yet. They usually call me and say, "Here's
an idea," and they are always ten times as good as what I
came up with—and sold a nonfiction book to Riverhead also.
RB: I was wondering when you'd get around to collecting the
nonfiction—I'm not about to run out and get GQ.
What might be a topic for a novel?
GS: That's where I get messed up—if I think of a topic
I'm dead. I think I'll start writing a bunch of paragraphs
and just try to see. There is something in the DNA of a paragraph—for
me anyway, that the length of the piece is predestined in the tone
of the paragraph.
RB: What's the biology axiom?
GS: I know what you are thinking of—progeny schmogeny something—Progeny
smogeny, that's it [both laugh].
RB: That's what I was hoping we would (d)evolve to—just
start talking nonsense syllables.
GS: We could do that.
RB: People would go, "That's brilliant!"
GS: "How phonetic!"
RB: "How meta!"
GS: I had a couple of ideas—I always think
of Dead Souls. A comic novel could operate on one scam—I
think I am just going to fart around and see if I can find a tone.
For me the key to having that switch thrown in my mind would be
to find the right tone to write it in.
RB: Where are the movie projects at?
GS: They are both written and we are just waiting.
We got two offers on money, and they keep saying we can do a little
better. We are waiting for scheduling things to drop into place.
RB: Cool
GS: Good enough. All right, thanks.
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Posted:
June 5, 2006
