Minnesota Zen master
Born in the Midwest to a fundamentalist Christian family which frowned on entertainment, Garrison Keillor's main ambition was to write. But he first worked as a radio presenter and went on to make his mark by broadcasting comic tales of a fictional small town, Lake Wobegon. His quirky stories and novels, with some echoes of autobiography, are now bestsellers, writes Nicholas Wroe
Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian
Garrison Keillor: mainstay of the American satiric opposition
Just before Christmas last year, Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau and Al Franken met for dinner at a New York hotel. Despite the absence of Michael Moore, this informal meeting of friends was in effect the high command of the American satiric opposition in session. Trudeau's treatment of the Bush administration in his Doonesbury cartoon strip is well known to Guardian readers and the thesis behind Franken's best selling book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), needs little further explanation. However, to many people in the UK, Keillor would not be naturally bracketed in this category. He is more generally seen as a rather folksy and avuncular figure whose tales of life in his fictional Minnesota home town, Lake Wobegon, have provided a soothingly wry view of life in small-town America. That description of him still applies, but particularly in the US Keillor has also built himself a reputation as a consistently astringent critic of the Right.
"But when I talk about politics it is in a very light-handed and in-passing way," his reassuringly rich-timbred voice slowly deadpans in his apartment the next day. "Republicans might be heathens and out to destroy all that we hold dear, but that doesn't mean we need to take them seriously. Or be bitter or vituperative just because they are swine. I think one can still have friends who are Republicans."
The three men were meeting after a live New York broadcast of Keillor's long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which for two thirds of its season goes on the road, the other third coming from Minnesota Public Radio in St Paul. Among the usual combination of sketches, poems, live music and, of course, Keillor's monologue with news from Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men all good looking and all children are above average", Franken had played Henry Kissinger in a sketch, and Keillor had woven in a running joke about Republicans. Keillor started the show 30 years ago after a visit to the legendary Nashville country music radio programme Grand Ole Opry.
The novelist and critic Jane Smiley, who has written extensively about life in the Midwest, says that from the beginning Keillor "seemed to set himself up in a sort of loving opposition to Midwestern values. He'd hold up these values for amusement and you had the feeling that while he was aware of their virtues, he didn't precisely share them." Franken says that while Keillor "is clearly a Democrat, he is not overtly political on the show. But his politics have become more salient in recent years and the tone of his gentle jibes does tweak his targets in a way that may sometimes be more effective than the type of humour I use, which is to go straight at them."
Keillor explains: "I am culturally quite conservative and being a writer is the purest form of entrepreneurship there is. And I am a Christian and had a fundamentalist upbringing and Republicans assume all fundamentalists are on their side. So I am a sort of conservative Democrat and the Republicans do find that odd." A review in the conservative journal, National Review, typifies the Right's frustration. It complains about his "moralising about the moralists" and categorises him as "a horrid left-liberal scold, dripping with contempt for nearly everything Middle American, who has grown rich and famous off ridiculing his fellow Minnesotans for the benefit of smirking elites everywhere".
Keillor and I go back a long ways. As he moved on from one public radio job to the next, there I was I time when I was hired to fill the vacancy. We both started at the University of Minnesota's public station. Unlike me, I think Garrison got his degree.
He went through a period in the late '80s into the '90s when he thought, once again, that he was going to make his living as a writer, changed wives several times, moved to Denmark with one of them, set himself up for a while in New York to be the anti-New Yorker writer on the staff of that magazine, left Prairie Home in the less-than-capable hands of Noah Adams for a number of years, and told the Twin Cities he hated them as he slammed the door on the way out. He returned chastened to Prairie Home, the only place where he ever really fit in.
On the night before Thanksgiving, the brother and his wife took me to see an unusual performance: Garrison as soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It wasn't a Prairie Home show. I don't really know how to describe it, it wasn't like anything we'd ever seen before. He sang, he told stories with symphonic accompaniment, read poems to Mendelssohn's Midsummernight's Dream suite and led the audience in a sing-along of old songs and hymns. I had tears in my eyes as I turned my head to see my hard-nosed brother singing Amazing Grace with his eyes closed.
Garrison is re-inventing the narrative in a new form. If you live in a city where you get to catch this show, don't miss it. The rest of the time you can catch Garrison, at the top of his form these days, on Prairie Home. If you've never heard it, or don't live in the States, check here to find your local NPR affiliate which carries the show, or listen to the webcasts. The man is our modern H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain in one. If you want to learn what literary mockery of the Bushes looks and sounds like, this is the place to go.
When I moved to Washington in 1985, I fell into deep homesickness for Minnesota, as this place is virtually the anti-Minnesota. I spent my second summer here working on the Hill, taking my lunch with the red-hot street vendors near the Supreme Court, and eating my doggie lunch lounging on the West Lawn with a bun in one hand and one of Garrison's books in the other while the squirrels gathered round looking for a handout. That way, I could keep the laughter and the tears to myself. The squirrels don't blab.