I discovered Garrison Keillor long before I knew he was
“Garrison Keillor” — that is, the host of the National Public
Radio’s all-too-long-running (30 years) radio variety show, “A
Prairie Home Companion.” In the 1970s, I used to subscribe to the
New Yorker. That’s the old New Yorker, readers, a
beacon of quality literature and of the literarily hip, and a model
for aspiring writers of quality fiction, as I was then. I used to
read it cover to cover.
By then, of course, I knew that John Updike had served an
apprenticeship there, writing the “Talk of the Town”
front-of-the-book feature for some period. I was a full-fledged
quality magazine geek. I had sent a short story to Updike, on which
he kindly penned some comments and criticism, and sent it back. (We
accidentally spent a shuttle flight together flying back from New
York in 1995, and I reminded him of that, and thanked him.) I used
to correspond with Rust Hills, then the fiction editor of
Esquire.
I remember one New Yorker short story very well for the
cleverness of its irony and its plot. In it, a little boy in the
Midwest gets caught up in a completely fake drama mounted by the
players in a radio variety show, and the boy buys box after box of
a certain breakfast cereal to “vote” for who he wants to win the
fair maiden in the conflict between husband and other man in the
radio show. The breakfast food, of course, is the sponsor of the
radio show.
I’ve just spent half an hour searching through Google, and I
cannot find the title of that short story, decades after I read it
in a Keillor collection. Confine Keillor to his short stories
alone, as I discovered in that search, and he would still be a
literary figure of some stature on the American scene. He has
published not only in the New Yorker, but in the
Atlantic, has edited at least one collection of the year’s
best short stories (1998), and is the subject of a number of
critical studies of the American short story. I’ve read most of
those stories, and they’re wonderful. Keillor deserves to be read
right alongside Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, and Updike. And he
brings to the short story something virtually no other author does:
He’s funny.
YEARS LATER, I DISCOVERED KEILLOR AGAIN, the way most of us have, I
suppose: by tuning across the radio dial and finding that VOICE.
“Who,” I wondered, “is that?” As I listened, I got no clue, because
what I heard was unlike anything I had ever heard on the radio
(nostalgia to the contrary), certainly unlike anything NPR had ever
broadcast before.
I was raised in Minnesota and South Dakota. I became a fan, as
who from my background could not. Keillor’s put-on accent only
faintly resembled the Minnesota speech I knew, but of course I also
knew Keillor was spoofing, with his self-conscious bumbling,
cracked pronunciations, and deliberately unhip joshing.
My admiration grew boundlessly as I discovered who he was, and
appreciated what he had done. He had found a voice and built an
entire show around that voice, becoming a kind of all-American
cross between Balzac and Will Rogers. He continued to write
wonderful, funny, incisive books. And he wrote his radio show every
week, hiding behind noms de plume like “Norman Conquest,” a
staggering prose output.
IN THE PROCESS, KEILLOR ATTAINED TO A STATUS every writer envies:
He had a perfect reputation. He could call up any editor in the
country and offer an essay or an article confident that it would be
accepted. Those of us who write for a living aim for that status,
work all our lives for it, to be regarded as well as Updike or
Phillip Roth or Tom Wolfe. Never to have to worry about being
rejected again. Never to have to struggle to publish. Lord! It is
worth gold, that kind of reputation.
Lately, Garrison Keillor has been shoveling that reputation away
with both hands. Why? Because he’s gotten the idea he has some
political wisdom to offer. In reality, he has been poisoned by the
bile of contemporary politics, a poison that, I believe, got its
start when Bill Clinton told James Carville, “We’ll just have to
win, then,” and Carville declared, “This is war.”
Keillor has been writing about politics since the '90s at least.
But people really began to take notice that something seemed just
plain wrong with an essay Keillor published in Salon in
November of 2002, “Empty victory for a hollow man: How Norm Coleman
sold his soul for a Senate seat.” Reputedly refused publication by
either of the Twin Cities’ hometown newspapers, the essay caused
quite a stir, not for any wisdom it offered, but for its sheer
meanness. This passage in particular came in for criticism:
Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a
small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows
about Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is,
shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about
it, least of all the religious people in the Republican
Party.
Stung by the reactions, Keillor published his
reply to critics a week later, getting even more
bile off his stomach in “Minnesota’s Shame.” Had he gone over the
top with the first essay, in the second, he went even further,
saying, among a great many other things, “Thus the use of Iraq as
an election ploy, openly, brazenly, from the president and Karl
Rove all the way down to Norman Coleman, who came within an inch of
accusing [opponent Paul] Wellstone of being an agent of al-Qaida.”
That was just plain false, as anyone willing to dig through the
newspaper files could find out — and did.
Keillor’s latest, another ad hominem attack on
Republicans, appeared in the Baltimore Sun June 8, titled,
“With ineptitude on full display, the party’s over for
Republicans.” In it, Keillor focuses on one Republican stratagem,
of calling attention to Nancy Pelosi as a “San Francisco
Democrat.”
“‘San Francisco’ is a code word for ‘g-a-y,’ and after
assembling a record of government lies, incompetence and disaster,
the party in power hopes that the fear of g-a-y-s will pull it
through in November,” Keillor writes. Later, he calls, Republicans
“Sturmbannfuhrers.” Granted that the use of Nancy Pelosi is what
litterateurs call “antonomasia,” the name stands for a great deal
more in San Francisco politics than a gay population: gun control,
pet guardianship, crime on the streets, bums sleeping and excreting
wherever they wish, City Council resolutions condemning Israel and
the war in Iraq, and so much more.
It is telling that the column appeared in a second-rank
newspaper. Two or three years ago, he could have had his choice:
Washington Post, New York Times, anywhere. Not
anymore.
Keillor isn’t the only one to fall victim to the political
poison, of course. Laura Ingraham has devoted a book, Shut Up and Sing, to the all-too-many
artists who presume to political wisdom. And I’d like to give
Keillor the benefit of the doubt. Now, at age 60, with 30 years of
writing a two-hour radio show behind him, perhaps he’s just tired.
I hope that’s all it is. “A Prairie Home Companion” hasn’t been
very funny for quite a long time. Maybe it’s just time to quit.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
