Gumption (29 page)

I
would
like to flatter myself so far as to acknowledge that we recognize something of kin in each other, the kind of folk who know their way around a can of suds, a tire gauge, and a potato fork (hipsters, please don’t appropriate those as your next accessories). We have both worked as roofers. George also worked in a slaughterhouse, an experience I don’t envy him, but the simple fact of which gives me an idea of his tenacity.

Don’t get me wrong—these are not boasts. The familial feeling is born of, quite conversely, an understanding that we have simply endured the parts of life that a person doesn’t brag about and have come out the other side with ten fingers. Each. Nonetheless, I have to cop to this: George Saunders paid me some compliments, and I have repeated them in my book, which makes me a jerk, and no amount of equivocation can dilute that. Moving on.

His stories have been compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s, for their seriocomic timbre, and I suppose that the freshness of his prose must bear a similarity to the whimsical strangeness Vonnegut presented when he was new on the scene. If you have yet to enjoy George’s stories, you’re in for a delectable treat, and not just a dessert, like pie, but the kind of dessert that makes you think. Like three hours of pie with a Zen koan written out in the crust.

Take, for example, this bit from a CNN interview on the eve of the millennium in 1999:

I don’t think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little
self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.

George Saunders says that, as a young man, he knew somewhere deep down that he wanted to be a writer, but he wouldn’t realize it for some time. He studied the guitar instead, playing in different bands and determining that he would become known as a virtuoso. He doggedly learned an extremely difficult classical piece (
Capricho árabe
, by Francisco Tárrega) with which to impress his teacher at community college. He worked and worked until he felt cocky, and when he went in to perform it, he played it better than he ever had before. He ripped through it with intensity.

When he’d finished, he cracked his knuckles and waited for his mentor to tell him that he had “the goods.”

His teacher, apparently moved, said, “I want to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” said George.

“If you don’t change your life, you’re going to be a very unhappy adult.”

What he then explained to George was that, sure, he had mechanically nailed going through the motions of the song, but without paying any attention to how it
sounded.
The teacher told him that he had a certain talent but that his tone was no good. Tough love, to be sure, but George and I agreed that many of today’s youth could use just such a dose, because for all its toughness, it is still love.

One might thank the guitar teacher for his timely admonition,
since the work George has done since finding his true calling (although he is still a wicked guitarist) is veritably dripping with tone.

In any case, that was more or less the end of George’s musical aspirations. He found himself somewhat adrift until his high school biology teacher, Joe Lindblom (“You would love him—he’s a sailor. Your feeling toward woodwork? He’s got about sailing”), gave him a copy of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged.
Reading that novel (and libertarian treatise) cracked open a door in George’s imagination that he hadn’t previously noticed. He began to realize that he was a thinker.

To wit: “It made me think I could go to college. I had this kind of comic vision of myself, like, in a sweater with some girls, talking philosophy. Just walking across campus talking about the big issues.”

Saunders couldn’t read music, but he applied to Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music and was denied. Same for Notre Dame. Huh. Joe Lindblom came to his rescue once again and hooked him up with the Colorado School of Mines, Lindblom’s alma mater. Because of his former teacher’s faith in him, George buckled down (with gumption) and completed the community college hours he needed to be accepted, and even then, it took a personal vouching from Joe Lindblom to seal the deal. Thus was Saunders saved from the ignominy suffered by so many young people who just give up on having any ambition in life through a combination of apathy and ignorance. Thank you from afar, Joe Lindblom, and I believe George was right. I love you plenty.

That was 1976. George took to the work and graduated with a degree in geophysics. Over the next several years, he “beatnik’d around,” working in Asia, Los Angeles, Illinois, and Amarillo, still
casting about for his entrée into his true calling: “I think it was basically a process of not being that great at being an engineer (and the queasy feeling that went along with it) and not being quite bright enough to go directly for what I liked (ie, reading and writing).”

After such beating about the bush, Saunders finally decided to go for it as a writer—“all or nothing.” He applied to himself a work ethic over a few years that was more about finding a method and a rhythm: “I didn’t make much progress, except it suddenly started to seem doable—like a series of choices that led to other choices. Wrote a weird story that got published—sort of a precursor to the stories in
CivilWarLand
—and used that to get into Syracuse. So, to paraphrase Fitzgerald or Hemingway: ‘Gradually and all at once.’”

When George first arrived at Syracuse to study creative writing in graduate school, straight from Amarillo, he had the impression that his unusual, more rural background would be valued by the mostly urbane, Ivy League classmates among which he found himself. He was mistaken.

They derisively would say things like, “Amarillo? Aren’t there a lot of currency exchanges there?”

George said, “I kept trying to get it through to them that, like, these are people living [in Amarillo]. There’s real life going on there.” To me, he added, “It was never anything but a joke to them, but to me it was hurtful. I said, ‘I know I’m right. I know that they’re blind to this whole part of the country.’”

And so, indirectly, the Ivy League snobs helped George along as well, by influencing him to galvanize his vision of the America he would feature in his stories; those living in the not-inconsiderable
acreage between the cities of “tastemakers” on either coast. Despite the erudition evident in his writing, one can’t help but feel his feet (and his point of view) rooted among the people of Amarillo and Illinois and Colorado and so on. The People.

His gift for effective storytelling involves an uncanny ability to examine all sides of every question without judgment. I don’t know about you, but I’m a human being, so my default setting is to absolutely come down on one side of any issue, depending upon how the question affects my well-being. I believe that’s called human nature. Because he loves us, George Saunders respects every opinion, leaving his own ego out of it, which makes even his scariest scenarios palatable.

Another topic upon which we spent a good deal of Joaquín’s twenty-dollar table time was a mutual appreciation for our redoubtable fathers. George shared this story, which seems to me to have laid the foundation for his ever-expanding generosity toward the human race: At Oak Forest High School, in the 1970s, the food was apparently terrible. “They had the hamburgers in the plastic bags that you would microwave and whatnot.” So the students decided they would organize a walkout. “We were very much in the thrall of Abbie Hoffman and the whole thing [re: the 1969–70 Chicago Conspiracy Trial].” So everything was set to stick it to the man on a Friday morning, but the Thursday night previous it occurred to George that maybe he would tell his dad about it, just in case. So he did. He honestly told his dad they were planning a walkout because the food was so bad.

“‘Oh, yeah. Sure, that’s great,’ said Dad. ‘Could I ask you something, though?’”

George said to me, “Just like Columbo.”

“‘Just one thing. You’ve let the principal know that this food is an issue, right?’”

“‘Nah, he wouldn’t listen.’”

“‘Oh. Okay. Although you’re kinda setting yourself up a little bit. Because if you walk out and you never tried to solve the problem . . . Anyway, just think about it.’”

The next morning, George went in to speak with the principal, Toby Hightower.

“‘George, uh, what? What’s goin’ on?’”

George hadn’t known that Principal Hightower even knew his name. He soldiered on and explained that the food in the cafeteria was really bad.

“‘Well, that’s not acceptable. I’m gonna appoint you head of a commission. Now, I want you to go out to— Would five days be enough? Five different school districts, every Friday you go out and— Pick a panel, three or four kids—and we’ll send you out to these schools. You tell us which one you like and you wanna hire.’”

“Anyway,” George said, “that little move that my dad did there was like—don’t assume your enemy is beneath you.”

Pretty badass dad skills right there. I began to understand how such a man as George Saunders could come to write stories with such a sincerely fair and balanced perspective, not to mention a measured examination of modern American society that requires backing up only the slightest step before the purview shows us to be clearly hilarious, heads buried in our phones, scrutinizing who might “like” us, fashion trends swinging recently from “heavily tattooed and stretching
irreparable holes in the earlobe with gauge rings” to “lumbersexual,” which apparently entails growing a beard, wearing flannel over pre-distressed work dungarees, and posing for photographs with an axe of any stripe. (I have been mortified to be even tangentially mentioned by “the press” in association with this, or any such fashion trend, but I can rest easy. I looked like that twenty years ago, and I’ll still look like that twenty years from now, if my luck holds.)

At this point in our chin-wag, George and I left the scrutiny of Joaquín’s hawklike gaze and set out across Central Park. No locomotion by carriage, sadly, just perambulating. I greatly enjoyed the commingling of my subjects, rambling with Saunders toward the west side of Olmsted’s park, under the beneficent Dakota windows of Yoko, as George revealed to me that not only was he a Wendell Berry fan, but he had set one of his poems, “The Wild Rose,” to music! Reminder to self—score that track for audiobook. (I actually said to George, “We may have to lay that track down,” and he said, “Yeah, lay it down and cover it up.”) We arrived right on time for our lunch at the newly refurbished Tavern on the Green, the history of which I delightedly explained to George as we sat to steaks and beer and fellowship in the former sheep barn for Olmsted’s pacifist flock.

As it so often does with me, the subject turned to religion. It’s funny—I have been on the receiving end of a good deal of knee-jerk reactions from followers of various Christian denominations regarding my religious material. They don’t seem to comprehend my commentary, a blindness that is, I suppose, the way of the zealot? What such critics don’t seem to glean is that I am probably thinking about their religion much more than they ever have. The religions of the
world are generally founded upon deep wisdom and beautiful notions that have been carefully wrought. Much as I have done for our founding governmental documents, I would just like to suggest that we always continue to freshly examine the truths at the foundation, rather than just accept our televangelists’ interpretation at face value. Sometimes when I speak to people about Wendell Berry, they ask, “Don’t you know he’s religious, though?” I answer that, yes, he is my favorite kind of religious person: one who knows what the hell he’s talking about. You won’t catch Mr. Berry blindly following the
people
who are leading their flocks in all sorts of disparate directions, some few of them decent. Mr. Berry also has enough respect for his fellow man and woman to refrain from attempting to recruit us into his church. By removing these confusing modern church habits from the conversation, he is able to shine a light on the heart of the matter: the writing. It’s not the text of the Bible that’s troublesome (with a few notable exceptions—please see my previous book), but what people are doing in the name of that text that bothers me, as well as Wendell Berry.

George Saunders agreed that such blind adherence to rote dogma creates the false impression among church folk (and political parties) that matters of the soul (or government) can be rendered neatly in black-and-white terms. The thing I love about these great thinkers by whom I am inspired is that they understand the
imperative
of coming from a place of ignorance, which will never change. The mysteries of the universe can literally never be decoded, and so the task before us is not in the solving but rather in accepting the ambiguity in the parts of our world where unknowable magic, also known as nature, resides.
George started out Catholic, as discussed, but was soon disillusioned by that brand of solace. Now he is a practicing Buddhist, and it shows.

He said, “What I’m trying to understand is how Christianity—if you could be sitting with Jesus, okay, the guy. You know, that guy . . . How did it then [go from that] and become, like, no swearing and no fornication? . . . Well, I do know how. The culture said, ‘Hey, that’s good. Let’s lay
our
shit down there.’” Wendell Berry just published a new book of essays in which he addresses the folly of such an approach—by refusing to consider the whole of all the complexities of human life as one and instead having the hubris to think that we can control individual actions like premarital sex or blasphemy as though they can be separated cleanly from the whole organism. Should these indiscretions be the recipients of some of our focus? Absolutely. No question. But to simply, flatly forbid these inexorable acts of nature takes about as much smarts as the enacting of Prohibition did, and we all know how that turned out.

Mr. Saunders (hell of a good rib eye at Tavern on the Green, by the by, plus local craft brews) made yet another perceptive point. He said, “Somehow it’s weird that all these thousands of years of human thought have gravitated toward those questions and those approaches, and now here we are with not much, really. We’re extreme materialists. So I’ve just been trying to figure out a way to think about those things. I say that in a positive way, meaning, as your doubts come up—totally allow them in the room.” Allowing one’s doubts to exist “in the room” requires courage. These religions have flourished, in part, for centuries exactly so that we don’t have to stay in the same room with our misgivings, our elemental comprehension of what
H. P. Lovecraft illuminated so succinctly: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”