The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  GEORGE

  A month has passed since my friend George Plimpton died, and I am still thinking about him. He was seventy-six, fifteen years older, a vulnerable age, but as Roy Blount said, “I was astonished that George died. It was so unlike him.” And it was deeply confusing, a few weeks after his death, to attend the fiftieth anniversary party in New York for The Paris Review, which George had edited since its founding in Paris in 1953. It was George’s party and he had arranged for the can-can dancers and the fireworks, and then there I was emceeing it. Billy Collins was there, and Alec Baldwin read Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut made a toast, and at the end of it, the young Paris Review staff came to the stage for a standing O, and hundreds of George’s pals were there, famous authors, movie stars, living legends, and Peter Duchin’s orchestra, but the host himself was missing and that left a hole in the middle of the proceedings.

  I am not like George Plimpton. I have the social skills of a marmot. He was Exeter, Harvard, Cambridge, and the Upper East Side, and I’m not, so we weren’t born to be friends, and he had that odd fruity accent that sounded like he had a bandage around his tongue, but he was a man with beautiful manners and that goes a long way to smooth over life’s little irregularities. Even if you weren’t close to George, he made you think you were. He beamed at you from his great height under his thatch of white hair as if he were resuming a delightful conversation that had been interrupted six months ago and now here you were rejoined, thank God. He crashed a party at my apartment once and sat at the dining room table deep into the night jiggling a glass of scotch and holding court and at first it irritated me to hear him rambling on about Hemingway at the bar at the Ritz and then, like everyone else, I got pulled into the story. George relished being an Old Guy of Letters who had known Hemingway and E. M. Forster and Ezra Pound and Frost and the other statuettes on the shelf and he was glad to reminisce about them and their lady friends and revels, and thus, subtly, he included you in the great club of writers that extends back across the centuries. He was a grand storyteller, East Side accent and all, and I remember thinking that night, “Nobody does this much anymore. There ought to be less lit. crit. in college and more of this, what Hemingway smelled like and how he liked his eggs in the morning and what his conversation was about.” I saw George last summer when he and John Updike and I did the Charlie Rose show, and afterward he walked me down Park Avenue and insisted on taking me up to the New York Racquet Club and showing me a tennis court there modeled after the one Henry VIII played on, with walls and a roof to play the ball off. He explained the arcane rules of court tennis to me, and then took me down to the library, where he told about the book he’d found in which an Old Member had hidden his correspondence with his mistress. George relished the notion of passion among the staid and stately, an old financier describing a woman’s breasts as “gleaming rosy-tipped orbs.” He offered me a drink. “Okay,” I said. Sitting there in the den of privilege, leather chairs and hushed footsteps and all, I felt as if I could see George at last despite all my midwestern biases.

  He went to Paris in 1953, a sunny time when America was admired as the savior of Europe and the exchange rate was good and you could rent a room for fifteen dollars a month and dine well for a dollar. And the authorities were tolerant of the extravagant gestures of the young. He and his friends Peter Matthiessen and Donald Hall and Robert Silvers were all there, hanging out in the Café de Tournon, writing, drinking vin ordinaire, looking for Hemingway, living proudly in tiny, cold fifth-floor walk-ups, being artists. They were thousands of miles away from anyone they might meet on the street who would ask, “What are you doing these days?” like dogs sniffing your résumé, expecting you to say, “I’m here for a few days and starting medical school in the fall,” expecting you to have a reasonable plan for your life.

  I came away from the party thinking about what terrific parents the guy must have had. In Paris in 1953, George visited the Hotel Plaza Athénée from time to time to write letters on hotel stationery and assure the folks that he was fine, just fine, and then returned to the toolshed where he lived, sleeping on an army cot among a platoon of alley cats. The elder Plimptons smiled on his adventure and didn’t bully him into taking up his cross and going down to Wall Street. And now his life was over, and here was a party with eight hundred people in attendance, most of whom felt really close to him, in addition to his readers, who may have felt even closer. His books Paper Lion and Out of My League are part of the permanent literature of sports. George was twenty-six years old right up into his seventies. You can’t really mourn a man who got a life as good as that.

  FAME

  Let us speak of the sorrows of fame. You are a hot young thing on a promotional tour for your book or movie or perfume and the limo brings you to the small luxury hotel and the celebrity suite where you step into the toilet and notice a wad of snot protruding from your left nostril. It is the size of the Hope diamond. How long has this been hanging there? You’ve spent all day mingling with people ecstatic at the sight of you you you, and yet not one of them dared mention this crusty green mucus ballooning from your nasal cavity. Nor did your publicist, Stephanie, nor the reporters at the press opportunity. Have you been walking around all day with this excrescence sticking out of your nose?

  You lie awake, hot tears on your cheek. You are friendless in this world. People fawn over you but they don’t like you enough to even lean over and say, “Hey, pal, you need a hanky.” The next day, en route to the airport, you notice an item in the paper:

  People are talking about a certain large enchilada who stood around with a noseful of blechhh the other day as he chatted cluelessly with members of the media. They say that heavy use of cocaine can desensitize the tissues. Anyway, check it out on YouTube.

  You fire Stephanie. But the video of you makes its way around the Internet, you smiling, emoting charm, and a big green thing like an emerald in your nose. And everywhere you go, little knots of hecklers are waiting for you, pointing to their left nostrils.

  You issue a statement through your new publicist, Jessica, announcing that you have a rare disease that is seldom fatal but that produces mucus unexpectedly. You caught it in Africa while trying to adopt an orphan and it was exacerbated by overwork, stress, and alcohol abuse. You are checking yourself into rehab at a clinic. So far, so good.

  Ninety days later, you emerge into the bright sunlight, smiling, focused, and in a totally different place from where you were three months ago, and happy to talk about your journey, and the press is not waiting for you. No cameras, no microphones, just a velvet rope with nobody behind it. What gives?

  Your cell phone rings and it’s Jessica. She’s weeping. She did her best to try to draw a crowd for your press conference to discuss your spiritual journey but today was not your day, other larger elephants were active in the bush, sweetheart, and so the press swarmed them and not you. You are in a totally different place in your life now and nobody gives a rip. Nobody.

  Right here is where you have a chance to learn what a great thing it is to have real work to do. When you fall off the A list, you simply return to your work, whatever it may be, and that rescues you from insanity. Even if you have the misfortune to be born rich and not too bright, you could still be taught a useful skill. In the end, this would do you more good than cosmetic surgery.

  People decry Lindsay Lohan but she serves a purpose. We’re a big country and we have so little in common anymore. Television and pop music have splintered into hundreds of niches. There are no singers like Satchmo or Sinatra or Elvis whose voices everyone knows. The audience for even the most successful TV show is a small minority. Most famous persons in America are persons most Americans have never heard of.

  But if we don’t admire the same people, at least we can find people to scorn and feel sorry for. That is the role of ditzy pop stars and rich bimbos and the old tycoon with the comb-over and the home-run kings on steroids—they are the village lunat
ics in our ongoing national fairy tale. We check on their comings and goings and then we turn to our jobs with fresh appreciation. Maybe our feuds aren’t widely reported and maybe people aren’t looking for pictures of us without underwear, but we have steady work and that’s a consolation, just being good at accomplishing useful things.

  I, for example, am good at washing dishes. I used to do it professionally and it’s still satisfying. You clear away the wreckage and run a sink full of soapy water and make everything sparkly clean again and you look around the kitchen and get a feeling that money and fame can’t buy.

  POWER

  It dawned on me slowly, after a man in a tuxedo brought me breakfast on a tray, quail eggs, boiled, perfect, on toast points, and my wife curtsied and kissed my hand, and I noticed the armed guards on the lawn, that I had become Ruler of the World. It was nothing I ever wanted for myself and perhaps that’s why it was given to me.

  So I tested my powers with a few little righteous deeds. I repaired the Arctic ice cap and shut down the Internet on Saturdays and Sundays. I made Mitt Romney a doorman at a Manhattan apartment building and he fit right in, suave, good-humored, helpful with packages and calling taxis. I gave his vast fortune to struggling orchestras. I gave the Nobel Prize for literature to John Updike, posthumously, and then I tried to raise him from the dead. That was when God called. “Don’t go there,” he said. “Jesus did it a few times and it just raised havoc.” We talked about a lot of things. He told me I needn’t capitalize his pronouns anymore, that we should be on a first-name basis. “Call me Fred,” he said. He asked me not to be harsh with the pope. He reminded me of his great fondness for the Jews. I asked him if Jesus ever got married and he said, “Not that I know of.”

  World domination is nothing I ever wanted for myself. I am a Midwesterner, a Minnesota boy, brought up to be sheepish and deferential. My mother never told me to follow my dream; she told me to “be appropriate.” So ruling the world has not been a source of great pleasure for me. Extracting the Royal Family from their various palaces and placing them in public housing next to the railway tracks in Croydon was no fun, nor was the extermination of a number of pesky little dialects in favor of plain ordinary English, nor was the elimination of hip-hop music, but it had to be done.

  I cut oil consumption in the U.S. by almost half, switching trucks to natural gas, distributing bicycles to the able, creating public transportation where there hadn’t been any, such as Los Angeles, Texas, the South. I brought the world’s bankers into one large arena and I showed them what I could do with locusts, frogs, blood, lice, hail, and pestilence. Then I brought in the Israelis and Iranians and Hezbollah and Hamas and showed them the same tricks. A veiled woman in a chador ran in with a backpack and cried out praise to Allah and pulled a string and the backpack fell open and fifty pounds of jelly beans fell out. So I’m hopeful about the Middle East.

  It’s been interesting, I’ll say that. The load of daily mail is staggering—truckloads—people wanting favors—and I can no longer go out in public. If I have dinner with friends, people keep sticking notes under my plate—“Get Freddie into Harvard,” “Get Lyle out of prison,” “Our dog has liver cancer. Please do something.” It wears a person out. And my wife is after me continually: “Why don’t we spend time together, just the two of us? Why don’t we make love the way we used to?”

  I wasn’t going to bring that up but there it is. The ruler of the world has become a nonperformer in the sack. I take hot showers, I look at pictures of naked girls, I read hot novels, I take the little blue pill: nothing. World dominance does not lead to self-confidence. Adolf Hitler had the same problem, so did Josef Stalin, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the list goes on. It is an odd feeling—to be able to banish the word relationship and forbid PowerPoint presentations and eliminate PIN numbers and yet be unable to make a woman happy. “Just relax,” she says. Easy for someone who isn’t ruling the world to say.

  And what about retirement, I wonder. How do I turn the job over to someone else and move to Antigua? I made myself a fabulous villa there, swimming pool, cabanas, guest house, orchard, long white-sand beach—when do I get to take life easy? I asked Fred and he said, “I’ve been struggling with that for millions of years. Welcome to the club.” The people who are waiting to rule the world when I’m done are people who couldn’t organize a three-car parade. So onward we go, exhausted, unappreciated, and impotent where it really matters. So how are you doing? Everything okay in your sector?

  3.

  A SPEECH TO THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ ASSOCIATION DINNER,

  WASHINGTON HILTON, MARCH 18, 1999

  A person should never turn down an invitation to speak to a group of journalists—how else to set them straight?—and in the spring of 1999, there was plenty to talk about. The impeachment of President Clinton had died a natural death a month before when he was acquitted by the Senate, Mrs. Clinton was said to be interested in running for the Senate from New York, and Jesse (The Body) Ventura had been elected governor of Minnesota. An embarrassment of riches.

  Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, Members of the White House Radio-TV Correspondents Association, Distinguished Guests, Ordinary Average Guests:

  It’s a pleasure to be here in Washington. I was here for your winter, which was on Tuesday, and it’s good to be back for spring. And to come and speak at an occasion whose purpose is civility, where people who distrust each other, and for good reason, will nevertheless sit down and break bread together. Of course, the same happens at any Republican prayer breakfast.

  I have always been in favor of civility—kindness to people who you have reason to dislike. Americans believe in the power of friendship to overcome all barriers of race and gender and religion. We believe that the really bitter animosities are between women who are related to each other.

  We are in need of civility, especially this year, with people suffering the premillennial jitters. What’s going to happen on New Year’s Eve? People are already in a dither over it. Of course it was worse two thousand years ago for the Romans—every year, the date got smaller—it was 20 B.C. and then suddenly it was 1 B.C. and what would happen next? Would you go to zero? Start counting up? Switch to the Jewish calendar? Nobody knew.

  • • •

  My hero when it comes to civility was Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a great Minnesotan, who died two weeks ago at the age of ninety, who served twenty-four years on the Supreme Court, starting at the age of sixty-one, and distinguished himself as the shy person’s justice. Somehow he found a right to privacy in the Constitution, and based on that, he wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, a decision that got him more hate mail than you or I could ever imagine. He read a good deal of it himself, and the violence of it didn’t affect him except to make him compassionate for the writers. He didn’t feel anger toward them. What got Justice Blackmun riled was that the company that sold him his homeowners’ insurance, after a sniper fired a bullet through the window of his living room and into the back of a wingback chair, would only pay to re-cover that chair and not the matching one, though after the first chair had been re-covered, they didn’t match anymore because the covering was so old. He was a true Minnesotan.

  Civility is the acknowledgment of our own humanity. And it’s practical. It is based on the fact that, loathsome as those sons of bitches are, you may someday need to borrow money from them. Don’t lord it over people: the podium will not be yours indefinitely. Nor the limo. So you should keep a decent tongue and if you are a journalist, you should strive to be fair. It will diminish the impact of your work, but do it anyway.

  • • •

  I am pleased that the president has joined us tonight. He is at the point in his presidency where ordinarily a man enjoys foreign travel and being driven through throngs of people waving tiny flags, who are delighted to see you, a wonderful prospect compared to eating chicken at the Washington Hilton with a roomful of people who would re
gard your downfall as a professional opportunity.

  This is a durable president. He has already gone four hundred days beyond when he was expected to resign. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but he didn’t know Mr. Clinton. He’s had two already, and in a couple of years, he may have yet another as a candidate’s spouse. It’s interesting to imagine Mr. Clinton sitting on a platform and looking pleasant and engaged through the candidate’s speech, smiling at the happy parts and grimacing at the serious parts. And then come back to Washington as a member of a group of older women married to senators, who gather for tea and to hear about literacy programs.

  I’m not sure the First Lady is getting good advice on this idea of running for the Senate from New York. The numbers look good—in this morning’s Times, she’s leading Mayor Giuliani 48 to 39 percent.

  But running for office in New York is about two-thirds ritual and one-third fund-raising. As a candidate for the Senate, you’re expected to pay ceremonial visits to a long series of grand poobahs and there is ring-kissing to be done, and you’ve got to march in ethnic parades and be photographed eating ethnic food such as knishes—I’m not sure if you’ve ever eaten a knish, Mrs. Clinton. A knish is a potato sandwich. You bite one end, it oozes at the other. People take a bite of a knish and they look around to see if there’s a dog in the vicinity.

  Mrs. Clinton, there is a Republican seat coming up in Minnesota next year and I think you ought to consider it. Minnesota is a state of polite and modest people. They’d be happy to see you. The fact that you had passed up New York to run in Minnesota would be enough to elect you going away. And you would provide employment for many of these fine journalists in the audience, who are in need of new material, now that the impeachment is over.