“Wendell Berry,” she said.
“Duh.”
“What about Carol Burnett?” she lobbed.
“You read my file. Two for two.”
Then it got fun. Running through the greatest hits of my life, in any cultural arena—it didn’t matter—to land upon citizens with gumption. I began piling on actors and filmmakers and musicians and artisans, but a deficit occurred to me: I didn’t really have a modern luminary of literature on the list. Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan don’t count, because calling Mr. Berry a writer is like calling Gandalf an igniter of fireworks, and Mr. Pollan is straight-up nonfiction.
“George Saunders,” I said.
“Ooh, yes,” she affirmed, always the mollycoddler, but also a smarty-pants, so she knows what’s good.
Jill wrote to George’s editor (they belong to the same font club) and passed along this tiny note from me, a similarly personalized version of which I sent to each of my hopeful subjects:
Dear Mr. Saunders,
Hello! My name is Nick Offerman, and I am an actor and woodworker and writer. I am working on my second book for Dutton over at Penguin Random House, a book that will comprise a list of “Great Americans”—each person selected for his/her exhibition of a spirit of rebellion or muckraking or revolution with regard to the way we are evolving, particularly in America, toward decency (or not). I sincerely hope that the book will contain more humor than that last sentence.
Other subjects will include some “founding father” material, focusing on how this whole American experiment took wing, or hoof, as well as many other political and cultural firebrands. A couple of Roosevelts, Theodore and Eleanor, Frederick Law Olmsted, as well as some modern-day achievers, like Yoko Ono, Michael Pollan, and Wendell Berry, and other artists, woodworkers, activists, farmers, and a couple of boatbuilders.
I want to examine some of the good and bad effects of “progress,” from the Europeans’ conquering of North America to the plight of modern advertising/television, and how we continue to succeed or not at becoming more decent people whilst surfing a massive tsunami of technology, information, and media saturation. Looking at religion, technology, human rights, nature, guns/war, tobacco, hand-crafting, advertising . . . hopefully with a chuckle. Hilarious, right?
I am quite besotted with your fiction, for its humor, intelligence, and social criticism. As such, I’d love to include you in my next humble book effort. What that would entail depends upon your willingness, but I would cite parts of your writing that support my themes, and then ask you some pertinent questions about the ideas therein. I could do it by correspondence, but I would prefer to sit and chat if possible, perhaps over a coffee or plate of ribs.
I am happy to conduct this conversation in any setting you may prefer, and I am conveniently commuting between New York and Los Angeles for the balance of 2014, to perform husbandry upon my bride of 14 years, Megan Mullally, an exceptionally talented and beautiful lady. She will be performing in a Terrence McNally play (It’s Only a Play) from September through January 4. If you’d like to come as my guest, do simply holler.
I would also relish springing for any meal or diversion in which you might like to partake during our chin-wag. Perhaps I could row you across the Hudson in an historic Whitehall skiff, and that is not a joke. I know a guy.
I am happy to provide any references you might like to investigate, and also my first clumsy tome, Paddle Your Own Canoe, upon which I can’t wait to improve.
Sincerely,
Nick Offerman
P.S. Perhaps we can work in a jaunt in the park?
Long-winded? You bet. That’s my bag. Surely that has dawned on you before now. But I had to be sure that the sincere tone of my proposed book (this one!) was sincerely communicated, while simultaneously putting across my sense of humor. Furthermore, I wanted to make the idea seem as painless as possible so that the inconvenience of spending an afternoon with me wouldn’t seem like a clear deterrent.
Imagine my excitement, then, when this showed up in my electronic mailbox the next day:
Dear Nick,
Loved your letter and would be very happy to get together. We’re big fans of your work and of your wife’s work around here. I think it might be best for me to try something in the fall—am cranking away on a new book for the remainder of the summer, with a quick trip to LA to see our daughter. Would be fun to see the play, if that’s possible. Thanks for reaching out and for reading my stories and all of that too.
George Saunders
P.S. Ok, but no carriage rides.
He was a peach! This was no minor deal—as a person who works in show business and lives in Los Angeles, it so happens that sometimes I get to run into people I admire, and sometimes they are not nearly as swell as I would have hoped. The disappointment can be crushing. Usually, though, it’s just surreal, like the time I pulled up next to a nice convertible, I think a Bentley, at a light. I looked over to see Dustin Hoffman at the wheel. He looked at me and slowly nodded, as though to say, “That’s right, son,” before zooming away. That Dustin Hoffman shares this plane of existence and (presumably) wields a driver’s license makes my head swim.
To receive a reply in such a generous fashion from someone like George Saunders was a thrilling surprise, to say the least. I do believe I may have giggled, and it’s likely that I performed a portion of a jig. We struck up a correspondence, George and I, and soon discovered that we had a lot in common when it came to our developmental years, a fact that would prove to engender an easy camaraderie between us. He’s been teaching creative writing at Syracuse since 1997, which is in a particularly gorgeous region of far upstate New York, redolent of maple, walnut, cherry, and sycamore trees, among other noble deciduous favorites.
As it happens, we finally made a date for December 19, 2014. George was going to be in New York City, and I cleared my day, reread my favorite stories, and planned our itinerary. Despite his reticence, I looked into a carriage ride. It would have been so cozy!
Upon the day, I arrived at the brownstone that Syracuse maintains on the Upper East Side. George stepped gamely out into the cold air and we exchanged a friendly embrace. I’ve noticed that this is happening more recently—people hugging openly instead of the handshake or weird, extra-hetero “bro” handshake/half hug/back pat. Maybe it’s just occurring within my own circle of artistic love, but I recommend it to you, this technique of hugging, no matter where you may reside. It really lends an immediate sense of camaraderie and trust that is not fully conveyed by the more circumspect handshake. I am also traveling so frequently these days that each such meeting with a valued compatriot has become that much more precious, as in: “Good God, let us sit and talk together and try to do some good, because I fly out for Topeka in the morning.”
We went to a classically New York, or “crappy,” diner (perfect) around the corner and took a little table for two halfway back along the wall in the shotgun layout of the joint. The waiter came quickly, took our orders for coffee, and moved on. I started my recorder and we dove in, but not before the waiter came back to take our food order. It being nine thirty A.M., we had both had our breakfasts. This coffee was intended to serve as the prologue to a very special lunch date.
“If you’re not gonna eat, you can move to the back, or you can be quick!” barked the all-business bacon slinger.
“We’ll be quick,” said George.
I didn’t want to be quick. I wanted to be slow and comfortable so that my interview with George could be as good-written as possible. He is good of writing, and I wanted him to see that I could also, too. Also, plus, my journalism is still additionally maturing, so I really needed time to take in the details of my surroundings, like a sponge, you know, that starts out dry, but then you get water on it and it gets wet totally. It “absorbs” all the “wetness.” Metaphor. You know, so I could squeeze, then, the water of some stark truth into my �
��piece.” All over it.
I inhaled, squinting with peepers, through my nose holes like in a sleuth simile. I looked left. Nothing of details would escape my looking. Salt . . . pepper, what’s up? Sugar and other sweeteners in paper squares but longer than a square, like so many small-ass, monochromatic, or “one-color,” flags from the nations of Diabetes Town. Their valor is weak, as evinced by the Eastery color choices of yellow, pink, and green fading, like the sense memory of my eyes sensing the colors in Aunt Dee’s powder room in 1983, except she also had a shitload of lavender.
To my right, a row of fucked-up toadstools, except the stems were steel and the caps were like cushions for sitting on, like a seat stool stuck in the forest floor, except this was a real floor with linoleum covering like a really spread-out hat.
“Goddamn,” I thought. “I’m gonna write the shit outta this thing.”
I slipped the waiter a twenty and said we’d be staying for a bit. His apron pocket sucked up that bill like a northern pike inhaling a night crawler. That’s a fish. Eating a worm. But figurative. I felt like I had pokered in playing that dicey hand, “New York style,” and the nice thing about a book deal is I can write that twenty dollars off, so I guess the joke was on you, Joaquín.
When George Saunders puts away some coffee and begins to rap, you had better pay attention. As he says himself, his thoughts come very quickly and explosively, and they’ll turn on a dime. Given the level of creativity at which he operates, that made for an extremely intense conversation that was more delicious to me than many Reuben sandwiches I’ve known. I mean to say his language was goddamn delectable.
I would expect a person packing the horsepower of intelligence that is exhibited in his story writing to be arrogant. I would also expect that person, in a dialogue with me, to eventually, or, well, soon, arrive at condescension, no matter how pure their motives at the outset. Mr. Saunders exhibits neither arrogance nor haughtiness. He is a sweetheart who happens to have a surgically incisive talent for writing, especially satire. Sorry if I’m blowing your cover, George, but I’m a writer, and I truth it up like in a way that I can’t help it, because of that’s how I play.
George grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Oak Forest, Illinois. It’s hard to imagine a community name that conjures a more charismatic image than Oak Forest, unless you want to throw maybe the Shire, Rivendell, or Wildwood into the ring. He attended Oak Forest High School, approximately thirty-five miles east of my Minooka High School, which explains our mutual love of the Chicago Cubs, but not the garlic-buttered, chopped-steak sandwich known locally, in my area, as the poor boy. George’s neighborhood had a chipped beef sandwich, but it was sadly bereft of any colorful moniker.
Like myself, young Saunders took to the stage of the Catholic church as a lad, where he found he quite enjoyed the captive audience, who, as church etiquette demands, must politely consume whatever it is you read from the big, gospel-y book, howsoever you choose to deliver it. George enjoyed “getting up and milking the mike,” as he put it, in his parish’s newly constructed and acoustically pleasing meetinghouse.
But that’s plenty enough about this writer guy, wouldn’t you say? Let’s take a look at something very nice George said to me about what he sees as the core of the matter concerning what makes my character, Ron Swanson, work on the quality program Parks and Recreation. “The first time I saw you, I thought, ‘I know that guy.’ And you have a whole legion of people behind you . . . the way that you had crystallized your knowledge of where you came from was evident and it represented more than just you. You’re bringing a world that isn’t normally represented correctly.”
Now, of course this was a nice thing to hear from George, but I can pretty swiftly deflect a healthy portion of the credit to the fact that, as Ron Swanson, I am merely the embodiment of a rich collaboration. Without the writers and my castmates and the rest of the crackerjack crew, I would be much less effective. Unlike Mr. Saunders, who is doing his magnificent work all on his lonesome.
He continued. “Your physical bearing and the way you work, it brings out something of America that—I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a whole part of my life that just opened up in the way he looks onscreen.’”
Again, “the way [I] look onscreen” is more thanks to my parents (for the genes), the costume designer, and the hair and makeup crew, not to mention the grips and electricians, who illuminate me and the edifice of a hairdo we call “the Full Douche.” The reason I have done myself the favor of pointing out these nice observations on the part of George is to point out George’s propensity for nice observations. Every character he introduced into our conversation had enjoyed a similar attention from his affectionate eye: “He had enormous forearms”; “she was one of those sexy, bottle-waisted, middle-age types”; “he’s got a really strong Chicago accent”; etcetera.
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 i
s 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.’”
Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers Page 25