Arm-wrestling Tolstoy: an interview with George Saunders
By Chad Schell-McGaw
(originally published on the now-defunct website Ill&Alice.com)
He did time in a Texas country bar band. He wrote his first book while working a slack job as a geophysical engineer, and he had every story in his second book published in The New Yorker. He has supposedly explored for oil in Sumatra, which involves knowing where Sumatra is. In his time, George Saunders has done a lot of things that you haven't, but he has also written two acclaimed collections of short stories (Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia) and has collaborated with wunderkind illustrator Lane Smith on the children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. Most of his stories take place in a semi-dystopic near-future where a regurgitated culture runs rampant through theme parks, theme restaurants, and unsatisfying lives. Much like Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathan Lethem, Saunders is a master of the balancing act between present and future, atrocity and whimsy, heartbreak and humor. But more than that, he has revitalized the short story as a form, showing that it is much more than a warm up for a novel or movie deal. My e-mail recently had a chance to sit down with the author at his desk on the campus of Syracuse University, where he spoke of women, mushrooms, and the deeper things in life, like arm wrestling.
I&A: When did you start writing and why?
GS: I was about 20 I guess, and had just read Thomas Wolfe (You Can't Go Home Again). As for why--hard to say. I loved the idea of someone fully inhabiting his own time and making something dazzling out of his own life. It seemed to me that writing was a way of paying tribute to the beauty I saw around me, and at that age, you know, you are seeing a lot of beauty. At this point it is considered de rigeur for the writer to say something like “plus I thought it would get me girls, which is actually true, but in a more profound way, I felt that if I could make something as beautiful as Wolfe had made, then I would finally be worthy of the attention of a woman, a woman being, when one is 20 and straight and a guy, the ultimate Beauty. And so the thinking was something like: Since I would like a woman to love me for my very best self (which is not yet realized, and will only be realized once I write my masterpiece), then I had better get to work on my masterpiece, so that when I meet the woman of my dreams, she will know I am good enough for her, having just read my masterpiece. So that is why you could find me, at 20, nearly flunking out of engineering school because I was spending all my time writing a book that looked suspiciously like You Can't Go Home Again, if the main character had lived in Chicago and not North Carolina and his parents had owned a Chicken Unlimited franchise instead of a boarding house, and if Thomas Wolfe had had like eighty percent less talent than he actually did.
I&A: How long before you were first published? What was published and where?
GS: I first published when I was around 26 I think, three stories pretty much at the same time, in Northwest Review, Puerto del Sol, and Nit & Wit. I was working as a groundsman at an apartment complex in Amarillo Texas and would write late at night in this little duplex I was renting. Then there was a hiatus of about six years, while I went to grad school and tried to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and got married and had two kids and started working.
I&A: Did you attend a writing program, or did you just write on your own?
GS: I went through the Syracuse program, and studied with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger and Hayden Carruth.
I&A: Who are some of your influences? Are you under their influence while writing?
GS: Well, the above three writers certainly. And Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Nikolai Gogol, Isaac Babel, Samuel Beckett. Marx Bros, Monty Python and Steve Martin. Bruce Springsteen. My father and mother and two teachers from high school who basically saved my intellectual life, Joe Lindbloom and Sheri Williams Lindbloom. My wife Paula, my kids, my friends Pat Pacino and Lee Durkee. Various youthful heartbreaks and humiliating periods, etc etc. I think I'm not as influenced at the time of writing as I was when I was younger. Falling under the sway of writers you love is an important part of learning to write, I think. But then in time, as you realize that your life is not describable in someone else's prose, it makes you a little sick, and you stop imitating and just try to make your own kind of noise, and start simply revering those influences: being awed and grateful to them, and hoping to be a small minnow in the pathetic pond next to the huge one in which they are swimming. I will stop now on this question, having just used a fish metaphor.
I&A: What is your personal favorite thing you have written?
GS: I would have to say Stairway to Heaven. I especially like the guitar solo, which I composed, believe it or not, on a train, using a harmonica. When I showed it to Jimmy P., he freaked.
I&A: What are people's (both critics and fans) reactions to your work compared to your own concept of it?
GS: They tend to be somewhat less interested in it than I am, based on the fact that, when I talk about it to them, they always want to stop after like three hours. Do I consider them selfish? Well, to each his own I guess, but as for me, if I suddenly found myself talking to myself about my work, I can't imagine ever stopping me.
I&A: Do you have any sort of writing rituals? Do you write on a certain, scheduled regimen? Do you listen to music while writing?
GS: No rituals. And absolutely no music. I will start writing while listening to music when musicians start writing music while reading a book.
I&A: If you could collaborate with any writer, living or dead, who would it be? Would it be more your book or theirs?
GS: I would collaborate with Count Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, on a rewrite of War and Peace. My strategy would be to change the word "the" on page 897 to "a" and then immediately begin splitting royalties with my esteemed co-author. It would, I feel, be more my book than his, since he would be, you know, dead. Similarly, I feel that I would be the best choice to do Charlie Rose and David Letterman and so on, since Mr. Tolstoy would still be dead and might well be even deader, if this is even possible, and would therefore make a boring guest, causing us to sell fewer of our book.
I&A: If you could arm-wrestle any other writer, living or dead, who would it be? Who would win?
GS: Again, I would have to go with Tolstoy, for the reason given above, i.e., his deadness. Being dead, I doubt he could beat me, and even if he did, being dead, he would not be likely to mock me out for being such a weakling. Actually, I guess I would be willing to arm-wrestle just about any dead author. Dead, or really really sick. Like especially if they had a disease which caused their arm to automatically break off at the slightest pressure.
I&A: Obligatory disaster question: Do you think that the literary world will change / has changed in light of our new life during wartime? Have you seen any reflection of it in your students' work?
GS: I think the literary world and even the real actual world is constantly changing even in light of the smaller more pathetic disasters taking place on a regular basis. This disaster, like any disaster, will exaggerate our flaws as well as our virtues. It will bring out the best in some people, while others will make tons of money and/or use the disaster to push forward their moronic over-simplifications. Some will be propelled into a deeper spirituality, while others will take the disaster as confirmation of their pre-existing brutal, self-serving philosophies, or their callow, New Age, self-serving philosophies. Ego will continue to thrive. Crazy people will be made crazier, the weak and poor and voiceless will bear the brunt of the suffering, zealots of various stripes will take the disaster as proof that their historic opposition must be crushed, the real horror and clarity of that day will gradually and then more rapidly be used to move product and perform the subtle mythologizing of advertising, stunted versions of very real virtues (patriotism, heroism) will appear, as will (thankfully) amazing three-dimensional examples of the same.
I&A: What are your literary plans for the future?
GS: To rest after that last lofty and long-winded paragraph.
I&A: When are you writing, are you more focused on the overall visual picture of what is going on, or on what words should come next?
GS: Really, it's a mix of both. In my case it's not actually very visual at all--probably the sentences are leading the images, or creating the images--but of course it's much more complicated than that, really beyond speech, and also I'm sure it's different for every person, and different for each story, and even varies within each story. Last night I heard this African folk saying, something along the lines of, When asked how he fared, the skillful mushroom-gatherer need only show his mushrooms. I'm sure I'm misquoting, since that sounds sort of pornographic but my point is, there is 1) writing, and 2) discursive conceptual thought about writing and they are very different things, as different as, say, 1) sex, and 2) discursive conceptual thought about sex. I would agree that both the 1s and the 2s can be fun and transcendent, I guess, but (putting aside sex for the moment) I am at heart more interested in writing than in thinking or talking about writing. In other words, to summarize, the proof is in the pudding, which is why we, as writers, must always endeavor to show our mushrooms, and try not to think about sex while writing, and especially try not to think about writing while having sex, which has a tendency to shrivel the mushrooms, although it is perfectly permissible to talk about sex while having sex, and in fact this can actually be pretty fun.
I&A: What attracts you to the short story form? Do you read more short stories than anything else?
GS: I think it was Alice Munro who said she was attracted to the story form because she understood what beauty might look like in that form. (I'm probably misquoting that too, but at least it doesn't sound dirty.) Anyway, that sentiment seems right to me. When I start writing longer pieces I lose my sense of what's good. What interests me is compression rather than elaboration. Somehow the stuff of short stories--compression, density, fragmentation, intensity, the glimpsed, the blurted-out, etc etc--are exciting to me, and seem to fit my disposition better. I'm happier when I'm writing stories and life seems much more full of potential and charm than when I'm slogging away trying to write something long.
I&A: Do you plan on writing more children's books? Is your interest due more to the fun of the form or to being a parent yourself? Was it hard to get Gappers accepted as a children's book?
GS: I'm working on one now, about a race of quasi-robots who genocides another race of quasi-robots under the direction of an evil dictator named Phil. Sort of like Winnie-the-Pooh if Winnie-the-Pooh had removable flanges and murdered Eeyore. The weird and sort of sad thing about the Gappers book is that it was, for reasons I never understood, marketed as an adult trade book, which means it never made it into the kid's section--a real shame. That of course is where the nine gazillion Lane Smith fans look for his work. I really love that book--the illustrations and the design--and I wish it would've found a bigger audience. I am thinking of working on a slight revision, with my very good friend Count Leo Tolstoy, who apparently has a few readers, despite his deadness.
Thanks for asking me!
George
February 2002
