George Saunders

0:07Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the Booker Prize winning American author George Saunders. He made his name as a writer of satirical or absurdist short stories which often explore contemporary consumerist society. always underpinned with a strong sense of compassion and empathy. In 2017, his first full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, about presidential grief amid a cacophony of spiritual voices, won the Booker Prize and became a global bestseller.

0:45His latest novel, Vigil, once again explores death and the afterlife. George Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, New York, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literature. George Saunders, welcome to This Cultural Life. It's so nice to be here. Thank you. And welcome back to London, where in 2017 you won the Booker Prize, of course, for your debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. How big a surprise on the night was that win? Infinite. I was kind of thinking, I'd gotten the message that it wasn't the year for an American, and so I was just there for the party.

1:24And then as the words Lincoln in the Bardo came across the room, I got a jolt. You know, it was really unforgettable. It was one of the best nights of my life. For many people, that book, A Win, was their introduction to you as a writer. It was your debut novel at the age, I think, of 58. But of course, you had been winning so much acclaim and prizes for your short stories for many years. Did the idea of Lincoln and the Bardo start off as the possible next short story? And at what point did you think, actually, no, this has to be a novel? I had first become aware of the source material some 20 years before.

1:58and it just scared the heck out of me because it was a little more earnest than I was used to doing. I thought, oh, that's a good book for somebody to write. How did you come across the story? Literally driving past a cemetery in D.C. where Lincoln's son was buried. So we should just explain this point for those people who haven't read Lincoln in the Bardo. The Lincoln in the title is not Abraham Lincoln, but his son, Willie, the 11-year-old son who has died and is visited in the tomb by his grieving father. And the bardo is a Buddhist concept of a limbo state between life and death. Exactly, yeah.

2:32So we were driving by this Oak Hill Cemetery, and my wife's cousin just casually pointed up and said, Oh, that's the crypt where Willie Lincoln was. And I said, Who's Willie Lincoln? I didn't know. It's in the historical record that Lincoln apparently did visit the crypt at night alone, which just kind of blew my mind. So over the next 20 years, I was reading about it just as an amateur historian. And then over that time, I guess I just got enough confidence to think, all right, I can try to be a little more earnest and a little more historical. And so at 55 or so, I thought, you know, if I don't do this now, I'm never going to do it.

3:06And I don't want to be the guy whose own grave says avoided that which he most longed to do. So I gave myself kind of a six-month contract to try to make a big mistake if I wanted to. And a big book as well. So it was never going to be a short story. No, I knew it would be something long. And in fact, I tried it as a play, and I'm not a very good playwright, but it felt that it could be more substantial than a story. Interesting you say it could have been a play because actually there was a play-like aspect to it in the way it's experimental. Lincoln's visits to the tomb are witnessed by this vast cast of ghostly spectral characters and then interspersed also with quotes from supposed historical records.

3:47Were any of those records real? Yes. At first, they all were. And then there were certain times where I just needed sort of a spanning quote. And it was kind of funny because I thought, I really need to make one up. And I thought, well, can I do that? And then this voice said, well, it's your book. You can do whatever you like. So it became part of the fun of the book to have some accurately quoted historical text and then to try to make up others. So it became kind of a really strange stylistic challenge to be able to write a convincing 19th century news release or diary entry. And that sort of very staccato form, which is almost like a play script, that answers the question why that form then, does it?

4:27Yes, it kind of grew out of the play. And then also I thought, you know, since it became clear that the main narrators were going to be ghosts, I didn't want to say, then the ghost said blah, blah, blah. So I just thought if you made it in kind of a, you read the text and at the end there's an attribution and if the person is living the attribution is capital letters you know and if they're dead it's all lowercase lowercase it was kind of beautiful the way that form it seemed to arrive just as i needed it it was probably the best four years of my life just to show up at the writing room with no anxiety and just literally turn on the spigot and let the ghost start talking it was just lovely he was softly sobbing roger Bevins III.

5:08He was not sobbing. My friend remembers incorrectly. He was winded. He did not sob. Hans Vollmann. He was softly sobbing, his sadness aggravated by his mounting frustration at being lost. Roger Bevins III. He moved stiffly, all elbows and knees, the Reverend Evoli Thomas. Bursting out of the doorway, the lad took off, running toward the man, look of joy on his face. Which turned to consternation when the man failed to sweep him up in his arms, as one gathered must have been their custom. The boy instead passing through the man as the man continued to walk toward the white stone home, sobbing. He was not sobbing.

5:54And what about the environment of the bardo itself? Are you a practicing Buddhist? I'm a Buddhist who doesn't practice very much. But yes, it is my spiritual path. And in the Tibetan tradition, bardo means transitional. But normally when people use that word, they mean the transition between the moment of your death and whatever is next. So originally I thought, oh, I'll just study the Tibetan Book of the Dead and put it in my book. Well, that's way beyond me. So my bardo is kind of a combination of the Tibetan use and then my Catholic purgatory from when I was a kid. So the idea is you kind of, if your life hasn't been entirely satisfactory, then you linger a bit.

6:33And you kind of are a little bit of a victim of your own neuroses or desires. And also in the book, kind of the punchline is that they don't know they're dead. And as soon as they find out, then they might decide to go onward. And Willie Lincoln is the one, plot spoiler, is the one who opens their eyes to that appalling fact that they are all dead. And it's interesting you called them ghosts earlier because I thought of them as sort of dead souls, restless spirits, those sort of things. But you're quite happy to use that word, ghosts. Now, it's a shorthand. I thought of them as sort of like energy remnants.

7:03You know, in a Tibetan epistemology, there's this idea that as long as we're here in bodies, our crazy minds are somewhat tamped down. But when you die, the mind goes supersized. And so whatever your issues are, whether it's love or anxiety or whatever, they get supersized. that's I think in the Tibetan tradition where heaven and hell come from is if you have a loving heart get supersized you're in heaven and if you're an angry violent person and that gets supersized then you're in hell on this cultural life George Saunders my guests choose the influences and experiences that have had the biggest impact on their own creativity and your first choices for this program are your parents.

7:49You were born in Texas, but grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois. What was home life, earliest memories of home life? Well, Oak Forest is a working class suburb of Chicago. So our family was a very funny family, lots of high energy, talking at once and joking. And that was kind of the way that you showed affection was to joke with somebody. So it was very warm, a lot of political discussion. And the main thing was that if you were a kid, and you could sort of hold your own with the grown-ups, you were welcome to sit at the table. So I remember reading the newspaper so that I could compete with my uncles on the political stuff.

8:24And so there's a real kind of 1960s political energy and a lot of comedy. And it's just a really - A liberal household then. I would say so. I mean, it wasn't overt politics, but for example, my father worked in the city. He sold coal to buildings in the south side of Chicago. So he would come home with these crazy, I mean, crazy adventures. is he once held up against a Coke machine for an hour at gunpoint by this crazy guy. And what was remarkable to me about that is he came home just fired up about it, like, wow, what a day, you know, and not afraid. So I think a lot of my storytelling came from that, you know, that you could live through something quite difficult, but see it as a gift, you know.

9:06There's a story in that. There's a story. And my mother also, a very good storyteller, very kind of, she's from Texas, so she had a different mode of storytelling. She had two brothers who would tell stories. And just the way that when they came into a room, everyone was so happy to see them because they knew a story was coming. And when they left, everyone was a little sad. So I thought, oh, that's a superpower to be a pleasure to be around because of the stories that you're bringing. What about kind of a formal cultural upbringing? Were there books in the house? Neither of my parents had been to college.

9:36So there were these interesting books called Reader's Digest condensed books. so they were novels that had been pared down to the essence and I kind of circled around those and read them and my father was though he hadn't been to college I think he was moving around in circles of people who had been to college and so he would bring home the books that were well for example he brought home Machiavelli the prince have George read this and so I read it you know and he also brought home I remember the other side of America by Michael Harrington which was a exploration of poverty. And he just said, he needs to read this.

10:09He was gone a lot. So when he said, read a book, I would read it. And you say your mother was from Texas. I think I'd read that you went back to Texas a lot during the holidays. So how important was that sort of Texan influence on your sense of identity? Very. In fact, when I got into my 20s, I started wearing cowboy boots. My mother had a warmth. She did something once that was, when I hit about 15, I was charged with responsibility of going to get a Christmas tree. And you could self-cut the tree and bring it back. And so I went with my aunt and uncle, and I picked out a perfect tree, brought it home, and then we put it up, and it was terrible.

10:46It had huge gaps. It was like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And I was a little embarrassed by that because I'd failed in my first manly undertaking. And so my mother, God bless her, she said, don't worry, it's going to be all right. And she got a drill and some shears, and she took the branches off the bottom part of the tree and retrofit them into the tree. So it was perfectly shaped. Filling the gaps. Yeah. And now at the time, I felt it's such a loving gesture because she saw that I was embarrassed and didn't make a big deal of it, but just said, we're going to make this all right. And so I've kept that in my heart as in my teaching, especially, where if someone is in some way defective or making, you don't have to call it out.

11:26You can know it and then you can gently correct and then give them a chance to move on from it. making the best of a situation when sometimes it's not going well. I mean, it reminds me of what you said about your father being held up at gunpoint, but it's a good story. I've heard you refer to as the kindness guy. Well, that's an issue. But yeah, I made a speech back a few years ago, a very short speech, and it's followed me around. But I do believe in kindness, as long as we interrogate it and find out what it actually is. Sometimes in the States, it just means niceness. So you can be a real jerk, but as long as you have a sunny exterior.

11:59But I think in the, especially in the Eastern traditions, kindness is a very deep topic. And that speech you're referring to, I think it was at a graduation ceremony, wasn't it, when you were a keynote speaker, was called Failures of Kindness, I think, wasn't it? And you say it followed you around. Were you aware that you got this reputation as the kindness guy? Yeah, because the speech is about one very small failure of kindness when I was in grade school. And it's kind of a confession that my anxiety prohibited me from being as kind as I would like to have been. But then it got made into a book and I started giving interviews and suddenly I was the expert on kindness, which was the direct opposite of what was in the speech.

12:37Not a bad thing to be associated with. Well, it isn't. It isn't. Except I think what I found out was that there's a kind of a misperception that kindness just means being sweet all the time. Which, of course, you know, especially now in this political moment, you can see that kindness doesn't it can have a kind of fierceness. It should have a kind of fierceness. It was also interesting when I was doing interviews that people would call in and this one woman saying, I've always believed in kindness, but there's so many stupid people who don't. So we sort of attribute it to ourselves no matter what.

13:06For example, if you go into a coffee shop and you see that the barista has been crying, what's the kind thing to do in that case? It might just be to be quiet and leave. In another world, you say just the right thing, it might help. How would you know? you'd have to be super alert to her or his circumstance. How do you do that? Well, you might have to quiet your mind so you don't have some kind of pre-existing agenda. So what I found was that this idea of kindness, which can be quite facile, opens up in some really deep concepts. Isn't it not just about empathy? Right. And this empathy argument is people say, well, empathy means you have a feeling that makes you be kind.

13:47But what if you don't have a... What if there's somebody towards whom you feel a little revulsion? Could you still be kind to them? And I think, of course, the answer is yes. So with that speech, I waded into some pretty deep waters. And as a fiction writer, I don't really want to be nice all the time. You know, Flannery O 'Connor is not a nice writer, but she's, I would say, a very compassionate writer. How has that informed the fiction, do you think? Well, it has to do for me with abiding a little longer with a person or a character than we might normally. So, you know, in real life, if somebody cuts you off in traffic, you know their political party, you know, which is the opposite of yours.

14:24But in fiction, you get that chance to kind of say, all right, well, let's reimagine that situation from the point of view of the person who cut you off. I think we learned that our capacities for understanding other people are actually much bigger than we think. And especially in today's climate where everyone has to have an opinion at the drop of a hat and antagonism is seen as a kind of power. just to say, let me just hang here a minute longer to see who this other person is. And maybe by doing that, broaden the range of possible responses. So fiction does it just because your first pass of a character that you've made too quickly is often a little boring.

15:02It's a cartoon. Then you come back and you try to revise it and you start getting some interesting overtones and it's just a better story. Essentially, by paying attention to somebody, that seems to me very close to love. Well, this leads us very neatly to your latest novel, Vigil, which again leads us into the spirit world as a spectral guide is sent to help a dying man. He is her charge and she's helping him pass to the other side. And the problem is he's not a good man. Objectively, he was a billionaire oil baron and a very active climate change denier. And yet he's not completely villainous in your telling.

15:44Does that all go back to this ethos then of see the good, every facet of character? Or even see the fullness. So, for example, in researching this book, a lot of the real life corollaries of this guy, they had pretty healthy family lives. They loved their parents. They were not dysfunctional members of their communities. So to me, that's interesting to say, yes, this guy literally delayed action on climate change by 20 years. Yes, he created the rhetoric that the Trump administration is using now to dismiss it totally. But also, he loves his wife. He probably gives to charities. So I think part of my mission is to try to develop the most sophisticated idea of what good and evil is that I can bear.

16:32Then you can't make a cartoon of him, which is good for the mind, I think. To hold those two contradictions is very interesting to me. He's not in the Bardo, technically, in the same way that Willie Lincoln was, because this guy is about to die. Is this closer to a sense of Catholic guilt and redemption? Because you mentioned earlier, you were brought up in Catholic. Yeah. I think I still believe all the Catholic ideas, but somehow put through the Buddhist filter, they're a little different. So for example, sin, which when I was a kid, that just meant you did something wrong and you're going to pay for it.

17:04That's it. And there's no negotiation. now I see sin is more like existing in a state of dishonesty or denial and the stress that puts on a person when you part of your mind knows that this is true and you're denying it and therefore you're in a sort of an inauthentic relationship to reality which causes suffering so it's still it's still sin and I think he's throughout the book he's part of him knows that he isn't right with the world but of course in those situations what one does is deny more fiercely and just a word about his spectral guide, the woman who is helping him get a sense of his life and whether he should redeem his sins and who can help him into the next stage of life.

17:46Who is she? Her name is Jill and her nickname is Dahl Blaine. And she's, as I imagined her, she died at 22, very sweet young girl from Indiana, and she died quite traumatically. So she's, on the one hand, And this kind of high-level angel with a very generous view of life on earth and everybody is worthy of love and forgiveness. But he also, we find out, isn't quite done being alive. You know, a few years ago I did a nonfiction piece where I went to a homeless camp in Fresno, incognito. And I lived there for a week and it was just harrowing. But both of these supernatural books come out of that because it was people who were in a kind of a Bardo state.

18:28They saw that I was not from there somehow, even though I was trying to be hidden. And they would tell me their stories over and over again. And they were always, of course, the one sane person in the homeless camp. And there was a sense that they were looking for something from me, like redemption or some kind of blessing. And it was quite... Or validation, I guess. Validation, yeah. And I think that experience has colored most of these books. Why did you go and live for a week in a homeless camp? Well, honestly, we needed college tuition money. So the magazine said, we'll pay you this much to go do a story.

19:01And it was either go to Burma or do the homeless camp. I mean, it would have taken too long to get the visas. And I had some idea of Steinbeck, you know, like, oh, this will be some guitar playing and some sitting under the stars. But it was much darker. There were a couple of sort of crack dealerships within there, a lot of violence. And it was quite an amazing experience.

19:27Your next choice for this cultural life, George Saunders, is a high school teacher called Joe Lindblom. And you say a day we spent at a Chicago area science fair and what it taught me about kindness. So we're back to kindness again. Firstly, what subject was Mr. Lindblom teaching? He taught geology. I was a terrible student, never studied, and he was a really impressive person. So I kind of took notice and he saw some kind of unfulfilled potential in me. And I think he noticed that I wasn't, to understate it, a very serious student. So he took me to this science fair, an all-Chicago science fair for kids my age and younger.

20:06We walked through it, and it was just amazing. I mean, these kids were so—they were nuclear reactors. I mean, amazing projects, really intense, lots of work. And I slowly became kind of embarrassed because I hadn't done anything in my high school career. And I had this slight sense of being with this mentor that I admired. and somehow being deficient. And the thing that I learned from that was he never said a word. He never said, you know, you should have worked harder or you couldn't do this. He just basically just celebrated. He looked at the exhibits and praised them and explained why they were good.

20:42But I had taken the message. You know, I saw that, oh, gosh, these four years I could have spent being like these kids. I squandered. I better change my life. but that message got in because there was not even a hint of judgment on his part you know so again with my teaching now i'll try to never blame a student or negate anything they're doing because then your message can't get in but he allowed a beautiful space for me to learn the lesson on my own internalize it and make a resolution to do better and you say in your notes that he helped you get a place in college where you studied geophysical engineering yes he He literally made a phone call, just being the 70s.

21:20He called the admissions department and said, I have a student who's got some real gifts, but he hasn't applied them. Would you give him a chance? And they said, all right. And so I had to take, I think, some amazing 18 hours in summer school, all technical topics. And they said, if you get above a certain grade point, we'll admit you. But just the one phone call changed my life. And this degree that you studied, geophysical engineering, leads to a really interesting chapter in your life, which is a job with an oil exploration company in Sumatra in Indonesia. What were you doing? Well, this was a seismic company, so we would drill a hole, put dynamite in it, blow it off, and then record the vibrations on the surface.

22:00And then you would process this signal in a sophisticated way and get a three-dimensional picture of the subsurface and then know where to drill. But in that glorious process, my thing was they would bring in these long rolls of paper that they recorded, and I would just edit them for any kind of noise. So I sit there for eight hours a day and edit these. And we're sitting in the middle of the jungle in Sumatra in this makeshift camp. This is like virgin rainforest. Yes. Yeah. There were places where literally no human being had ever set foot. And we would send in these local crews to go in and cut these very thin trails.

22:31And then there would be two pieces of bamboo nailed together. So you had to walk on that. And there were tigers and monkeys and very, very adventurous. And given that Vigil is partly about the spiritual guide trying to persuade a fossil fuels billionaire into repentance, is it a book in which you're also exercising some kind of personal guilt at having played a part and working directly for the oil industry? I wouldn't say guilt because I was so bad at it. And what I was doing was such a small part. But what I did use was the joy of that experience because you were in sort of a tribe of specialists.

23:09I'd never been out of the country at that point. So I'm in this exotic location. I felt like I was Indiana Jones or something. And so I can see very easily where that experience, which is so positive in a certain way, would make you solidify against any criticism because it was my life and I was doing it and these were my friends. So I use the righteousness to the mission. Yes. Right. And so I use that to make the kind of foundation for his worldview. you. There are some other fascinating entries in your CV in your early 20s. And this is all according to the internet. You were a Chicago nightclub doorman, a roofer, and a slaughterhouse knuckle puller.

23:50All true? Almost true. I was the doorman in Beverly Hills. So that's the internet. And also, I was never the prime minister of Belgium. That's the other thing. No, I got sick in Asia and came home and then kind of was a little bit in my mind a Jack Kerouac beatnik sort of just roaming around and did all these jobs during that period. What does knuckle pulling entail in a slaughterhouse? Is it as horrible as it sounds? Yes. And it's hard. So you're in the slaughterhouse. It's very cold, of course. And then this big sort of cow leg comes by on a hook and you do a series of really intricate cuts.

24:25And at the end, you take all your body weight and pull down on something and the knuckle pops out. And then you take it and you literally heave it across the room onto a conveyor belt. And then you get in line and do it again and again for eight hours. And at the end of the shift and before lunch, they would turn the speed up on the line. So you'd be going so fast that you'd be literally out of breath before you went to lunch. So it was hellish. This is really hard physical labor. And having grown up in a working class environment as well, do you think how much of that has informed your life as a writer?