Recently, a friend sent me the galleys of his autobiography, which will be his sixth or seventh published book. He's an academic and he sees himself as one of a pantheon of deep thinkers in a long line stretching back to antiquity. And maybe he is, I wouldn't know about deep thinkers or antiquity.
But I do know about the experience of my generation, and Garrison Keillor can speak to that.
Seeing Keillor with a live audience after thirty years of listening to him on the radio, is a surprise. It's a different and better experience. His voice is much better and more mellifluous than on the radio and he is much bigger and much more a stage presence than I expected.
The audience reaction is also important, and the audience at the Music Hall in Portsmouth could hardly have been better. They knew all the words to all the songs he got them singing, from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to "We Shall Overcome" to "Amazing Grace" to various church hymns. The only one I didn't hear was "Onward Christian Soldiers."
His memory is astonishingly prodigious, as he peels off Shakespeare and just about any poet with grace and fluidity.
His brand of mordant humor, laced with sensuality, is a sort of blank verse, and it is by turns morose, macabre and sublime.
Of the many stories he spun, one captured me most: There is no way to reproduce even its outline here, but suffice it to say it's about going to the funeral of his first girl friend, who was a neighbor, in a small town, so small he knew her laundry because it hung on a line in her back yard and he could see her underwear out there with the sheets. She sits next to him on the lawn when they are 14 and at 17 she asks him to go to the prom with her and she shows up in her father's Pontiac (in a town where the Lutherans own Fords and the Baptists Chevy's) dressed in a satin gown that plunges to her sacrum, and afterwards drives him to the graveyard, where clearly the dress comes off and he is initiated into the wonders of womanhood. He is wearing the blue suit of a cousin, who died a few weeks before the prom--no sense in the suit going to waste. Gasps arise from the audience when he mentions this, and he obliges the crowd by describing how the cousin died, a quintessential Garrison Keillor death, a foolish boy who could not swim, water skiing behind a boat in which the girl he is trying to impress is riding, next to her boyfriend. A stupid, impetuous, foolish youth, who dies a death which would have looked funny in a movie, but in real life is pathetic. And as Keillor is making love to his true love he sees the headstone of the boy in the graveyard and the headstones of all those young soldiers from the Civil War, who likely went off to war virgins, and he says, "I was doing it for all of them."
Now, Keillor is 77 and his girlfriend, who has not led a happy life, has died. And he meets her children and they produce the poem he wrote about that night, which she had clearly kept until her death, when it was unearthed by her children.
The only other time I've loved the Garrison Keillor thing more is during a brief scene in "The Wire" where Bodie is in a van on the way to Philadelphia and, never having been out of Baltimore, he is confused about the loss of the radio station's signal and he is madly fiddling with the dial. His driver tells him radio stations don't reach beyond each city,(unaware of National Public Radio) and Bodie stumbles on to Keillor, "A Prairie Home Companion" talking about the tomato harvest season in Minnesota and Bodie could not be more dumbfounded than if he had stumbled upon a broadcast from Mars.
"Why anyone would ever want to leave Baltimore?" Bodie asks, shaking his head. "That's what I want to know."
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