When you were a kid, did you believe in ghosts? I saw one, one time after my grandfather passed
away. I woke up one night and there was this presence
at the end of the bed, benevolent. And it was just like, "Everything's fine." And that was it. So, in that sense, I believe in 'em. Yeah. Were you close to him? Yeah, yeah. We were, yeah. But it was funny 'cause it wasn't a big deal. I didn't tell anybody. I was just like, "Oh, that's good." [chuckle] Oh, you didn't tell? No, no, until right now. [laughter] She really gets it out of you, it's unbelievable. We just started and already I'm crying up
here. I did rob a bank. Okay, I did. What? Hey. [laughter] [music] George Saunders, you've said that your new
novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" began with an image, a melding of the Lincoln Memorial with
the Pieta. Where did that come from? Well, we were in DC about 20 years ago. It was during the Clinton administration,
I remember. And my wife's cousin just pointed out this
crypt and she said Willie Lincoln, Lincoln's son, was buried there. And Lincoln was so grief-stricken that he,
according to the newspapers at the time, went in a couple of times and somehow interacted
with the body, held the body or looked at the body. And as a young writer, I was like, "Oh my
God, that's my book." And then the other... Was like, "No, it isn't." [chuckle] But the Lincoln Memorial is such a huge, vast
monumental. To blend that with The Pieta, how did that... It literally just sprung in my mind. Just converged in your own mind? Yeah, and it was just Lincoln with this son
cradled limply across his knees. But this is maybe after the first book, and
I just had the sense that... Sometimes if I think of an idea or something,
there's a way in which your artistic sensibility rises to it in a really joyful way. It's a fullness like, "Oh yeah, I can do that." It didn't happen. That didn't happen. I thought, "Oh, that'd be a great book for
somebody," but I didn't think I had the chops for it, actually. So I just put it off for 20 years, just kind
of... But you grew up in the land of Lincoln. That might be part of the reason. Everything was Lincoln all the time. He was on the milk carton... It's on the license plates. Yeah, I just felt like... It's just like writing your book about Jesus. It's like, "No, that's too hard." Let's hear from one of the ghosts. This is one of the main characters. It's from the opening of the novel, the ghost
of Hans Vollman introducing himself. Oh, yes. Okay, sure. On our wedding day, I was 46. She was 18. Now, I know what you're thinking. [laughter] Older man, not thin, somewhat bald, lame in
one leg, teeth of wood, exercises the marital prerogative, thereby mortifying the poor,
young... But that is false. That is exactly what I refused to do. You see, on our wedding night, I clumped up
the stairs, face red with drink and dance, found her arrayed in some thinnish thing an
aunt had forced her into, silk collar fluttering slightly with her quaking, and could not do
it. Speaking to her softly, I told her my heart. She was beautiful, I was old, ugly, used up. This match was strange, had its roots not
in love but expedience. Her father was poor, her mother ill. That was why she was here. I knew all of this very well and would not
dream of touching her, I said, when I could see her fear and the word I use was "distaste." She assured me she did not feel distaste even
as I saw her fair, flushed face distort with the lie. I proposed that we should be friends, should
behave outwardly in all things as if we had consummated our arrangement. She should feel relaxed and happy in my home
and endeavour to make it her own. I would expect nothing more for her, and that
is how we lived. We became friends, dear friends. That was all. And yet, that was so much. We laughed together, made decisions about
the household. She helped me bear the servants more in mind,
speak to them less perfunctorily. She had a fine eye and accomplished the successful
renovation of the rooms at a fraction of the expected cost. To see her brighten when I came in, find her
leaning into me as we discuss some household matter, improved my lot in ways I cannot adequately
explain. I had been happy, happy enough, but now I
often found myself uttering a spontaneous prayer that went simply, "She is here, still
here." It was as if a rushing river had routed itself
through my house which was pervaded now by a fresh water scent and the awareness of something
lavish, natural and breathtaking always moving nearby. At dinner one evening, unprompted, before
a group of my friends, she sang my praises, said I was good man, thoughtful, intelligent,
kind. As our eyes met, I saw that she had spoken
in earnest. Next day, she left a note on my desk. Although shyness prevented her from expressing
this sentiment in speech or action, the note said, my kindness to her had resulted in an
effect much to be desired. She was happy, was indeed comfortable in our
home, and desired, as she put it, to "expand the frontiers of our happiness together in
that intimate way to which I am, as yet, a stranger." She requested that I guide her in this as
I had guided her in so many other aspects of adulthood. I read the note, went into supper, I found
her positively aglow. We exchanged frank looks there in front of
the servants, delighted by this thing we had somehow managed to make for ourselves from
such unpromising materials. Before they can consummate the marriage, Vollman
gets hit by a falling beam and finds himself confined to what he refers to as the sick
box, which is, in reality, a coffin. And one of the most touching things about
the ghosts in your novel is their lack of understanding of what's happening to them. They believe they're sick, they're not dead. What's going on with that? Well, I think they're just in a denial about
it. He knows, that's why he works so hard to not
say coffin or corpse or grave. So I think that that became, again, the book
just told me that because, somehow, if they know they're dead, it's a hard sell. To say, "Yes, I know I'm dead, but I'm not
going," It's sort of... It doesn't make as much sense to me as what
would probably happen, which is some sense of, "I don't know what I am, but I'm still
here." In the ghost mythology, there's actually a
funny, sad riff which is a medium trying to get rid of a ghost. The first thing they try is they say to the
ghost, "What year is it?" And the ghost will say, "1742." And the medium goes, "No, no, no, no, no." And actually, sometimes will show a newspaper
with the date, and the ghost will be like, "Oh, sorry." And leave. [laughter] So, I found that... That seems right that if you died right now,
you would not go, "Oh, no, I'm dead." And if you did say that, you'd probably do
whatever was necessary, but if you couldn't quite accept it... But again, the book told me that and he started
that habit of saying sick box, sick box. And then at the end of the book, there's a
moment where, spoiler alert, but somebody actually comes out and tells them they're
dead and it causes this incredible outbreak of problems. At that point, I went back and made sure that
there was nowhere else in the book where that word was used, that none of the ghosts used
it. So in that way, again, the book teaches you
the rules and then you enact them retrospectively, retroactively. And one of the rules is that children aren't
supposed to spend very much time there. Yeah. That was just something you conjured up? Yeah, well partly, it felt like an unclean
place, a place that where... The only people there are people who are embittered
by life, disappointed, negative. So I think the notion is that it really isn't
a place. It's like a bad bar or a disgusting suburban
party. Kids should not be there, they should move
on. 'Cause Willie Lincoln undergoes this, or is
threatened by this terrible transformation. Just... It's the stuff of science fiction. I don't want to give too much away cause it's
really one of the physical processes that overcome him. What took your imagination in this direction? I hate to keep giving this answer 'cause it's
a little insider baseball, but sometimes I think imagination, for me anyway, is always
a technical response to a technical problem. So in this case, I knew really early that
one story was Lincoln comes into the graveyard, holds his son and leaves, 'cause we know that's
basically what happened. Then I knew that Willie was gonna be there
in the spirit when this happened, and then, suddenly then you've got a bit of a vacuum
of plot. And, working on it, I thought actually the
most interesting this is that Willie also has to leave. Well then, why is he there? He's making a mistake. How do I prove that he's making a mistake? I show a precedent, which is another kid who
stayed. So, I'm a former engineer, and when I'm working
on these stories, I tend to think of it that way. I need him to stay because it makes more drama. Can I construct the world in which he's not
supposed to stay? That's really the truth. And then once you do that, you say, "Okay,
if he's staying against the rules, there has to be a consequence for it to really have
heft." The best way to show consequence is to show
someone else who did that. And then from there, I don't know. Then you're just trying to physically think,
"What would a punishment look like in this place?" They're already dead, what could happen in
a quasi-physical way to make that punishment more vivid, I guess. I don't know. And the other ghost is so excited when Abraham
Lincoln visits Willie's crypt. And they're just so disturbed by Willie's
continued presence and the presence of... It's not even just that he's the president,
it's just that he's a human being, that he's there. What's that agitation? Well, there was a moment where he had come,
Lincoln comes, and he actually does hold the body. And there was just a reaction moment after
he leaves. And one night I just, I was halfway thinking
about it, and I just thought, "Oh, yeah, of course, they would be excited about that." And again, it was really just that the... To imagine that next beat of them going, "Oh
my God! A living person came." That seemed like a cool beat. Then once you decide that that's what's gonna
happen, it back fills the story and suddenly you're in a world where these dead people
feel like second class citizens. They know something's wrong, they're not physical
anymore, they can't have any influence on this sort of beautiful race of living beings
anymore. So this evolved, almost, a living person is
a celebrity in this world, and one of the things that they're so heartbroken about,
is that the living don't notice them. They think they can have no effect on living
people. They have a vaguely nostalgic sense of how
active they used to be when they had bodies. So, this is another thing, in the ghost literature,
there's an idea that ghosts really love it when you put their pictures out. They like to be remembered in that way. There's stories about ghosts who got really
angry and malevolent when people used their gravestones as building stones. My sister's house in New Orleans has a haunted
room, for sure, 'cause I actually bolted from that room in the middle of the night one time,
and undercut my manliness in that way. [laughter] But we figured out that part of the reason
is, there's a window that they got from a church that says, "In Memory of Father So-and-So." So that also came into the book that these
ghosts really, they really liked being alive. They feel a little offended that they're out
of the game, and they're in the minor leagues now, and... What kind of ghost pursued you in new Orleans? Well, I don't know. A priest, I think. A priest. Yeah, that's the worst kind, 'cause they're
always like... [laughter]
I mean, a nun is worse, because she's always putting you down, but... I'd like to talk a little more about Abraham
Lincoln, because, during his lifetime, he wasn't always popular. And there are a lot of different views on
him, on his character, even his appearance, and his achievements. How did you find your own way into Lincoln? Yeah. Well, I think one way was just to skillfully
make sure he wasn't on stage too much, actually. And also, to say, it's not a book about Abe
Lincoln. It's a book about this father-son relationship,
"Abe, stand over there. I'll call you in when I need you, and I'll
rush you off when I don't need you." Because it's a pretty hard thing to make a
historical figure come to life. So, I think part of the trick was just stage
management. And then, at some point, you say, "I'm sorry,
Abe, I don't, I didn't know you. Nobody knew you, actually." He was a very secretive guy, in a lot of ways. So then you say, "Okay, I'm gonna make a... Kind of a mold, that looks like Lincoln, based
on what I know about him, historically." And then, I'm gonna give myself permission
to melt down my own mind, and pour it into that mold, you're meeting halfway, sort of. So I thought, "Well, I've got... I've been a father. I've been a husband." So I know enough. So it's really... It's a... Did you put a lot of yourself into it? Oh, yeah, I think so. Yeah. It's just stage craft. It's like that, in the States with that commercial,
"I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." [laughter] So it's part of that. I feel like, if you had the job of saying,
"I'm now gonna make a three-dimensional literary representation of Abraham Lincoln, I would
just quit." It's too much. But if you wanna make something that looks
convincingly like Abraham Lincoln, I think you're gonna have to put your own phenomena
into it, because what else could you do? But you contextualized this story, because,
Willie Lincoln... And this happened in real life. But Willie Lincoln's funeral was held on the
day when the latest casualty lists of the Civl War were posted. And even the ghosts seem aware of the great
loss of life in the war, it was the biggest numbers thus far. You make a powerful connection between the
two events, the death of his son, and the deaths of so many sons. How do you think his private grief influenced
his political decisions? Or is that your own speculation? Well, I didn't... Yeah, well... I mean, it was interesting, 'cause I, at some
point, I had to make a real timeline of how this stuff played out. And youth, of course, he didn't talk about
it. One of the last things, last conversations
he had with his wife was the day of his assassination, I think, or the day before. And they were out on a carriage ride, the
war was won, just a day or two before. And he said to her, some version of, "We have
been too distracted by our grief over Willie. We have to find each other again." And they actually had this sweet plan to go
to California. So, I think it was on their minds. But I think part of the prerogative of a fiction
writer is to say, "Okay, his son died. He was moved enough by it to go into the crypt." The big losses of the Civil War started in
the next six months: 20,000 people a day, boys, you know. I can't imagine that a man of Lincoln's sensitivity... He was constantly excusing prisoners, who
were to be executed. "This is somebody's son. We can't do this." So there's no historical record that he fretted
over this, but I can't imagine that anybody wouldn't. When you get the telegraph that says, "20,000
young men died today, per your orders," and you've got the fresh grief of your kid, I
don't... I think, considering the element of the fantastic
that's in your work, what kinds of stories or ideas excited your imagination as a child? Well, I was a big... In Chicago, we had this thing called "Creature
Features," which is this kind of, Saturday night, the guy would dress up like a monster,
and introduce scary movies. So, looking back, honestly, and not in a literary
way, that stuff really got me going. I had one experience where the first one was
always a classic, like The Wolfman, or something, Frankenstein. And the second one was some terrible B-movie. And there was one called, something about
Dr. Sardonicus, anybody heard this? [laughter]
No? Yeah. Yeah. The whole shtick was, I'm sitting, my sisters
fall asleep, I'm watching this show. And the idea is, this guy has opened up his
father's crypt, because his father won the lottery, and his wife has insisted he go do
this. So the scene was, the guy goes in, opens the
crypt, you can't see much, but he's making these noises, gets the ticket, rushes home. His wife says, "Did you get the ticket, you
fool?" And she turns the light on, and his face is
frozen into the exact death rictus that his father's face was in. [laughter] And I'm sitting there, my parents aren't home,
and I remember thinking, "I can't move." [laughter] I sat there. I watched the whole thing, 'cause I couldn't
get up. How old were you? Maybe 10, or something. So that was formative. [laughter] But it's interesting because when you... I was a working class person. And when I had a book out for the first time,
you get the question about influences. And I always fancied it up a little bit. "Well, of course, Dostoyevsky." [laughter] And then, as you get more honest, you see
that the real influences are the one that really rattled your cage and you didn't expect
it to be art, really. The movie "Jaws" was like that for me. And it took years before I recognized that
as power and art are related, and even if the power is a little funky, and a little
embarrassing, it's still powerful and it gets in you somehow. 'Cause I wonder what place ghosts or the dead
might have on your imagination, 'cause they're very present, and restless in your fiction,
not just in your new novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, but in earlier stories such as CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline, from your first collection about 20 years ago. That story is set in a civil war theme park
that's run into bad times and the park is haunted by a ghostly family, who lived on
the land, originally owned the land during the actual American Civil War. What are they doing there in your story? Well, the truth is, I think sometimes... I can answer the question about ghosts in
a fairly straight way, but the more honest way is that, they're there because the story
needed some excitement. There is a young Chicago artist that we bought
a painting of his, a beautiful big Bacchanal. And in the painting, there's all these flying
pork chops. They're in there. And so, he hung the painting, and I said,
"Well, can you tell me something about the pork chops?" And he said, "Yeah, I had the painting finished
and it just didn't have enough energy." [laughter] What was it? A landscape [0:19:35] ____? [laughter] No, it was a... It was, yeah... But you could... Those pork chops mean something, but from
a creative standpoint it meant, for him, the energy was too low. And I think there's something deep about that. If the energy is too low, there's something
untruthful about the work. And so, part of the artistic move is to scan
around and see how in the world can I get more energy in this. And I think, at that point, your intuition
gives you something that turns out to be thematic later, but in the moment, you're really just
trying to get the energy up. So, for me, the... Now, this is related to that. I think sometimes when I was younger, I was
a big Hemingway fan and a big Raymond Carver fan, a realist, but I could never get energy
into realism. I'd write it, and it would be like, "Yeah,
that's a realist story." And also, in that low energy mode, what I
tended to do, and I think a lot of artists would identify with this is, when the energy
is low, you get doubtful and you start resorting to logic or thematics. It's about patriarchy, it can be dull, that
kind of thing. [laughter] You've written that story, I know you have. But there's something about when you introduce
energy by any means necessary, then that's when your essential themes actually show up. For me, it has something to do with the feeling
that realism doesn't actually get it in terms of the way life feels to me. If God was looking, what does God think is
going on here? I think what God thinks is that... There's 400 consciousnesses, 400 thought streams,
400 monkey minds, no offense, just having thoughts, you could actually write 400 parallel
columns with every consciousness. That would be an amazing novel. So I think I keep trying to find ways to do
that. In some of the later stories, there's two
or three voices that are talking back and forth, because I think in that setting... I'm not big... I'm not a natural plot person, I don't think
it in that way, but I found out early that if you just make a distinct human personality,
almost anything that happens to her will be plot. If you start off... Turgenev has this incredible little sketch,
he talks about a guy from his village who has a unique characteristic, which is, whenever
a beautiful woman is near, he starts to limp. That's so weird. [laughter] Now, I wanna know what happens to that guy,
just because of that quick portrait. So my thought is, if you can make a thought
stream with sufficient detail, if you have a person really three-dimensionally made,
who you care about, who has got vulnerabilities, in an elevator with another person, anything
that happens, somebody passes wind and it's plot. If the person is sufficiently made, actually. Don't steal that, by the way. [laughter] From what I discern from the writing and the
way you talk about it is that it's not a morbid preoccupation, it's more carpe diem, 'cause
that's waiting in the wings kind of thing, but in this story, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,
to see foreshadowing in this family that are ghosts that have to reenact what happened
to them is, obviously, as a reader reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I see a connection. So it's not just on energy terms, but the
fact that they have to reenact the violence that took their lives, is that part of... A violent end make for troubled spirits, is
that part of the convention here? Yes, I think. That's when I was doing my minimal research
on ghosts... If you aren't ready, that's a bad thing. Or if you're preoccupied with... If I'm about to get on a plane or I'm on a
plane and I'm coming to Toronto, some part of me is like, "I'll be dead after I get to
Toronto, I have a plan," that part of it. But also, I'm not trying to dodge the psychological,
but there's a way in which you do something like that in CivilWarLand. You have a ghost reenacting their violent
end. It lights you up when you stumble on it and
then you put it in your hopper, and you hold onto it. So there are other stories where that comes
in too. I think... I realized I didn't publish until I was older,
a story in the 38th book. And I think by that time, I'd had this lovely,
desperate realization that the talent I had was a very narrow wedge, actually. It wasn't one of these big talents where you
could take on anything and write in any mode. It was very limited. And I'd gone through that panic in my late
20s and 30s where I couldn't find it. So having found it, I think you do tend to
rework things that have worked for you in the past. And then, I guess, the hope is that, as you
do that, you'll escalate it each time and make it a little more capacious and a little
bigger. In this story and in your novel, which we'll
get to shortly, there is the idea of the dead entering, inhabiting the living, their minds,
their emotions, even their dreams. And is this also... Did this come up in your study of the ghost? Is this something else that is typically part
of... I think actually that... I'm not sure. At the end of that story, the main character
gets killed and he accidentally passes through the body of his murderer and can read his
mind. And I'm not sure where that came from. If I'm being honest, I'm sure it came partly
from Wings of Desire, which is not exactly that, but of angels who stand near... The Avenger's film? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, actually maybe, I don't think that
happens in a Christmas Carol, but it may sort of happen. You were brought up Catholic, but you became
a Buddhist. How does that fit with or how has that shaped
your beliefs about this world and what comes after? In the Buddhist tradition, and I'm a beginner
at it, but from what I've read, there's this idea that your death, the death moment would
not be unrelated to this one right now. That's pretty terrifying, but also maybe hopeful,
because if you could work with the way your mind operates right now, then you'd be better
prepared at the end. But the other part is that it's not unrelated
to what happens after in that tradition. So if you are an intensely competitive person
who feels you didn't get your due and you die, I guess this theory says, well, that's
your habit of mind, it continues, and the really terrifying thing that I came upon in
the Tibetan Book of the Dead and some of the surrounding texts, is the idea that your mind
right now, it's like a wild horse, but your body is like a post that it's tethered to. As neurotic as we can get, and as anxious
and as passionate, it's damped by the physicality. Well, when you die, these texts say that that
rope gets cut, and that wild horse is just, boom. It's still the same horse though. Whatever habits you've cultivated in life,
they get let off the tether and super-sized, which isn't that different from the Christian
mythology, really. Except there's maybe a little more of a binary,
heaven or hell, but if you're somebody who is intensely self-loathing in this life, and
you multiply that times 20,000, that's hell. And if you're somebody who is in touch with
your own phenomenon and found a way to convert negativity into positivity, multiply that
times 20,000 times, maybe that's heaven. Why did you move from Catholicism to Buddhism? Well, when my wife and I got married, I got
engaged in three weeks in the romantic Syracuse ambiance. [laughter] Got married... It's cold and snowy in Syracuse. Yeah, you lived there, didn't you? It's a snow belt. Yeah. But we found out that we had the spirituality
in common. I was a pretty serious Catholic kid, and she
was a fundamentalist Christian in South Dakota. We gravitated to the Episcopalian church at
first, and then a Lutheran church, and then she was just trying to figure out how to meditate,
and couldn't find anything on how to do it in the Christian tradition. So she just went to a Tibetan teaching and
we went from there. And actually, what happened with me was, I
follow her in everything, really. I just grumble and do what she suggests. [laughter] It's always been best. But I was watching her, and suddenly, when
you're in a relationship, there's those things you are always going to butt heads about a
little bit. Just in passing. And she had been meditating for about two
weeks and suddenly that stuff was just gone. I kept waiting in these... I'd say something that I knew was going to
get a reaction. Nothing. So, I'm like, wow, I want some of that. [laughter] But that was about 15, 20 years ago. I tell the story a lot, but I had a near plane
crash a while ago, which was an incredible instructional course in how not prepared one
is. Some geese flew into the engine of this plane. And it was like a minivan hit the side of
it. And the black smoke started coming out of
those little [0:28:35] ____, and people were screaming, and I always thought I would be
the kind of person who would be like, "Okay, everybody. Now it's time for us to be grateful for all
that we have enjoyed." [laughter] And I was not that guy at all. My thought stream was, "No, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no." Didn't even get to the bargaining part. I was just like, "No, no." [laughter] And that's when I was at the peak of my meditation
powers. [laughter] But to get back to the ghosts, tell me about
the bardo itself. What is it? Well, in the Tibetan tradition, it's means
traditional state. And it's just that this particular bardo starts
at the moment of your death, and it just goes to whatever is next. In the Tibetan tradition, it would be reincarnation. In the Christian tradition, it would be the
judgement enactment. And I departed pretty quickly from the actual
textual bardo, but in that, I think, that last 49 days, and my understanding is that,
for most of us, we don't notice it. But for a spiritually advanced person, it
would be a period of hallucinogenic visions, some frightening, some beautiful depending
on what you were into when you were alive. One of the texts I read indicated that whatever
mythology you think in now, that's what you'll see. So a Christian would see a Christian symbology,
a Buddhist would see a Buddhist. If you're a Kardashian fan, good luck. So it really is this idea of super-sizing
whatever is habitual in your mind. So this is the thing, I think I started out
thinking, "I'll be very factual about Lincoln, about the Civil War, about the layout of the
graveyard, about the bardo." And at some point, you're like, "Wait a minute,
is this a catalogue or a novel?" If it's a novel, the effect you're going for
is that moment at the end of a work of art where you just go, "Whoa," or maybe you don't
even go, "Whoa," you're speechless. That lasts a bit, and then the analysis begins. But I think an artist is involved with that
post-art shock, whatever you wanna call it. When I thought about that, I'm like, "It doesn't
really matter if it's factual, it just matters if it kicks ass, basically." And so, then I said, "Okay... And in terms of the bardo itself, you would
adopt that as an image and then use it as, you once said, your own twisted version of
it? Right. I gave myself permission to use the bardo,
as a way of guaranteeing that I kept death weird, because at some point, I was like,
"Whoa, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this happens." And you're like, "Well... " My guess was whatever happens after death,
it's probably not what you expect, that would be weird if it was, "Oh, look." Although, have you read that Stanley Elkin,
The Conventional Wisdom? No. It's a great story that goes on that premise
that this guy dies, and he goes to heaven and it's exactly like you're taught. So Saint Peter is there, and he says to Saint
Peter, "I'm so happy to be here, I think I'm gonna like it here." And Saint Peter says, "Go to hell." And he goes, and... [laughter] And when he gets to hell... And he's a great guy, you get enough of his
life to know he's an upstanding guy, and he says, finally, he demands a conversation with
God, and he says, "What did I do?" And God says, "Well, you didn't honor your
mother and father." He goes, "I did," and he lists all the things. And God says, "Well, you were adopted." [laughter] It's a very concerning story. [laughter] That's mean. Yeah, it's mean. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] There are 166 voices in the novels, some real,
most invented. Each of your ghosts has a story to tell, and
they keep on telling it, there's a kind of compulsion, remind me a bit of The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, they'd grab somebody and you had to keep telling the story. Is that a kind of curse, or is it way... A road to liberation, or redemption, or how
did you see that? Yeah. Well, the way it evolved was that it came
to feel like they aren't supposed to be there. They're not supposed to be lingering in this
realm, they're supposed to be moving on, but this is a way for them to fix themselves,
to fix their identities, much like we do here. I'm a best-selling author. You know I'm a best-selling author. This is... [laughter] Not that I would do that, but I'm just saying... [laughter] Well, it's 'cause you already did that. Yeah, right. So in this realm, the idea is it's so hard
for them to stay that they have to fix... They have to reduce their identities and keep
repeating, almost like sometimes you see people who are very old and are having cognitive
problems, they end up telling two or three stories. So I didn't really plan that, but in working
through the story, that seemed kind of energetic again. And once you have somebody repeat a story,
then you start saying, "Well, why is he doing that?" And that's where this world-building starts
to happen. So I became really... I love that idea, and was saddened by the
idea that these people are so desperate to fix whatever it is they have to fix, that
they keep repeating the stories. And in the process, they trim off the edges
of their personality. So one of those things that the book revealed
to me, that I didn't know, was that as they do this, they forget everything else. There's a character called a Reverend, who's
in that book, he is kind... He's been to judgement, and it didn't turn
out well for him. He literally can't remember why, because he's
trimmed off the edges of his consciousness so much. But again, that was something that the book
gave me. I'm a real obsessive reviser, and so sometimes
when you're revising, you fix something, and in fixing it, the story goes, "You just made
a rule." But the thing about the reverend is that he... We think there's gonna be a reveal, and the
reveal is that there isn't a reveal. Did you do that deliberately to have the reverend
not know what he did, 'cause he ends up being... I mean it's not a spoiler, 'cause he ends
up being damned and he doesn't know why. Did you have it be the reverend, because it
relates to the church? Or is it like there's an element of... No. Honestly, the truth is I had written the book,
I'm pretty much done with it, and I still didn't know why. [laughter] No, and you see just in the text where you
didn't know why, then you say to yourself, "Why? Why? Why is he going to hell?" And then you have a choice, you can either
say, "Oh, because he was late with his taxes, or... " You can name the sin. Well, no, I was thinking more because he's
a reverend, I thought there was some implicit critique going on in there. I didn't really know what kind of reverend
he was, and I've known some wonderful ones, I didn't mean it... But I just noticed that the book put me in
a trap, which was, "Hello? We don't know why the reverend goes to hell." So then you say, in revision, "Well, either
I'm gonna pronounce a reason," which, to my ear, was gonna reduce the book. If I said... Whatever sin you put in there, suddenly I
felt like the bottom fell out a bit. So then I thought, "Is there a more interesting
way in?" And as I kept revising, the book told me,
"It's not ours to know." We don't know why it would be... I have a friend, Sam Burkos, who just wrote
a book about this. He's actually died twice. Once he had a heart attack in an airport and
they managed to bring him back barely, and another time on an operating table. The first time, he had this intense Buddhist
vision of heaven came alive, and then the second time it happened, he had a vision of
hell. And I said, "Why? What happened? What do you... " He goes, "I don't know." What did he do between the first and the second
time? Exactly, and what he did was everything good,
you know? I love the idea, maybe just as a self-humbling
device, that of course we always think we're good and we always think we're doing fine,
but what if it's more complicated than that? What if our... I know for me, when I think I'm being good,
I'm usually just being exactly the way I want to be and doing a lot of rationalization. [laughter] I wrote this little book on kindness and I
was on the radio and it was so funny 'cause suddenly I'm the kindness guy. It came from a convocation speech that you
gave and that went viral, and what George Saunders said was that if there's anything
he regrets in his life, it was failures of kindness. That's something anyone... It's very apt, moving, I can see why people
responded to that. So then you became Mr. Kindness? Yeah. So, I went on tour for it and on some interviews,
one guy said, "I've always been about kindness, but people just don't get it." You're like, "Hmm?" You know? And this other woman called, she said, "I
really love what the author is saying about kindness. Especially, I think Americans are kind. If you go to Europe, not so much." I was like, "Wait a minute... " [laughter] So my point is just that... I think, we tend to get... Anybody gets complacent, of course, in the
notion that you're good and that you're bound for heaven. But I thought it was just interesting with
the reverend to say, "What if we actually, right now, don't know what it is in us that
might not be up to snuff?" For me, it's something about awareness. I know my awareness is not up to snuff and
I know that everyday I miss thousands of opportunities to be more present and thereby more kind. So, knowing me as I do, it wouldn't surprise
me if, when I died, that turned on me. I'm pretty neurotic, maybe that thing turns
on me and you're like... If you became acutely aware of those thousands
of failings a day and you didn't take them in the right spirit, that could be a kind
of hell too, you know? Unless judgement isn't fair. Say it again. Unless judgement isn't fair. Right. Or doesn't seem fair to you at the time, which
it probably wouldn't. So, that's cheerful. [chuckle] Lincoln in the Bardo is a timely novel, in
terms of its politics, and I know the idea came 20 years ago, the actual sitting down
to write it was, I think, 2012 or something like that? Yeah. You held on to that image of Lincoln cradling
his son for a long time. What made it the right time for the story? Not so much in terms of your own desire to
try it out, but with respect to the subject itself? It really... For me, it was that I, all those 20 years
whenever I was feeling artistically happy, the book would come out of the shadows and
go, "Now?" "No, Abe. No, I'm not doing it." But in 2012, what became clear to me was the
reason I didn't want to do it was because I was afraid of the sincerity of it, actually. You make your living on some degree of being
funny, and you look at a story like this and you're not sure you can make the stretch. So, I had a talk with myself and I'm like,
"Well, if you don't do it, you're gonna forever more be the person who balked at this thing
because it was too much of a stretch." And that felt like that was the inception
of an artistic death spiral. Personally, it was just a matter of I think
I should... I didn't want to be the guy whose gravestone
said, 'neglected to do the thing he most wanted to do'. That would be... You know. You would've hung out in the Bardo a long
time... Yeah. Exactly. Give me a pen. Somebody give me a pen. [laughter] Actually, in terms of the material, I don't
think I really thought of it, it was just such a burning idea. I tried to write it as a play, I tried it
many ways. I think it was mostly just in my career trajectory,
I had finished Tenth of December, I was getting the first inklings that it might do pretty
well, and I thought, if not now, when? Why is it that a book about love and grief
and loss, that might have some poetic passages in it, is beyond you at 55 years old, a father
of two kids, who's done a lot of things. It seemed to me that it was a deficiency if
I didn't try it. And then, as I got closer to the end, it seemed
like it was gonna come out right when Hillary was inaugurated. I thought, "Great. People will be in a nice, patriotic mood for
my book." Actually, we delayed the publication 'cause
it was going to come out during the election and that's why we push it back 'till a safe
zone. [laughter] So it's been interesting because... When I'm touring in the states, it's... As you know, the energy around this election
is so high and the book, some people, some critics said totally the wrong timing. One critic said that. Why? I don't know. I disagreed with her on that. But that was one of the first reviews, was,
"This is a very lovely book, but is timed exactly wrong." I'm like, "I don't know." Then there was another wave that didn't agree,
and in the audiences, you can feel that there is something about that... I guess it's that vision of America and I
think it has something to do with the fact that that vision of America, which may or
may not have any relation to the actual country, but it's my vision of America. Pretty much I think America on a good day,
it flourishes through big-hearted-ness, inclusivity, true equality, a loving nature, a sense of
humor, so you're praising those things at a time when there's a different vision, say,
hovering. 'Cause race also comes in, of course, it would
come in in the context of the Civil War, but also long-standing racial divisions still
exists within the bardo. There's still a separation between blacks
and whites. Could you read another excerpt? This is in the voice of Thomas Havens, a former
slave. Sure. I don't know what came over me. Never in that previous place had I been a
rash person. What need I to be? Mr Connor and his good wife and all of their
children and grandchildren were like family to me. Never was I separated from my own wife or
children. We ate well, were never beaten. They'd given us a small but attractive yellow
cottage. It was a happy arrangement, all things considered. So I don't know what came over me. As that gentleman passed through, I felt a
kinship and decided to stay a bit therein. So there we were, moving along together, me
matching him step for step, which is not easy, his legs were long. I extended my legs to match his, and extended
all of myself, and we were the same size and out upon horseback. And forgive me, the thrill of, once again,
riding a horse was too much, and I stayed therein. What a thrill it was to be doing what I wished
without having been ordered to do so, without having sought anyone's permission. The ceiling of a lifelong house flew off,
if I may put it that way. I knew of the instant vast tracks of Indiana
and Illinois, full towns in their complete layout, and the nature of the hospitality
of specific houses therein, though I had never been in either of those places, and came to
feel that this fellow... Well, my goodness, I will not say what office
it seemed to me that he held. I began to feel afraid, occupying someone
so accomplished. And yet I was comfortable in there, and suddenly
wanted him to know me, my life, to know us, our lot. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did. He had no aversion to me is how I might put
it. Or rather, he had once had such an aversion,
still bore traces of it, but in examining that aversion, pushing it into the light,
had somehow already eroded it. He was an open book, an opening book that
had just been opened somewhat wider by sorrow and by us, by all of us, black and white,
who had so recently mass inhabited him. He had not, it seemed, gone unaffected by
that event, not at all. It had made him sad, sadder. We had, all of us, white and black, had made
him sadder with our sadness. And now, though it sounds strange to say,
he was making me sadder with his sadness. And I thought, well sir, if we're gonna make
a sadness party of it, I have some sadness about which I think someone as powerful as
you might like to know. And I thought then as hard as I could of Mrs
Hodge and Ellison and Litzy and of all I had heard during our long occupancy in that pit
regarding their many troubles and degradations, and called to mind as well several others
of our race I had known and loved, my mother, my wife, our children, Paul, Timothy, Gloria,
Rance P, his sister B, the four little Cushmans, and all the things that they had endured,
thinking, sir, if you are as powerful as I feel that you are, and as inclined toward
us as you seem to be, endeavor to do something for us so that we might do something for ourselves. We are ready, sir, are angry, are capable,
our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, are holy. Turn us loose, sir. Let us at it. Let us show what we can do. It's such a powerful moment when you bring
them together, black and white, within Lincoln himself. Can you talk about the risk you took? It feels like a risky kind of thing. Yeah. This book was funny because sometimes... I teach at Syracuse and I say that writing
a story is like throwing... The author has to throw a bunch of bowling
pins in the air. And then the job, really, is to know which
pins they are and then catch them. That's really it. But with this novel, a first novel, what I
found was you throw a lot more pins in the air, and up there, they multiply. And this, the last, say, 40 pages or so, it
was the experience you dream about as a young writer. I would just rush out to my shed in the morning
and just go, "Oh, good," sit down, and the pins would start coming down. And the only thing I had to do was be a little
bit logical about sequencing of scenes. They were just coming down. And one of them was this convention we talked
about, that if, in this world, if a ghost was to sit down where you are right now and
co-occupy you, they could read your mind. So I'd set that precedent up way back when. So, suddenly, here, there's the ghost of a
former slave who's very near to Lincoln as Lincoln's leaving the graveyard. So, you talk about imagination. The imagination actually isn't a thing. It's just noticing, aha, former slave, Lincoln,
convention that they can co-habitate. Huh. Then it's almost a deficiency if you don't
cross those wires. In this sense, the writer's job, I think,
is to be very, very aware of what she's already done. In other words, you've been writing this book
for four years. Are you fully aware of all the little boxes
you've opened? Because part of the thing is you're assuming
such intimacy with your reader, and such capability on her part, that she knows there's boxes
are open, so she's knows that you've made that convention. If you don't honor it, she's gonna think a
little less of you. So in a sense, imagination, at that point,
is like just calling the cows home, in a certain way. I had eight cows when I started out in the
morning. There's 12 now. They all gotta come through the gate. And then these things happen that have meaning,
and they have beauty, I hope, and theme. They are about race but they only happen because
you cross the wires that you've made in a certain way, which, for me, it takes a lot
of the responsibility off. If I had to think I'm gonna try to write a
big book about life, death, the supernatural with race in it, I'd be like, "Oh man, I'm
going to law school." [laughter] But if you know that you put the things in
motion and then be a good, almost like a, maintenance guy, then the thematics will actually
take care of themselves, then I can proceed. George Saunders, speaking of race and other
themes in American culture, I want to look back at an introduction you wrote to Mark
Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". This is back in the 2001 edition and I was
struck by the timeliness of your observations and of the novel itself, 'cause you talk about
the fictional Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as representing two viable models of American
character. You say America is and always has been undecided
about whether it wants to be the United states of Tom or the United States of Huck. Can you explain what you meant there? Especially in reference to today, I think. Yeah. Well, in that book, at least I left the Tom
Sawyer novel out of it, but in the world of Huck Finn. Huck is somebody who is open to Jim, basically. He has a moment there where he considers turning
Jim in. Jim is a... Well, he thinks he's an escaped slave. He turns out to have been a freed slave but
he's travelling with Jim. Right. And everything that Huck has learned from
convention is that, if that's the case, you should turn him in. And there's just a beautiful moment where
he comes up against his habituation and his actual common sense and he decides to go with
the common sense. He says, "Alright, then I'll go to hell." And he decides not to turn Jim in. To me, there's something about that, that,
at its best, America has that quality. It's in the constitution. Everybody is created equal. It doesn't say us white men are the most equal
and you can have some of it, which is often the stance that I think America has taken. That women want rights, "Okay, you can have
some." The constitution doesn't say that. The equality was always there and we just
screwed up by denying it. The Huck spirit is like, it's outgoing, it's
willing to be overturned, it isn't particularly afraid. All those kind of positive qualities. Tom, in the book, basically tortures Jim for
30 pages in order to indulge his own projection. He wants to make up an imaginary world in
which he is a hero and they're playing Walter Scott. That's a different American quality, which
is to say, "My projection is the most true thing in the world." And I think in the current moment... I covered the Trump campaign for the New Yorker
and what I found, when you really boil it down, here's what I think the big difference
is or the big illness of that movement. There was a Gallup Poll, the most comprehensive
Gallup Poll taken of the Trump supporters. And what it said was that most, just factually,
most Trump supporters didn't live near the border or near communities of immigrants or
have many friends of color. That's just a statistical fact. Well, where's all this fear coming from? Projection. And where is the projection coming from? Right wing media. So, to me, that's Tom Sawyer. Tom read Walter Scott and it got in his head
and he decided to force the world to be a Walter Scott novel. Huck hasn't read anything, actually, and he's
like, "I don't know what the world is but let me observe it and find out." So when I did that rally, the one... I didn't have a lot of success converting
anybody and neither did they but the one hopeful moment was I got to know this young woman
who would come to Mexico with her parents when she was three. So she wasn't documented, but she's been here
since she was three. And I would just bring up her example. She borrowed her mom's social security card
to work so she could earn the money to get into the DACA program. They did a workplace raid. Just explain what DACA is. DACA is... It's the dreamer's program that if a person
is in that situation, they can actually go to college, otherwise they can't because they
don't have the papers. So she needed $300 or something to get that,
got a job at a little grocery, this is in Arizona, and there was a workplace raid, and
they arrested her, the sweetest 19-year old girl, so dear, put her in the general prison
population for two months. She'd never been to a nightclub, so sweet. And so, she was there for two months and then
a month in the ICE, the immigration lock up. I would just tell the story to the Trump people
who are saying build a wall and deport them all, and there was always a very telling moment
when you put a name on it and a face, where there was a hesitation. And then quickly, the hesitation, "Well, we
have to have laws, we have to have borders." They would often say, "Was she a nice person?" I'm like, "Yeah, she's nice." So I think that there's something in the American... Well, probably in human beings, we all project. If I say Milwaukee. [chuckle] You got it. You may never have been there. I've been there once and I get beer, cheese. So that's how we story tell. Every human being is an artist in the way
that they project, but I think part of this movement is it's so far removed from individuals
and from actual experience that that wild, fearful projection has taken over. In that book, that's Tom Sawyer. Just to say, that introduction to that book,
because you seemed to have been so prescient, you say, "We must learn to look passionately
and technically at stories if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative
ones being circulated among us." Yeah. Yeah. How do we do that? Well, I have the corny answer which is art. In my life, I noticed this in the last three
months, I've always marginalized art, like, "What do you do?" "I'm a writer." "You're what?" "A writer." And somehow, maybe as a working class person,
never really thought that art should be central anyway. I thought, well, no, of course, that's done,
that was the 19th century. Now we're just like, we wear berets and we're
freaky. [laughter] But, since this whole thing has happened,
I'm like this... It makes sense if you think about a culture
that has marginalized art and freakafied art and commodified it, that then, that culture
would have a strange, dysfunctional relationship with truth and with language. If art is that process of opening up... When you're reading a book, you know how so
many boxes in your mind come alive. You're attuned to a semicolon, a pattern of
colors becomes meaningful, there's all these things that are started, the bowling pins. I would say your mind on art is probably about
the most open it ever is except maybe love or something like that. So that's an incredible state of consciousness
that makes us wiser and kinder and more engaged and all that. A culture that degrades that to a sideshow,
is gonna end up in the weird situation that we're in now. So I think art is, for those of us who are
here, on a night like this, we know that already. And in the States, what I'm telling people
is, let's just sit up straight about it. We also are citizens, our love for art is
not some kind of dysfunction, it's who we are. Every human being is an artist from birth,
you go to kindergarten and you start telling a story about it, "I'm the tallest one in
my room." You're a novelist. [laughter] Yeah. So I think that's one thing that I was... In, yeah... I mean, just the idea that the language has
become degraded past what even Orwell could have imagined, because the big fascists have
always had sophisticated language, albeit bad-hearted, but this is something, I mean... You know. [laughter] But even back then, we're talking... So, 15 or more years ago, you said, "How could
anyone be truly free in a country as violent and stupid as ours?" Yeah. [laughter] I approve that message. It's funny 'cause when I... Every time somebody reads that to me, I always
think, I wonder if I would stand by that in Canada. Should I betray my country? No, I stand by it. I think we are violent and we're stupid and
we're banal. Not all of us, not always, but there's a certain
American strain that has a banal aggressiveness to it, but... Now, here's the thing, this is true with countries,
it's true with people, it's true with writers, if you take a trait, banal aggression, okay,
that's not good to be banal and aggressive, if you turn it around, you get friendly and
energetic. And I think Americans are friendly and energetic,
and then you turn it, and they're banal and aggressive. So, I think our culture has something, I don't
really understand what our culture is about anymore, but certainly there's this quality
of an anti-intellectual tendency, certainly a materialist tendency out the wing-wang. The idea that we believe so much in direct
outcomes, shareholder value, linear narrative, good common sense, and so I'm not really sure,
but I think we are what we are. I'm backpedalling here, but yeah. But you once said that if Shakespeare were
alive, he could have created a character like Donald Trump. Is there a comparable figure in Shakespeare's
work? I don't know Shakespeare's work that well,
but I'm sure there is somewhere. I think he's an incredible character, even
this thing yesterday, that guy is really skillful. To do something... If Hillary Clinton had done that, I'd be like,
well, you know, I can see her point. So, he's got a way of continually shifting
the playing surface in a way that, I think, is totally instinctual to him. He knows... His approval ratings are dropping, I think
the FBI is closing in, what does he do? He's got a showman's instincts. So, I think he's something. He bombed Syria. Yeah, he did. [laughter] No matter how dark or satirical or twisty,
there's always been compassion in your work, but this novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, it seems
to give us, not withstanding all your technical allusions to how it actually got constructed,
but it does seem to give us a more tender, compassionate George Saunders, would you agree? Yes, I would, I would, I have always felt
that way in life but I just... I think, one, I didn't really have the chops
to communicate it. There's that saying happiness writes white,
it's difficult to convey positive things, I think. And then... So, as I've gotten older and have done most
of the things that a human being can do and seen how beautiful life can be and how our
kids grow up wonderfully and all that, I just noticed that those qualities were somewhat
underrepresented in my stories, but it did feel, to me, like a technical thing. It took a lot of time to figure out and, actually,
I did two things that helped. One was I did a lot of non-fiction reporting,
where you have to kind of... There are things that happen that you have
to represent straight and that gave me a little more confidence that I could actually make
that kind of prose come to life. And then, also, in Tenth of December, the
title story, there was a passage at the very end of that, where this guy has done a stupid
thing and he's waiting for his wife to come and he knows he's hurt her. And in that moment, I just instinctively turned
to my marriage and blurted out, literally just blurted out, this bit of prose that said
something like... The idea was, that love is when you have somebody
who you know will accept you, no matter what a dummy you are, not conditionally, and actually
has seen you do all that stuff before and still, for some reason, accepts you. And he knows that his wife will respond that
way. And what happened was, I blurted it out as
truthfully as I could, and it actually had a nice quality as prose. So, I think, in that way, you build your confidence
up, that when you get to a true, earnest thing, you can handle it. So, it was exciting in the sense that I think
I was still... My prose is still growing, and I'm still feeling
that I'll be able, in the next five or 10 years, to be very specific about beautiful
things, as well as dark things. It's great to have the chance to meet you
face to face. I really enjoyed it. You too. I've enjoyed our talks in the past so much. Thank you. [applause]
