“Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness,” the author wrote in the introduction when this collection first came out in 1987, “and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem. Nobody smirks at you or gossips about you, nobody resents your successes or relishes your defeats. You get to start over, a sort of redemption.”
Starting over is the great American luxury: leaving your parents’ town for a greener one of your own, leaving the constricted life under the gaze of Mrs. Grundy for a freewheeling one that fits you more comfortably, leaving the sullen marriage, the dead-end job, the too-familiar house, the cold climate, the cool appraisals of your old relatives, whose take on you is so much less pleasant than your own. The author, back in 1987, was experiencing an odd sort of restlessness, that of the struggling middle-aged writer who is suddenly accosted by success, that beautiful, glittering young three-hundred-pound painted woman, who came screaming out of the woods and sat on him, smiling, for a year or so until gradually he began to long for other forms of entertainment.
Emily Dickinson said, “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed; to comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,” and the needy author found the success of “A Prairie Home Companion” and Lake Wobegon Days (1985) very sweet indeed, seeing as he had been such a social misfit in high school and college. Most of his high school classmates could not have picked him out of a police line-up. He was even more invisible in college. And Minnesota is such an invisible place in America that if a Minnesotan gets noticed by anybody at all, for anything not actually illegal, he feels a doglike gratitude. If there is money involved—which is sometimes true in publishing—then it’s all the sweeter, though you do, of course, feel guilty about your success, and worry about the state of your soul, and fully expect God to strike you down as He has struck down so many other large enchiladas (KEILLOR FOUND CONFUSED, WANDERING IN DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL, WAVING UNLOADED PISTOL, SHOUTING NON SEQUITURS) and you expect to wind up in the gallery of celebrity losers (KEILLOR: HOW I GAINED 200 LBS. FROM MY CODEINE COUGH SYRUP HABIT—AND LOST SOME OF IT!). Nonetheless, success struck the author as one of the nicer things that ever befell him. No kidding. To a social misfit, it’s a wonderful gift when, suddenly, people start to recognize you on the street and ask if you are the author of Lake Wobegon Days and are happy to find out that you are.
When success lingers too long, however, it is time to push the fat lady off you and go do something else. After all, you don’t become a writer so that you can go on television and talk about your work to a man with hair; you are a writer because you write, and public attention is not so conducive to that. Writers are meant not to bask but to work, to observe, not to be the observee. So off he went, closing down “A Prairie Home Companion” with a farewell broadcast in the spring of 1987, taking a bow, slipping out the back door of the World Theater in St. Paul, selling his dearly beloved house in St. Paul, and heading for Copenhagen and, ultimately, New York. He wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. He traveled around. He did a show at Radio City Music Hall. He looked for a farm to buy. He started, and stopped, writing a memoir. He wrote a novel. It was a tumultuous few years, characterized by a kind of impetuous restlessness that the author had managed to postpone from his teenage years. He had been a hard worker through his youth, a cautious little striver, a Scout, and then, in his late forties, he went through adolescence. He woke up almost every morning seized with a beautiful notion of what, finally, to do with his life, and every morning it was a new notion, and it seldom lasted into the afternoon of the next day. And finally, when he recovered, he went back to the Midwest and back to doing “A Prairie Home Companion” and felt grateful to have the second chance.
It is hard work to invent ourselves. Movie stars do it pretty well, and politicians, and writers of memoirs, but at the author’s age—the extremely late forties—it is good to go back home and be among people who know you. Some of those are the people in this book, a collection of monologues from the radio show between 1984 and 1987. The author has written his share of lyrical prose about the Midwest and spoken his share of curses on it, and at the moment he has made his peace with it, which is a kind of redemption too. Midwesterners have an urge to roam—exasperation with home impels us out on the road—and thanks to a good upbringing, being patient and polite, we make good travelers and take vast pleasure from un-Midwestern places, such as Italy or India or North Africa. And then, coming home, seeing the towboat plow up the Mississippi around the bend below St. Paul, seeing the dome of the cathedral on the hill, the giant “1” on the First National Bank building, the tower of the old courthouse, the snow drifting down in Rice Park, snow on the head of the statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald, standing as if waiting for a friend, we feel our hearts break with the pleasure of the familiar.