George Saunders: ‘Materialism is winning out over spirituality’.

On the occasion of his visit to Greece, George Saunders gave an extremely interesting interview to Sakis Ioannidis for the newspaper Kathimerini. Read it below: One of Harry Houdini’s first tricks was to free himself from a pair of handcuffs. The locksmith who made them had spent five years perfecting the security mechanism, and it did indeed take the resourceful conjurer over an hour to escape. On the shoulders of the cheering crowd, the king of escape wept. The American short-story writer George Saunders often brings Houdini to mind. The magician who set himself an ever more difficult problem each time. If he failed to unlock his chains, he would fail; but if he freed himself, then the problem became a trick, a performance. His latest book and first novel, ‘Oblivion and Lincoln’ (trans. Giorgos - Ikaros Babasakis, published by Ikaros), won him the Booker Prize in 2017. It is a journey of emotions, humour, love, and the struggle between good and evil in the ‘in-between’, in a spiritual state between the living and the dead, which unfolds as Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his eleven-year-old son Willie in Georgetown Cemetery. Often, Mr Saunders felt the fear of Houdini struggling to free himself from his bonds. ‘If, as an artist, you want to tackle something difficult, you have to think of new tricks; the old ones won’t work,’ he tells us. “A historical novel, the death of a child, Lincoln – it’s like saying ‘I’m going to write a novel from a chicken’s point of view’. At first you’ll say, hmm, yeah, okay, but if you pull it off, you’ll be like Houdini,” he tells us. The worry Like everything else in his writing life, his latest book began with problems. “When I start a project, my mind makes a list of problems, such as that it might turn out badly, be banal, or tedious, and then I know I have a project. I was worried, but at this stage of my career, not worrying is dangerous. ‘I know how to write a story, and that’s the danger,’ he tells us. George Saunders was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, with Greek roots tracing back to his great-grandfather in Crete. He grew up just outside Chicago in a family full of humour and funny stories. He studied engineering and for a time worked for an oil company that sent him to Sumatra in Indonesia. Until college, he had never left the US, and the travels he undertook afterwards changed his views; he moved from being a conservative to the political spectrum of the American Left. In 1986, at the age of 28, he was accepted onto the creative writing programme at Syracuse University, with the writer Tobias Wolff as his tutor and mentor.Sipping small sips of coffee from a paper cup, dressed in a dark short-sleeved shirt and black trousers that he frequently pulls up – he forgot to tuck in his waistband– he speaks nervously and effusively about his time in Syracuse, Chekhov’s stories, his admiration for Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, and his image of what it means to be a writer. ‘I was young and thought that a writer had to be tough, drunk, uncompromising, and Toby (ed. Tobias Wolff) was none of those things. He was tough but kind, and I’d just watch him with his family, how he’d come and give a wonderful lesson, how he’d write his beautiful stories, and there was something liberating about it all. ‘You could be yourself; you just had to have an original idea,’ he tells us. Mr Saunders now teaches budding American writers on the creative writing programme at Syracuse University. Every year, there are around 650 applications for just six places, and we ask him about the tradition of American writers in the short form of the short story. In the America of ‘pragmatists’, he tells us, there is a tradition opposed to intellectuals that makes young writers feel uncomfortable with the grand themes of literature, a factor, he points out, that has favoured the development of the short story. ‘They feel more at ease with Hemingway’s approach: crafting something small and beautiful and letting the truth spring from within. The other reason is financial. Creative writing programmes are a great opportunity for young writers to enjoy a few years of freedom and favour short stories; they work best in the short form,” he emphasises.George Saunders is considered one of the greatest contemporary American short story writers, yet he shuns the ‘big issues’ that preoccupy other writers and remains ‘silent’ when his colleagues speak of ‘ideas’. ‘Writers like Roth come in through the front door and change the house. I come in through the basement window and thresh the grain in there. I’m like a thief, I look at the house and think about which window I can sneak through. I think I can contribute something regarding class issues. I’ve written about it and I’ll write about it again. I come from a middle-class family; in my twenties I lived at a lower level and I think I understand quite a lot about this subject, which is important and has been neglected. But when I see writers like Roth, Wallace, Flannery O’Connor, I think they’re simply brilliant. ‘I’m playing at a lower level, but I do it with passion and perhaps I can offer something,’ he tells us. His public silence, however, vanishes when he enters the writing process, where he poses questions without knowing the answers in advance. Thus, ‘Lethis and Lincoln’ touches on issues at the heart of America, such as slavery and racism, by placing in the narrative black people who have died, buried in an isolated mass grave. ‘I didn’t want to deal with slavery at first; I found it difficult for me. But then I thought, we’re in the Civil War, there’s Lincoln, we need some Black voices. Then it becomes automatic: where are they, why aren’t they allowed to be with the others, why is there a boundary? Suddenly you have all their stories. If you start this process and decide to be honest, the world will flood into your book whether you want it to or not,” he emphasises. “‘The ideas of humanity and kindness do not exist.’ Abraham Lincoln is something of a Jesus figure in American political history, and beyond. He is a figure recognised throughout the world, who steered the Union’s fortunes during the American Civil War, abolished slavery, modernised the economy, and whose face still appears on posters, T-shirts and American banknotes. The death of little Willie, the family’s third child, from typhoid fever, left a deep mark on Lincoln, who visited the child’s grave alone after the funeral.The idea of writing about the tragic event had been on George Saunders’ mind for 20 years. ‘There is a moment of truth when you realise that you are resisting something because it is difficult. If you do that, it means the end of your career. I trusted the feeling of terror I was experiencing, the one you feel when you see a beautiful person and are afraid to speak to them,” he tells us.The book’s publication coincided with Donald Trump’s election, and whilst he himself feared the book would be judged as ultra-patriotic (he firmly believed in Hillary Clinton’s election), people saw Lincoln and America in a different light. “It was as if they were saying, ‘Look at this wonderful thing we had, we took it for granted and now it’s changing’.”Historical sources coexist with ghosts, which give the book its distinctive flavour, its poignancy and its humour. The author likes them because they remind us that the world seems complete ‘because our senses are limited’.Loss and the process of mourning run through Mr Saunders’s book, and when asked whether addressing the subject through the novel helped him come to terms with the idea of mortality, the answer comes effortlessly: ‘Only because it didn’t happen to me!’ Neurotic and nervous Years ago, during a routine flight, one of the engines on the aircraft Mr Saunders was travelling in failed and cut out mid-air. “All I remember is saying ‘no, no, no, no’, as if I wanted to go back in time and have people say no, that’s not how it works,” he notes. He hasn’t come to terms with many things in general; he remains neurotic and nervous, he says, whilst as he grows older he realises that if he makes it to the end without major losses, in good health and with some sense of fulfilment, “it’s pure luck, it’s not something you earn”.The ‘corrosive idea’ of American capitalism, he emphasises, boils down to the simplistic notion that if you have a nice car, you’ve earned it; if you don’t, then it’s your own problem. “There is no compassion in this logic; the sense that anything can happen to anyone. This also applies to American politics: if you are unlucky, there is a sense that the responsibility lies solely with you,” he notes.Raised on the teachings of the Catholic Church at a time when the idea of the spiritual person came first, he now sees the world turning away from spirituality. “Throughout my life, I have seen materialism triumph over spirituality,” notes Mr Saunders, who has turned to the teachings of Buddhism. Blind faith in the slogan “America First” is terrifying, he points out. “The ideas they ought to be following—humanism, kindness, spirituality—are nowhere to be found. I don’t just mean Trump; the whole government is like that. This does not suggest a serious culture,” he concludes.