The New Yorker and the World (2)—Fiction: Garrison Keillor, "Don: The True Story of a Young Person"

One year ago on Round and Square (13 September 2011)—Styling Culture: Text and Spacing
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The New Yorker and the World"

[a] Don of a new day RF

Over the next few months, I plan to post a little bit of the "content" from the first-year seminar I am teaching on "The New Yorker and the World." I will introduce several writers—fiction and nonfiction—and will give at least a snippet from the pages of the magazine, along with some of the context that I give while teaching the material. The next few days will feature some of the fiction writers who brought fresh perspective to The New Yorker short story in the 1970s and 1980s.

Forty-two years ago, almost to the day, The New Yorker ran a short-short, a brief account that might well have been mistaken by the gullible reader for a brief news item in the community newspaper. It took up less than half a page, and concluded with a recipe for "Fancy Eggs." You see, a thirty year old Garrison Keillor had admired The New Yorker since his childhood in Anoka, Minnesota, and he had been sending fiction their way since he was in college. Nothing worked until this little word cluster caught a wave. 

[b] Fancy RF

Roger Angell (the fiction editor) and William Shawn saw something here that they had not seen before on the occasionally stuffy pages of the magazine. There was humor, to be sure, but it was also tinged with a mellifluous Midwestern authorial voice that differed so greatly from the typical New Yorker story as to make it irresistible. The title (headline) read: "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," and it described the arrangement—parole has something to do with it—in which a twenty-four year old prostitute became the live-in companion for their moody, teenage son. It was the start of a storytelling career for Keillor that has kept him creating overlapping fictions from the heartland for almost half a century. 

Strange? Yup. Riveting? Yup-yup. Keillor was one of a kind, and the editors knew they needed him as much as he needed them. The story is available only to New Yorker subscribers, but the link is here.

[c] Exquisite RF

As many of you know, Keillor would have much more to say, including one of the best tales of adolescent angst in a rural community that has ever been written. Alas, this one, too, seems only to be available in The New Yorker's archive, but (as you will see) the essays and stories highlighted in these "The New Yorker and the World" posts are so exquisitely written that the magazine's archive of old issues is in itself worth the price of a subscription.

     Garrison Keillor
     Don: The True Story of a Young Person (1977)
     Earl and Mavis Beeman and son Don, seventeen, had lived together in the 
     two-bedroom green stucco house at 2813 Rochester for sixteen years, but 
     for the last two they had been like ships in the night. Don, a gangly youth with 
     his father's large head and flat nose and his mother's shoulder length hair, kept 
     to himself and seldom spoke unless spoken to. "Ever since he joined that 
     band..." his dad said. Mavis suspected drugs and finally asked Don straight out. 
     He told her that coffee is a drug, but, as Mavis pointed out, coffee drinkers do 
     not lock themselves in their rooms and never talk to their parents.

     Actually, Don did love his folks. It was just that right now he was totally into his 
     music. But they thought something was wrong. One Friday night, when Don 
     and his band, Trash, were playing for a dance at the Armory, Earl and Mavis 
     went in and shook down his room. Under the bed they found a box of tapes, 
     numbered one through four and marked "Songs." They played them and found 
     out they were songs written and sung by Don. They were about subjects he 
     never discussed at home, such as anger and violence. One song was about 
     going down the street and tripping up nuns, and although the Beemans were 
     not Catholic they were shocked...

     As it turned out, criticism was exactly what Earl gave Don, especially after 
     the President's Day County 4-H Poultry Show dance, at which Trash played. 
     Actually the dance wasn't so bad. The band was rowdy and yelled a lot of tough, 
     punk types of stuff at the audience, but that was their thing, after all, and nobody 
     really minded until Trash's drummer, Bobby Thompson, spat at Sharon Farley 
     while she was being crowned Poultry Show Queen on the stage between 
     numbers. He said that she had given him a stuck-up lip, but Mrs. Goodrich, the 
     senior 4-H adviser, ordered him to leave the poultry barn instantly. But the kids 
     thought it had been done just in fun, and yelled until she decided to let him stay, 
     on condition that he didn't do any more of that sort of thing.

     Of course, this was a direct challenge to the others in the band. Brian Bigelow, 
     the bass player, spat at Mrs. Goodrich as she left the stage, and then, with the 
     crowd yelling and egging them on, the others in the band made belching noises 
     and lifted up their shirts. Don and the other guitarist, Art Johnson, turned their 
     amps up full blast, and soon feed pellets were flying back and forth. Things 
     were just about completely out of hand when suddenly a guy tossed a chicken 
     on the stage and Bobby grabbed it and bit its neck.

      Instantly, the barn was hushed. "Did you see that!" some people murmured. 
     See what?" other people whispered. Trash picked up their equipment quickly, 
     while several exhibitors chased and then caught the chicken. Somebody took it 
     to a vet. Everyone went home.

      The next morning at breakfast, Earl picked up the Gazette and found his son on 
     page 1. "4-H DANCE ENDS IN RIOT AS ROCK BAND EATS LIVE BIRD," the headline said. 
     According to the story, police were investigating the incident, which one observer 
     at the scene called "an act of bestiality reminiscent of Nazi Germany."

      Earl, a veteran of the Second World War, exploded...[1]
        [Continue on The New Yorker website]

***  ***

The chicken was o.k., and Keillor resolves the conflict in a beautifully imagined Minnesota passive-aggressive sort of way. So much of the mid-1970s rushes through these paragraphs that I find it to be a kind of time-capsule for post-Watergate adolescence. 

And remember, the chicken was fine. The vet in the story said so. Trust me.

[d] Presidents' Day RF

[1] Garrison Keillor, “Don: The True Story of a Young Person,” The New Yorker, May 30, 1977, 38-43.