George Saunders has long been regarded as a master of the short story, telling his tales with wit and empathy. He carried these qualities into his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , which has been awarded the Man Booker Prize this year. The book starts from a solitary night in 1862, when a devastated Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery, where the body of his 11-year-old son Willie is buried. What follows is a supremely entertaining and eccentric story narrated through dialogue, spoken by an array of ghosts, who swim around in the “bardo”, a Buddhist term that describes the limbo that separates life from death. Excerpts from an email interview.
Lincoln is a much-explored figure. Was there a fear that this was a man whose every tale has already been told?
Yes, and that fear was really a great thing to keep in mind throughout the writing, if you see what I mean: knowing what had already been done (or might feel clichéd or too familiar) was a good compass.
The book’s strange structure, for example, came out of my desire to avoid a straightforward third-person account, which would (I feared) steer me into too-familiar territory. For an artist, a very frank admission of what the potential problems of a given project is an essential part of the process. When a person is embarking on a long trip, it makes sense to ask, “What could go wrong here? What am I afraid might happen?”
How did you research the book? And what was the process involved in arranging the information, often disparate, that you might have gathered from various sources?
My operating assumption is that any formal innovation should come out of true need. Here, I felt that the emotional power of the story was intrinsically linked with some of the historical background of Willie Lincoln’s death, and of the status, at that moment, of the Civil War. So, the question was, “How do I get that information into the book?” Again, I tried the obvious approach and found that these didn’t have any life in them, and were also leaching the life out of the surrounding chapters.
So, I asked myself, “Well, George, how do you know all of this history?” And I answered myself, “I read it in history books.” Then that “other” me sort of crossed his arms and gave me a knowing look, which I took to mean: “How about we put those other books verbatim into our book?”
So that’s what I did. I read hundreds of books, or portions of books, about Lincoln, and typed the relevant passages up, and spent many hours cutting these up with scissors and arranging them on the table or sometimes on the floor, until they made coherent narratives, which I then incorporated into the book (after sometimes adding in some “invented/ historical” titbits of my own).
You’ve long been regarded as a master of the short story. Lincoln in the Bardo , even if short, is your first novel. How different was this experience?
What surprised me was how similar the process was to writing a story. In both forms, the approach, for me, goes something like this: Work on polishing a certain textual section. Soon it starts to seem more true and specific. See what this revised section suggests in terms of the next section (that is, what does it seem to want to lead to?) And then, as it says on shampoo bottles here in the U.S.: “Rinse, lather, repeat.”
The only difference with the novel was that the superstructure was larger, and I knew, from the beginning, the basic outline. I’ve said before that it was as if I’d spent my life building custom yurts, and then someone asked if I could build them a mansion. At first you think, “Oh no, I can’t do that.” But, then: “Well, I could link together hundreds of my custom yurts…”
How much did your Buddhism influence your writing? Why, for example, a bardo?
I used that word just to destabilise myself. I am a student of Buddhism but not a very academic one, so I don’t have a full understanding of the true sense of what the bardo is. I wanted “my” afterlife to be its own thing, but to be a place of confusion and surprising and even comic logic for the souls who find themselves there (as, I expect, the afterlife will be for us, when we get there — it would be strange if the afterlife was, you know, just as we expect it to be).
And thinking of this place as “the bardo” as opposed to, say, “purgatory” helped me keep things weird. There’s also a more conditional feeling to the bardo, a sense that one could leave that place or change one’s experience there.
But I think I was a Buddhist before I ever knew what that was, just through my writing practice, which involves writing something, then trying to come back to it in a state of freshness — not clinging to what I thought was good about it yesterday, willing to experience its actual energy on the day of reading and then correct accordingly.
You wrote the book well before the election that saw Donald Trump become president. You also wrote for The New Yorker on Trump’s rallies. Could you contrast the two presidencies for us? Is there something that you learnt about Lincoln that might be particularly relevant to the present political climate?
Well, Lincoln actively avoided extemporaneous speaking. He preferred to write and revise his speeches laboriously, believing that a leader should bear complete responsibility for his words; that is, he believed that words and truth matter. This is in marked contrast to the current President, who seems to view speech as a tool of expedience and manipulation. In this, there is also something communicated about these respective Presidents’ view of their own people.
Lincoln had a loving and fatherly relation to the people; was always working to understand what might benefit them. Trump seems to regard the people, largely, as simply the source of his power, to be fooled and roused into fear, with the ultimate purpose of cementing his own power.
The author is a lawyer and writer based in Chennai.
