Garrison Keillor is an embittered old liberal whose political pronouncements range from the unfunny to the ungenerous. But the creator and longtime host of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion is also a talented writer and bewilderingly versatile entertainer, and we took no joy in hearing that he had been forced to step down from his position at Minnesota Public Radio as a result of sexual harassment allegations against him. He has denied the allegations, saying they arose from an episode in which he had merely placed his hand on a colleague’s bare back.
His accuser says this is not the case. Her attorney says there were many other incidents, seemingly far beyond back-touching. But Keillor insists his version is correct. “If I am guilty of harassment,” he says, “then every employee who stole a pencil is guilty of embezzlement.” He also promises to put his account in writing: “I’m an honest fiction writer, and I will tell this story in a novel.”
We wonder if, at a time when so many progressives lament the rise of “alternative facts,” Keillor’s liberal co-belligerents are similarly exercised by the idea of creating one’s own fictional account of a disputed encounter. We’re guessing Keillor will come out looking pretty good in his version, but how will it comport with, say, the sworn testimony of his accuser?
The ability of writers of fiction to create their own worlds, with their own alternative facts, is of course one reason hidebound traditionalists of a bygone age thought poorly of fiction. The Puritans were suspicious of the stage and at various points banned dramatic performances. Scottish Presbyterians and English evangelicals of the 17th and 18th centuries never liked novels, feeling as they did that writers could use them to tell lies about history.
We won’t go as far as that, but they had a point. In a marvelous essay in 2002 for the New Criterion, the Australian critic Keith Windschuttle lucidly exposed Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath as a work of Marxist propaganda. And yet, just as Wellington claimed all his English history came from Shakespeare, so most of what the average American knows of the Great Depression comes from Steinbeck’s book (or the movie version starring the improbably handsome Henry Fonda). Distinguishing between lies and artistic license is an ongoing problem, especially when it comes to Hollywood. We think of U-571, a World War II film that credited the Americans with capturing an Enigma machine that was in fact captured by the British; or of the recent movie The Post, which, as John Podhoretz explained last week in these pages, slanders the memory of Frederick Beebe.
Well, never mind. We won’t prejudice our readers against Garrison Keillor’s fictional account of the dispute that led to his resignation and disgrace. We’re sure he’ll tell the absolute unvarnished factual truth. But we can’t help recalling a remark made by the great novelist Muriel Spark in 1979. “I have a strong sense that fiction is lies,” she said. “It really is.”
