My parents were dismayed at my newspapering. My mother said that writers were a bunch of drunks, meaning F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose old neighborhood in St. Paul she had once lived near and she had heard the story of him walking into church drunk on Christmas Eve. She shook her head at that. Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Dylan Thomas, all boozers. People went to Thomas’s readings to see if he could remain upright and not drop a cigarette down his pants and set himself on fire. She had read about that somewhere.
The only writing that mattered was Holy Scripture; everything else was vanity and horsefeathers—fiction, poetry, even history was suspect. When they cut loose from the Church of England in the early nineteenth century, men were being hanged for stealing spoons, aboriginal people were enslaved, the poor were starved into submission, and the Established Church sanctified it all. The Brethren stepped away from history, politics, power, the very idea of hierarchy. Rich, famous, accomplished, brilliant—those words meant very little to them—we are all naked and impoverished before the Lord—so I grew up sitting through Bible study with postal clerks and farmers, an auto mechanic, a seed salesman, engineers, railroadmen, carpenters, my tribe, feeding on the Word, leaning on the promises. The Bible is not bad as literature, but as revelation, taken literally, it is a wild ride. I was a devout young man but when I turned twenty, I abandoned the Brethren. I thought that probably they were right, that it was sinful to want to be a writer, but I would do it anyway. It was all I really wanted. I took a last stab at self-sacrifice and wrote a letter to a Trappist monastery near Dubuque, asking for admission, and they wrote back politely suggesting that I give the matter further thought. A good Christian was supposed to sacrifice his desires to the Lord. But if I couldn’t be a Trappist and lead a life of prayer and poverty in a black robe in Iowa, then nuts to that, I’d just go ahead and be a writer.
I went off to be an English major at the University of Minnesota, where John Berryman, James Wright, and Allen Tate taught. My parents were not pleased, but I paid my own way so they had no leverage. I owned the Underwood, a Webster’s Third Unabridged, a funeral suit, blue jeans, white shirts, one tan corduroy jacket, Red Wing work boots, and a broad-brimmed hat. I had acquired a nicotine habit and was learning to tolerate coffee because that’s what writers do. Back then, a cup of coffee was two bits, a pack of smokes thirty-five cents, and a drink was a dollar. I supported myself by washing dishes and parking cars, both educational experiences. You work the morning shift in the heat and steam of the scullery and you feel clean and contented the rest of the day, even in August. You stand on a gravel parking lot on the high bluff of the Mississippi, the wintry blast sweeping down the valley, and you direct a stream of cars to their correct spots in straight lines, tolerating no dissent or diversion, stomping out individual preference wherever it occurs, and you discover the authoritarian within. Good to know one’s own capacity.
Mr. Tate was sixty-eight when I took his poetry seminar. A slim, elegant man with a Southern patrician accent—a pal of Robert Penn Warren and Hart Crane—he chain-smoked in class, so we did, too. The whole English Department reeked of tobacco smoke and was proudly alcoholic—anyone who wasn’t was considered an interloper, possibly a Mormon. James Wright chain-smoked through his lectures on Dickens and Whitman, which he delivered through a haze of hangover. He always looked pale and haggard. His line “Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom” was written by a man with smoke coming out of his mouth.
My hero, Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), had recently taught at the U and I heard about him from his pal, my advisor, Joe Kwiat, a big, hearty guy with a great bark of a voice. Snowy-haired Robert Frost came and filled Northrup Auditorium, 4,700 seats, and recited his greatest hits by heart to the awestruck crowd. Afterward I stood by the back door and watched him emerge and shuffle down the walk and climb into his limousine. Nobody asked for his autograph, it was enough to observe him up close. (He looked extremely old.) Our great alcoholic genius was John Berryman, a man of such towering intellect that I was afraid to be in the same room with him—one caustic glance and I would’ve gone up in flames. He wore a big beard that made him look like he was eating a sweater. He gave a reading of his Dream Songs, slumped against the lectern, speech slurred, a man on the verge of collapse. His greatness and his affliction seemed intertwined, an artist engaging with powerful dark forces in public, pain had driven him to alcohol and to poetry, and he could no more give up one than he could stifle the other. I thought, If this is what it takes to be a great American writer, then I am on the wrong street. I am not screwed up enough. Berryman’s dad blew his brains out with a shotgun when the poet was twelve. My dad only worked hard and expected me to.
So I accepted that I could not be a true artist and that my future lay in the field of amusement. For the campus literary magazine, The Ivory Tower, I wrote stuff that owed a lot to Benchley and Thurber, A. J. Liebling and E. B. White. My journalism teacher, Bob Lindsay, encouraged this. He was a Marine Corps captain, a veteran of two wars—his bald head showed a remarkable dent as if a mortar shell had bounced off it—and he was a no-nonsense teacher. In his class, one spelling mistake on a writing assignment, no matter how elegant, earned you an F. We were horrified to hear this. But we learned to copyread, a skill that sticks with you for life. Mr. Lindsay’s office was on the first floor of Murphy Hall, and when I walked down that hall, I slowed down, and if his door was open and he didn’t have a visitor, I stuck my head in. He was brusque, not given to flattery, and when he said I should try to catch on at The New Yorker, I believed him. And then, unbeknownst to me, he sent the magazine some of my writing and a letter attesting to my good character.
I had not informed him that I had written to my draft board that winter of 1965 and told them I considered the war in Vietnam unnecessary and therefore immoral and so I would not be reporting for induction into the U.S. Army, as I’d been ordered to do, having passed the Army physical in the fall. I was waiting for the FBI to knock on my door and wondering if, hauled into a government office and confronted by G-men with lantern jaws and ball-bearing eyes, I would cave or if I’d stay strong and go off to Sandstone Prison. I pondered this great question on late-night walks along Riverside Avenue to the river and back: prison was a dreadful prospect, but so was Vietnam, and for that matter, life itself. What to do? I had acquired a girlfriend, Mary Guntzel, the cousin of my friend Corinne, and neither of them knew about the letter. Only my friend Arnie Goldman did and he told me I should head for New York and simply disappear. And he offered me a ride.
He drove me to the city in July 1966. I was living in a ramshackle house near campus, above the river, and Arnie drove me and a suitcase to New York and dropped me at a boardinghouse on West 19th Street across the street from an Episcopal seminary. It was a poor Hispanic neighborhood then and the boardinghouse was cheap: breakfast and dinner along with a room, bathroom down the hall, for $45 a week. A woman named Elizabeth Lyon ran it, assisted by an old lady, Marion Tanner, who was the eccentric aunt of the man who wrote Auntie Mame and who worked in the kitchen. The clientele was about half made up of recent patients from mental hospitals, doped up on Thorazine, a sedate bunch, who sat in the garden under ailanthus trees listening to the nuns in the convent next door chanting in Spanish. Mary and I were supposed to marry in September, a big church wedding with a country-club reception—it was all planned—and I wanted to escape. I felt like a jerk, abandoning her and her family, who had been so good to me, but there was an enormous vacancy between her and me, a silence we could not break through. New York seemed like a good move, what with marriage and the FBI on my trail. Arnie introduced me to an artist friend of his named Irwin Klein who drove a cab by night and shot photographs by day, and I hung out with him. He was screwed up, as an artist should be; he dropped acid, smoked dope, and lived in a one-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side with his wife and two baby gi
rls in such poverty as I knew I hadn’t the strength of character to endure. Small dim rooms, summer heat, city clangor, sink full of dirty dishes, weeping infants, a weary wife. New York was indeed a place where a man could find anonymity, but how did that jibe with my wanting to get my name in The New Yorker? I had spoken to a woman there, Patricia Mosher, who encouraged me to write a try-out piece for them, so I tried writing one about Marion Tanner and her un-Mame life peeling potatoes and tending to a brood of abandoned children she kept under her wing. If the magazine bought the story, I thought, I would stay in the city, not file a tax return, maybe change my name. I weighed what to write to my mother (I am okay. I don’t have an address or phone number now but I will call you from time to time), but the magazine turned down the Marion Tanner piece—“There is much to admire here but it’s just not quite right for us,” someone wrote in pencil at the bottom—meanwhile I took a bus to Boston to interview at the Atlantic. An overnight bus, to save on hotel. Got to the Atlantic office on Arlington Street an hour early and went to the men’s toilet, stood at the sink, took off my shirt, and sort of bathed and dried myself with paper towels, and a man in a suit came in, stood at the urinal, and made a point of not looking at me. He, as it turned out, was the man who would be interviewing me. It was a brief interview and I was not told to keep in touch. I was almost out of money. I rode the Greyhound back to Minnesota with great trepidation and married the girl and moved to a tiny apartment in Minneapolis overlooking the Mississippi and the handsome Franklin Avenue bridge. The next year, Irwin jumped out a fourth-story window. I felt jumpy about the FBI for a long time but they never knocked on my door. Maybe someone at the draft board office stuck my file in a dark place and thereby put herself in danger—it is a felony to conceal or otherwise impair the availability of a governmental record—and I wish I knew who she is because I owe her an enormous debt.
In 1969, I sent some stories to The New Yorker and one, rescued from the slush pile by an angel, was bought by the fiction editor Roger Angell, who became my editor, and I moved my family to a rented farmhouse south of Freeport, Minnesota, in German Catholic country. The magazine paid around $1,000 a story, and our rent was $80 a month, not including heat and light. I sent off two or three stories a month and if they bought one, we were on Easy Street. It was a luxurious life for a writer, not so good for the writer’s wife and infant child, isolated among clannish country people suspicious of strangers. Sweden might have been better, or Bulgaria. I wrote in an upstairs bedroom on my Underwood typewriter on a slab of 3/4-inch plywood set on two filing cabinets, my back to a window looking out on the farmyard, the barn, the cattle milling in the feedlot, the silo, the granary, the pig barn, the woods beyond. I found that I could sit and look at a piece of writing for hours at a time and not get twitchy, a skill I had picked up in Brethren Bible study, and I was a good rewriter. Day after peaceful day, visitors on weekends, the occasional big check and encouraging letter from West 43rd Street. A sculptor named Joe O’Connell befriended me, and a St. Cloud couple, Fred and Romy Petters, and that was all the social life I needed, but Mary slipped into depression; she spent whole days hardly speaking. Her mother, Marjorie, urged me to move back to the city for Mary’s sake, and I took a job at Minnesota Public Radio, the 6–9 a.m. shift, played records and created a cheery on-air persona, the Old Scout, who rallied listeners to rise and shine and face the day with a smile. It was a good and useful persona. I even started to believe in it myself. I was in an awkward marriage, I was absurdly self-conscious and timid and eager to please and arrogant, all at the same time, but I was lucky. On that early morning shift, I invented a town where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average. Businesses in that town advertised on my show—Jack’s Auto Repair, Bob’s Bank, Bunsen Motors, Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, the Chatterbox Café, the Sidetrack Tap, Skoglund’s Five & Dime, the Mercantile—and I talked about the women, men, and children, and that town, Lake Wobegon, became my magnum opus, unintentionally. I just sort of slid into it, like you’d go for a walk in the woods and fall into a crevasse and wind up in a cave full of rubies and emeralds. I labored in obscurity for the first few years, and then Will Jones, the entertainment columnist of The Minneapolis Tribune, wrote a big warm embrace of a story and that was the beginning of many good things. Will was from Ohio and admired James Thurber, and thought Lake Wobegon was Thurberesque, and his kind words in print were intoxicating.
In 1974, after writing a fact piece for the magazine about the Grand Ole Opry, I started up A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday evenings, a live variety show with room for a long monologue by me (“It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. . . .”), and found steady colleagues who did the hard work, starting with my boss, Bill Kling, and the producer, Margaret Moos, Lynne Cruise, Tom Keith, Bill Hinkley, and Judy Larson, and down to the present day, Sam Hudson, Kate Gustafson, Debra Beck, Kay Gornick, Richard Dworsky, Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Fred Newman, not to mention tech guys, good stagehands, researchers, and our truckdriver Russ Ringsak, and so we sail the ocean blue in pursuit of truth and beauty, sober men and true, attentive to our duty.
Life is good when you finally grow up. You find work you enjoy, buy a car that starts on cold mornings, look for love, sing along with the radio, beget children who nestle on your lap and put their little arms around your neck and kiss you. You put away sarcasm. You mow your lawn, read history, learn to cook a few things well, seek out good shoes, converse with strangers on the bus. You find a hairstyle that suits you. Your taste changes: time goes by and contemporary art strikes you as ditzy and shallow whereas you are moved by Hopper and Rockwell and Nordic painters of snowscapes. Young Sarah Singer-Songwriter only makes you wonder if she is getting enough fresh air and exercise, whereas a Chopin étude carries visions of women in lamplight, the forbidden kiss, the whisper of silk, the nobility of kind gestures. You cross the line into your forties, the mortgage years, and the fifties, when you stand weeping at graduations and weddings, and then in the blink of an eye you land in your sixties and now you’re on Easy Street. You become eminent and learn to harrumph. And then seventy. A golden age. You are wise beyond knowing, you have embraced moderation and humility, your work is triumphant, you pee like a Palomino pony, and your imagination is more vivid than ever before. One can’t wait to turn eighty and ninety.
Having once anticipated dying young, I now look back on those times when I might have and did not. The time I dashed out onto a busy freeway to retrieve a heavy mattress I’d foolishly tied with twine to the roof of the car and at 65 m.p.h. physics kicked in and it blew off. While I was dragging it off the road a truck bore down on me as if I were a raccoon and blew its air horn. I heard the Doppler effect up close and the whoosh of the draft made my pant legs go whupwhupwhupwhup and blew my hair back.
One summer my brother Philip and I canoed into a deep cavern in Devil’s Island on Lake Superior, attracted by the dancing reflections on the low cavern ceiling. We steered into a narrow passage, ducking under rocks, and he took pictures of the formations, and after a while we paddled out, a few minutes before the wake of an ore boat a mile away came crashing into the cavern, three-foot waves that would have smashed us into the rocky ceiling like eggs in a blender. Our mangled remains would’ve floated out and been found by fishermen days or weeks later—TWO TWIN CITIES MEN PERISH IN BOATING MISHAP—but instead we sat in the canoe and watched the waves whopping into the cavern and said nothing, there being nothing to say. He raised his Leica and snapped a picture of the crashing waves and dropped it into the lake and it got smaller and smaller as it plummeted to the bottom.
Philip died a few years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, skating on a pond near his house. He who had survived the close call in the cave on Lake Superior fell and struck the back of his head on the ice and suffered serious brain injury and died. He was an engineer, a methodical man, a problem-solver, and I imagine that even as he fell, he was analyzing his mistake—he should’ve sat
down on the ice and landed on his butt rather than his head. He tried too hard to remain upright; he should’ve collapsed. His family tried to keep his funeral as light as possible. There were three funny speeches and a rollicking gospel finish, and then we stood around the hole singing hymns as the gravedigger bent down, exposing a big slice of butt crack, and lowered Philip’s body into the ground, and then went to supper.
After we buried my brother, he became a steady, flickering presence in my life, even more so than when he was alive. He was a teacher, a patient man who strove to accept people and see the goodness in them and not scorch them with ridicule, and now I try to be more like him and less like myself.
When you’re in your seventies, people die all around you, at a steady rate. A high school classmate collapsed at our fiftieth reunion while I was at the microphone nattering about olden times; he died two days later. A man died in the audience at A Prairie Home Companion in Seattle; he was old and ill but wanted to come to the show, and during intermission he simply leaned against his wife and expired. Tom Keith, who was on the radio with me for four decades, came to a post-show party at my house, felt fine, and two days later fell down dead from an aneurysm—the man who played Mr. Big, the jowly incomprehensible man, and did the sounds of a golf swing, a man falling off a bridge into piranha-infested waters, a 350 h.p. snowmobile driven by an orangutang over a cliff and onto the ice of Lake Superior. He was a prince.
The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay. They exhort us to greater faithfulness, forgive us our inertia, comfort us in our agitation. My first mother-in-law, Marjorie O’Bleness, is smiling from the doorway, holding a Winston and a Rob Roy, tuned in to the conversation. My grandmother Dora is kneading bread on the counter, whistling a tuneless tune under her breath. Aunt Eleanor speaks in a soft twang a sentence that begins, “Well, you know—” and it’s something I never knew, it never occurred to me to know it. My father sits waiting for us to get in the car and head for Idaho to visit some people there. My father-in-law, Ray, is about to launch into a long and very detailed story about the cars that he has owned and how well they ran.
The Keillor Reader Page 2