I do dishes with my older sister. She sings a song we always sing together when we do dishes, but I don’t feel like singing it, so she sings it with my mother.
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the stars do shine.
Tell me why the sky’s so blue
And I will tell you why I love you.
Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue,
Because God made you, that’s why I love you.
I go to my room and fall face-down on the bed and wonder why God made my life so embarrassing. What I want most is to sing—to be a famous singer like Elvis or Ezio Pinza or George Beverly Shea and stand on stage with light all over me and open my mouth and out comes my magnificent voice and people get weak listening to it because my voice tells them that life is not miserable, it is impossibly beautiful, but instead I open my mouth and out come faint cries of ducks, awful sounds, a drone, a whine. My heart is full of feelings, but I can’t sing worth beans.
I make myself feel better, as I so often do, by putting a record on the phonograph and pretending I’m the singer. My Uncle Tommy, who attended the University of Minnesota and made something of himself, had sent me a souvenir record of “Minnesota, Hail to Thee,” sung by the University chorus and Mr. Roy Schuessler, baritone. I get out the record, and imagine that it is Memorial Day and sixty thousand people have come to Memorial Stadium to honor the dead and also to hear me, Roy Schuessler, and the chorus sing our state song. The governor is there, and mayors and ministers, and five thousand Boy Scouts in formation holding American flags; my family has driven down from Lake Wobegon for the occasion, and after I sing, we’ll go to a swank restaurant and have sirloin steak and french fries.
And now the moment has come. Sixty thousand people rise to their feet, the stadium is hushed, as I put the record on the phonograph and stand, head up, feet apart, at the foot of the bed, arms outstretched, facing the wall, facing the great wall of faces turned up toward me.
And as I mouth the words, “Thy sons and daughters true will proclaim thee near and far,” my mother walks in with an armload of laundry—she walks between me and the chorus to the dresser and puts socks in the top drawer. The governor, the sixty thousand fade away—the song goes on.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m practicing,” I say. “For choir.”
Miss Falconer’s portrait was painted by an art student at the University for $400, and from the looks of it, the two women did not hit it off. The artist seemed to have the same impression that we did: not only does the figure look stern, pointing a pencil viewerward, but her face is flushed and her eyes are ever so slightly crossed. There is a barely visible mustache.
It was unveiled at a school assembly on the last day of school, 1960, though Miss Falconer had already seen it and, though she couldn’t very well say so, she hated it. She hated it so much that when she looked at it, she looked exactly like it: ticked.
As a special surprise, we seniors stood and sang “Red River Valley,” which we had forgotten was not a favorite of hers. “Come and sit by my side if you love me, do not hasten to bid me adieu,” we sang sadly, with foreboding, and got on a bus and rode to St. Cloud and had a class dinner with the rest of our money, where we promised to keep in touch and be friends forever.
* Blue laws once frowned on Sunday labor, also loud recreation, unseemly dress, and any “deportment inconsistent with proper reverence,” and those laws still frown but do it in private, in the book of old ordinances, in a section unread for many years. Still, as recently as last summer, when Corinne Ingqvist, home for the weekend, walked four blocks to the lake in her red bathing suit, people who passed her going the other way, to church, felt that something was definitely not right. It bothered them. She is Pastor Ingqvist’s cousin, a slim connection, but it made for a disturbing note, a long red honk in the middle of a peaceful Sunday morning. They prayed that she would leave town, and on Monday she did.
* “Do we share our worldly goods? You betcha!
Do we care for all the sick and poor?
Are we kind and generous? I guess so!
Are we Christian gentlemen? Ja shur!”
—Sons of Knute Songbook, #42
REVIVAL
After a year at St. Cloud State, Johnny Tollefson came home something of a success, having notched a 3.2 grade average and published two poems in the literary magazine Cumulus (under the names J. Robert Tollefson and Ryan Tremaine), and promptly smashed the front end of his dad’s Fairlane on old Mrs. Mueller’s rock garden. It was a fine June afternoon and she was talking on the phone to Mrs. Magendanz about a woman whose house got robbed in St. Cloud in broad daylight, when she heard the screech, a couple loud thumps, the crunch of metal, and finally the hiss. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Somebody’s hit me!” she said. He had managed to take out her ornamental deer, a plywood Dutch windmill, and the martin house, and left two black ruts across the new sod. He didn’t damage the rock garden much, her son Earl having cemented it pretty good. The front of the car was mashed in back to the engine block, and the hood was sprung. Johnny sat with his hands still on the wheel, blood running down his chin. “Dear God in heaven!” she said. “I knew something like this was going to happen!” She braced one skinny arm against the car and put her other hand over her eyes. “Dear Jesus, I’m about to faint,” she whispered.
He shouldn’t have driven the car home after that. With the radiator smashed and the oil left behind on the grass, the engine overheated and then, seeing the idiot light flash red, he drove faster, thinking the wind would cool the engine off. So, beyond the damage to the front end, the valves had to be reground. It came to $350 all told.
“Byron,” his wife said when Mr. Tollefson got home. “By.” She held onto his arm, slowing him down, and then routed him into the kitchen and sat him in a chair. “Be patient,” she pleaded. “Don’t talk to him when you’re so angry.” But Byron couldn’t talk much, he was so disgusted. He skipped supper and went to Mrs. Mueller’s. Earl had stood the deer up and the martin house, but the windmill was totaled. And two nests of martin chicks were dead. That was the worst of it. “Mother is taking it pretty hard,” Earl said. Byron could see that by the fact she didn’t come out and offer him coffee. “She’s so nervous to start with, and then this—”
“I don’t know,” Byron said. “I just don’t know.”
Earl said, “Well, they all grow up eventually.”
“I don’t know.”
From his wife, Byron got the story that his son “didn’t see the curve” and it “happened so fast [he] couldn’t do anything,” which made no sense. The curve had been there since God was a boy. Was the kid drunk? What the hell?
That night, after hearing a speech he had heard on other occasions,* Johnny went up to his room, took out a yellow legal pad, and wrote:
The car swerved and ran off the road
Into the yellow flowers.
Some roads aren’t there.
He looked at his nose in the mirror. Dr. DeHaven said it was broken but not badly so he just put a piece of tape across it. It looked good with the tape, like a fighter’s, and Johnny hoped it would be a more distinguished nose with maybe a scar. His face was too childish. He wished he had a beard like W. Greg Hatczs. He had tried, but with his blond hair, what grew out didn’t make a big impression. W. Greg, on the other hand, had a huge multicolored beard, reds and browns and some whites. You looked at him, you thought, Writer.
W. Greg Hatczs was the author of Fragments of the Piece: A Dream Passage, which he had read a chapter of to Mr. Davenport’s creative writing class at St. Cloud during his week as a writer in residence. He was from Minneapolis. He wore a brown herringbone sportcoat and a gray turtleneck sweater and was as big as a desk. Johnny didn’t remember what the chapter was about, it didn’t have sentences and paragraphs as such, but he had liked the spirit of it and the boldness of
the writer, who made Mr. Davenport look like a dink.
Mr. Davenport, who gave Johnny’s story “Song of Larry” a C-minus, and at the part where Larry’s parents turn into plastic lawn chairs, Mr. Davenport wrote in the margin: “Where are we? Who is Devereaux DesChampes? Point of view? Unclear.” Obviously, W. Greg was operating under no such restrictions.
Naomi Swenson, who sat next to him in class and took good notes, had managed to write only one word in her spiral notebook: surrealistic. She seemed to be pretty much right about that. W. Greg was not big on structure; the chapter seemed to take place in a Greyhound bus depot where General Custer had gone to sleep off a hangover. Or it might not have been Custer, who knows? And when the writer came to the end, it was hard to tell that it was the end. Some students thought the silence was maybe part of the story, a blank page thrown in for contrast. Then he asked for questions.
The students looked at him thoughtfully for a long time, as if the chapter had made such a profound impression on them and had raised so many questions in their minds that it was hard to narrow them down to just one. Finally Naomi raised her hand. The author nodded.
“This may seem like a dumb question,” she said, “but where do you get your ideas?”
He smiled as if she had asked what was his favorite food. Dumb question, everyone thought. W. Greg lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke that filled the entire room.
“That’s not a dumb question, only an impossible one,” he said, and all of the A writers smiled at him in an understanding sort of way. “I suppose I could say that I get my ideas from writing,” he said, “but that begs the question, doesn’t it?”
Naomi turned red and bent over her notebook, pretending to study it (surrealism … surrealism … surrealism), shielding her face from the smirky looks the A writers gave her. Where do you get your ideas?!! Didn’t she know that a serious artist’s ideas come out of himself, out of his inner life and the struggle to realize his strange and absolutely inescapable gift, the dumb broad?
Her question struck John afterward as not dumb, not impossible, but certainly difficult. When Cumulus printed his poem “Death Dad,” he was so happy to see his name in print he sent a copy to his mother, who called him on the phone two days later and said she had never felt so humiliated in her life.
“Where did you get this?” she said. “We never talked like that! Our home isn’t like that at all! It’s so cynical! Where did you get those ideas? You certainly didn’t get them from us!”
He explained that the poem was metaphorical and that the dad in the poem, who wore blue pajamas and a red chenille robe (which Byron happened to wear), was purely fictional.
“It’s only a poem! It’s symbolic!” he said.
“Explain that to your father,” she said, and hung up.
To the serious artist in him, the question “Where do you get your ideas?” made writing seem ordinary and so prosaic, like a hobby (“Where do you get your Austrian first-issues?”), implying that maybe writers subscribe to an idea service, a newsletter called Lots o’ Plots, or maybe readers send in ideas (“Dear Mr. Roth: This may be a dumb idea but how about a novel in which a guy turns into a breast? It’s just an idea, thought I’d pass it along. Feel free to use it and fill in the details as you see fit. P.S. Love your stuff!”).
And yet—It stuck in his mind. His humanities prof, Marvin Voss, in “Hum 100: Undercurrents of American Thought,” talked about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, as if their ideas were simple reflections of their times, like so many iron filings arranged by powerful forces that they could not understand then although he did now.
When John looked at his own writing, he was disturbed by the thought that it came from Mr. Davenport, a fan of Nissan, a Zen master of the three-line zazu, whose tiny oblique poems Mr. Davenport recited in a thin, tremulous voice, hands upraised, wiggling his fingers. After hearing a few, John could sit in his room and write a dozen.*
This thought did not lead him to retire from the field of serious writing, however; it made him resolve to try even harder that summer. His work (as he referred to what he had written) was imitative because he had never forced himself to look deep enough within, so he would go back home and write things that came directly out of his own life and experience.
He sat at his blonded maple desk every night, trying to write better. His dad had bought the desk for him when he was eight. His legs were cramped in the well. The desk lamp, with Mickey and Goofy dancing on the base, was an old birthday gift. The shelves above the desk held old Landmark books, A Boy’s Life of Lindbergh, the Hardy Boys and the Christian adventures of the Minnehaha Creek Gang and the Flambeau Family,* along with his Paul Samuelson Econ text, Commager’s Living Ideas in America, the Our Living World from Bio 101 and Elements of Public Health, and Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought (abridged), which he had bought thinking that he, an American, might read it and find a current of his own. The bed was his boyhood bed, with a footboard that forced him to invent new sleeping positions, and under the bed was a peach crate full of old train track. A bullfight poster was tacked to one wall, a Leonards pennant to another.
It was hard going. He was nineteen years old, and his experience up to that point consisted of childhood, growing up and going to school, hanging around with friends, and spending a year in St. Cloud. Lake Wobegon was a lot like any small midwestern town. It had no Skid Row or bohemian section, where a writer could meet exotic, desperate, or vicious people and collect impressions and feelings to use in his stuff. Several in Mr. Davenport’s class had been to Europe and used it as a setting for poems such as “Paris: A Triptych” or “Fourth of July in Florence.” He had only been to Canada. Once. Barely.
He made a list of experiences he thought he should have in order to become a better writer. He left No. 1 blank, for fear his mother might see it. No. 2 was Europe; No. 3 was despair. In April, he had thought of writing to Naomi and suggesting they go to France together and kill two birds with one stone, but after five or six drafts, the letter still lacked clarity. Europe was a long way away. It looked as if he’d have to settle for No. 3. Maybe Mrs. Mueller’s rock garden was the beginning.
“Why do you stay in your room all the time?” his mother asked him one morning as he stood at the kitchen counter, spreading peanut butter on a hamburger bun.
“I’m not in my room now, am I?”
“No.”
“So then I don’t stay in my room all the time, do I?”
“Well, a lot of the time.”
“I sleep in my room. There’s a lot of time right there. You want me to sleep on the living room couch?”
“Oh, Johnny.”
One reason he stayed in his room was the sheer number of Oh, Johnnys he heard when he came downstairs, about one every two minutes, plus his dad’s Oh, for pete’s sakes, Good Lords, Grow ups, and I’m talking to yous. Nothing about him was right in their eyes, not his clothes, his hair, the food he fixed himself or the way he ate it, the way he sat in a chair or got up from a chair, the way he dried dishes or walked across a room or closed a door.*
He literally could say nothing that they agreed with, nothing. He had tried to come up with things at the dinner table: “I saw Mr. Berge today, he was so drunk he didn’t know where he was or why”—his dad had said that a hundred times, but when John said it, his dad told him to have a little pity, that if he (John) had been through half what Mr. Berge had been through, he might have a weakness, too. He said, “Uncle Jim is sure a hard worker.” His dad said, “What would you know about work? You wouldn’t know it if it came up and bit you.” He said, “I was thinking maybe I’d paint the shutters tomorrow.” His dad said, “I remember the last painting job you did, you got half-done and ran off and left the brushes sit in the paint can.”
If he was to say, “I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,” his dad would say, “A person sure wouldn’t know it to look at you.” Or he would say, “Don’t talk with your mouth full,”
or “It’s about time,” or maybe he would convert to Unitarianism on the spot (“The Trinity? Don’t be ridiculous!”).
“Dear Naomi,” he wrote one night. She lived in Sauk Center, where she was a carhop at a drive-in.
The summer is passing slowly here. I’m writing quite a bit, nothing worth mentioning. I’ve thought about starting a novel, but I hate to start something I don’t think would turn out to be good. I might join the Army in the fall or else just bum around. Right now, I’m too depressed to think about it. I hate to sound conceited but it’s hard to live under the same roof with people who have so little interest in ideas or even just conversation as my parents, especially my father. I think he must resent me for going to college, which he never did, because every time he opens his mouth, he tries to cut me down to size. Well, I don’t want to be his size. If I thought I’d be where he is in twenty years, I’d kill myself right now and get it over with. I don’t mean that we ought to sit and talk about poetry or anything (though that might be nice), I’d settle for one minute’s conversation in which he accepted that I’m not six years old. Instead he can’t look at me without coming down with both feet, and then of course the little kids pick it up—I asked my sister to please not come in my room without knocking and she said, “You’re not so smart.” Which is the general drift of conversation here: “Who do you think you are?” I don’t know, I’m trying to find out the only way I know how, and it’s hard enough to write without people constantly harping at you.
Well, enough about my problems. I hope you’re doing better. Call me sometime. It’d be nice to get together and talk to someone about something other than what a terrible person I am.
Writing quite a bit? He was writing a ton. Under the influence of Leaves of Grass, four months overdue at the college library, he found he could rapidly fill up whole pages of legal pad.
You say I’m not so smart and you’re right but
Lake Wobegon Days Page 37