14
Newspapering
MY SOPHOMORE YEAR WAS A lost year. I enrolled in English Lit courses, Shakespeare and Eighteenth Century and Milton, and grew a beard for the scholarly look, and published a few abstruse (obtuse? refuse?) poems in the Ivory Tower, but I was lackadaisical, indifferent, lost in class, having skimmed the text lightly if at all. I sat under the gentle drizzle of learned lectures and wrote term papers stringing together critical monkey talk, but nothing took, nothing interested me. I drifted along, learning nothing until I took a course in journalism taught by Robert Lindsay, a former Marine with a big dent in the top of his head. (Oddly, none of us journalists ever asked him how he got that dent. We sat and studied it and formed theories but never sought the facts.) He cared about facts and not so much about fancy writing. He circled it in red: “Too lit’ry.” Mr. Lindsay was gruff but good-hearted—his motto, Endure. Hang in.—and he was a good teacher. The difference between him and English Lit teachers was that they spoke to impress and he to engage. They spoke to the ghost of a long-ago mentor and he met us on the ground where we stood. On the first day of class, he announced a simple rule: one misspelling in a written assignment and you got an F, regardless of literary merit. We rolled our eyes at the unfairness of it, but he was serious. As a Marine, he believed that pain could change minds. Once you wrote an assignment for him and got a big red F, you paid closer attention to your work and saw up close what was on the page, word by word. We students had plenty of attitude, but he gave us a competence: after Lindsay’s class, you were a copyreader for the rest of your life on earth. You looked at your manuscript and the mistakes flickered like fireflies. A good writerly habit, pay attention, from which other good habits may derive.
One day I saw a notice on the J-School bulletin board for a temporary job at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and drove over to St. Paul and was hired as a reporter and dropped out of school. It was a morning paper, so I worked 3 p.m. to midnight in the city room, the big presses rumbling down below, and reported to the city editor, Walt Streightiff, sitting at the head of the horseshoe desk facing the copy editors and rewrite men to his left and right. He was a bulldog of a man, bald, starched white shirt with sleeves rolled up, suspenders, a bark that could be heard fifty feet away. He put me to work writing obituaries. It was a classic newsroom: reporters’ desks piled high with papers around black Royal typewriters, clouds of smoke in the air. Everyone smoked more or less steadily. Don Del Fiacco did human interest, Nate Bomberg had the police beat, Don Giese covered major crime, Don Riley did sports. I was in charge of death.
I felt useful, picking up the phone, talking to a widow. Her man had died, and she wanted the world to pay attention. She had a story to tell about his knowledge of local history or his love of Scouting or fishing, his carpentry and the fact that he made her happy for fifty-some years. The man had his merits.
Mr. Streightiff liked his obituaries straight and simple, four graphs— name and address and DOD, church and club memberships, survivors, and funeral arrangements. “We can’t get into feelings and how much someone was loved, otherwise it turns into a contest. Just bury the stiffs and leave the eulogy to the priest,” he said, but I tried to add personal detail, as told to me over the phone—the man who, until he was seventy, swam across White Bear Lake every summer, the woman who could speak the alphabet backward quickly and perfectly, the man with the enormous model-train layout in his basement, the woman whose peach pie was envied by others. Some of these Mr. Streightiff sniffed at but tolerated; others he crossed out. “Every woman in St. Paul has a pie recipe,” he said. “If we start putting recipes in obits, there’ll be no end to it.” That was fifty-five years ago and he was in his fifties and a chain-smoker, so I suppose he is gone now. If I were writing his obit, I’d mention the stiffness of his starched white shirt and how he picked up a phone and said, “YEAH?” into it: Mr. Heaberlin, the press foreman in the basement, a copyboy, Mrs. Streightiff, every caller was equal. The “YEAH” was to discourage small talk and it did. Disaster, crime, government and politics were our principal crops, followed by sports and weather. Opinion was not his province. He was loud but not a bully; he didn’t play favorites, he paid no compliments because he didn’t look back at yesterday. He was in charge of weights and measures, what goes at the top of page one, what goes back by the want ads.
My hero was Irv Letofsky, who covered politics. He was from Fargo, had a beautiful smile, a knack for putting people at ease. Now and then he and I had supper at the Lowry Hotel. He wrote satiric sketches for the Brave New Workshop nightclub in Minneapolis and had a reporter’s innate contempt for big muckety-mucks. He said, “Politicians are all desperate to be loved, and the worst are Democrats because they pretend to care about the common man. Republicans don’t pretend.” He said, “Liberals get it wrong over and over. Joe McCarthy was a blowhard but he was small potatoes. Eisenhower was not a dolt and Stevenson was no giant. He had the luxury of high-minded talk because he knew he was going to lose.” He said this over a steak dinner at the Lowry and then he said, “You wouldn’t happen to have twenty bucks, would you? I left my wallet at the office.” I reached into my pocket and he said, “Just testing. Good to know who I can count on.” He gave me a big grin. He was the coolest guy at the paper, and I followed him around like a puppy dog. Years later, when I was a best-selling author, and the editors of the Los Angeles Times invited me to lunch, there was Irv, grinning at me—he was their entertainment editor—and he leaned over and said, “I knew you when you were just white trash. It’s great that the publisher invited you to lunch but don’t shit in your pants.” It was a Fargo guy’s way of making me feel at home.
As the death correspondent, I called up hospitals to find out if the victims of car crashes had perished or not, so I could update the highway death toll. In my spare time, I was sent to interview minor celebrities: a classical pianist, a sportscaster, Robert Frost’s daughter, nobody really big came to St. Paul. Irv referred to the celeb beat as “the garbage run,” but I liked it, the slight brush with minor greatness. I asked if I could go out on a fire or cover a murder trial—“We haven’t had a good murder in years, and anyway that’s Giese’s department,” Mr. Streightiff said. I was offered a slot in the copy desk doing rewrite, but one look at the pallid faces in the smoky haze of the horseshoe told me all I needed to know about rewrite—it was a cemetery—so I left.
The pleasure of newspapering moved me to disappoint my aunts and leave the Brethren, a simple matter of preferring a wide-ranging life to strict adherence to the letter of doctrine. God gave us eyes and the men around me watched each other closely to make sure their blinders were tight. My brother Philip left for a nondenominational Christian fellowship, my sister Judy married a Baptist, eventually the three youngers would depart as well. Our Assembly had lost its spirit in the division of 1947, we were a militant remnant clinging to a life raft and it made sense to float free, and swim. There was a hospitable shore not far away, trees, gardens, friendly strangers.
The Brethren was a great education however. It said that the material world is not All, that human institutions are susceptible to severe moral judgment, and that one day the mighty will be brought low and the low exalted. It was like a superhero comic except you knew it was true. And Brethren exclusivity stuck with me, a rich inheritance, the gift of scorn. You get attached to the wrong things, and it wastes whole parts of your life unless you can break away without remorse. Thanks to a Brethren upbringing, I could quit jobs, some of them cushy, and walk away from two marriages and several romances, drop burdensome friends. When I heard that Tina Brown would be taking over The New Yorker, I packed up my office and got in a cab and went home.
I am an Escape Artist; avoidance is my specialty. I quit smoking and put away alcohol and gave up writing incoherent poetry that sits on shelves and is never read. An artist needs to believe in God, whether he can say the Lord’s Name or not. There is no art without Someone who looks at your work and says, It is not goo
d enough, not even close. Other people tell you you’re a genius, but He knows better and you must pay attention to Him whether you call Him Jehovah or George. And a writer needs arrogance to get him through the scrappy years until he acquires a name and can afford to be humble. I acquired arrogance as a child, reading the Brethren prophet J. N. Darby and looking at Brother Booth’s Chart of Time from Eternity to Eternity, a map of the dispensations of human history from the Garden of Eden to the Judgment Throne and the Lake of Fire, which gave me the feeling that I was in possession of the secrets of the universe. It was a wonderful feeling. I couldn’t change a carburetor or build a stone wall or raise tomatoes, but I knew the mind of God. This is pridefulness, a powerful liquor. Other writers were assailed by self-doubt. Not me. Not even now.
15
The Guntzels
O maiden, young maiden, I worry for you.
To marry a writer, you should not do.
He will put on a suit and kneel down in church
But for him marriage is only research.
He will write a novel that’s set in your home
And all your best lines he’ll take for his own.
I MET MARY GUNTZEL AT the Guntzel family cabin on Cross Lake the summer after I quit the paper. I was twenty and living at home that spring, writing poems and dark allegories and was in emotional turmoil over my place in the world, if there was such a thing and whether I was a writer or a bus driver with pretensions, and for solace I walked every evening over to Corinne’s house and sat on the porch with Helen and poured out my heart for an hour or two and she listened. She invited me to spend a couple weeks at the lake with her and Hilmar and Corinne, and of course I said yes. Corinne’s boyfriend, Leeds Cutter, had died in February in the horrible car crash and I had visited her several times at Carleton College, where she was practicing stoicism but in deep mourning. Leeds was on a clear track and meant for great things in the world, we knew that, but we didn’t talk about him, anything you could say was a cliché, it was all so much beyond words. We listened to Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique on a turntable in her dorm room. She was reading Rilke and found comfort in German and tried to translate for me—“It’s impossible,” she said, “like trying to describe stones.” She and Leeds had been necking in his car in her parents’ driveway and her dad discovered them and forbade them to see each other for a few months, and their courtship became more passionate by telephone and letter. He and she talked about marriage, making a family, and buying a farm. He sent her a lamb as a birthday gift. A beautiful plan was forming in the near distance and then the phone rang and she went to the hospital where he died.
I wrote her long letters that spring—“When the burden of life’s problems can no longer be borne, I escape into the healing darkness of a rainy night—rain pelts my face, rivulets of water run down my cheeks, mingled with my tears”—that sort of letter. Once I asked her straight out: “What do you think will become of me? I am twenty. I need to do something that shows direction and purpose. I drifted into the U, into radio . . . then to the newspaper. Now I need to get serious.” Corinne wrote back that she was no judge of my writing but that she did like the poem I sent her.
Come to me in your dark green dress,
Open your arms, be impetuous.
Rest awhile. Let peacefulness
Immerse you as our fingers touch
Nobody’s hand on the steering wheel,
Nobody’s feet on brake or clutch,
Each one following what we feel.
A love poem. I wrote it for her but didn’t say so. Nowhere in the raindrop-spattered letters did I ever say, “I am in love with you, Corinne.” She was in mourning and I was in distress and kept my distance, but I loved her family and went north to Cross Lake. Corinne’s cousin Mary was there with her parents, Marjorie and Gene. It was a simple one-room frame cabin built by Hilmer and his dad, Hugo, back in the Twenties, four double bunkbeds separated by canvas curtains strung on wires, a back door leading out to the outhouse, an old yellow kitchen table and wood stove in the middle, a refrigerator and stove and sink on one side, wicker chairs, a flowery green linoleum floor, a screened front porch looking at the great blue lake, a swinging couch on the porch, a hammock in the trees, a dock down below. A breeze blew through the cabin, from screened porch in front to screen door in rear, and we seven sat around the old yellow kitchen table and played Hearts, each with our drinks, Marj and her Rob Roy, Gene and his Manhattan, Hilmer with a bourbon and soda, and the rest of us drinking white wine. Smatterings of conversation. Whoever held the queen of spades tried to hold her till the dramatic last moment, then lay her down in a trick taken by whoever was ahead.
The Guntzel family was my first look at adult life in which grown children and their parents are free to be themselves in each other’s company. The younger can think aloud and not be dismissed and the elder are offered due respect. This easy tolerance was unknown in Brethrendom, where your doctrinal shoelaces had to be tied properly and the bows knotted. The cabin was very chummy. I loved that. Corinne the socialist declaiming against corporate greed to her father the Republican plumber, afternoons swimming off the dock, card games and Scrabble, drinks on the porch, family gossip, world affairs, curling up with books, and Mary, a piano major at the University, very shy, lying on an upper bunk observing the rest of us from above. Hardly a word passed between her and me, but I called her a few weeks later and asked her to a movie.
Corinne told me to do it: “You should call Mary. I think she’s in love with you.” So I did. We went to a jazz concert and a week later to an organ recital. We were two awkward outsiders with many inexpressible feelings about music and poetry. She told me she’d gone on a date once and the boy had tried to take her blouse off and she’d jumped out of the car and walked two miles home. I was twenty and had never dated. I admired girls, I loved their company, I couldn’t imagine one being attracted to my hangdog face and long silences. Mary was the first girl to show serious interest in me. Naturally, I was stunned.
We went to the movie Splendor in the Grass, and afterward, in the parking lot, discussing Natalie Wood who declined to have sex with Warren Beatty and thereby wound up in a mental ward, Mary said, “When are we going to make love?” There it was, on the third date. A card laid on the table. I said something wordless, like Mmmmmm. I was a twentyyear-old virgin and I decided not to become a twenty-one-year-old one. A week later, we went to dinner and afterward to her apartment, and her roommate took one look at us and decided to go study at the library and we sat in the dark and necked. A few weeks later, my brother Philip asked me to babysit his little kids while he and Ann-Britt visited friends in Duluth overnight. He said to bring Mary if I wished. She was eager to come. The children went to bed early. She led me into the guest bedroom. I had never been naked with a woman before. I was astonished at how easy it was. So simple, my body knew what to do. I withdrew at the crucial moment—how did I know to do this?—and seed gushed out of me and she laughed to see it. If she’d been disgusted, everything would be different. Life is full of these small but crucial intersections. I had done as she wished me to do.
I think she saw romance as a simple transaction, like what her parents had accomplished, two odd individuals forming a gentle pact to be partners and make a life with its own limits and comforts. Gene was a premature baby, not expected to live. His mother swabbed him with oil and set him in a cigar box on an open oven door at low heat and he survived. He grew up shrimpy, unathletic, injury-prone. Marjorie was a North Dakota farm girl in the Dirty Thirties, her father a dedicated drinker, her brother likewise. Money was scarce; the mother had to fight for the money to put food on the table. When the dust blew, it sifted through the cracks and covered the furniture. Marj had no sweet memories of childhood. She and Gene made a gracious and pleasant home with good china, wall-towall carpeting, tasteful furniture, pictures on the walls, a piano, and she was a good cook, standing over the stove, stirring gravy, a Winston in one hand, a drink in the other,
keeping an ear out for the conversation in the living room. She had a kind face, a boisterous laugh, and if Mary sat down at the piano and played Chopin, Marj was transported by the loveliness of the home she had created, it brought tears to her eyes, the clean house, the smell of chicken and gravy, the Chopin, and I meshed into the picture as the boyfriend. She escaped from the Dust Bowl through gracious living. I saw this. She had banished the dust, the drunken men, the Depression by her hard work and her good taste, and her buoyant hospitality. As a writer, I felt obliged to scorn suburbia but that ended at Marj’s doorstep: I was welcome in her home and I admired her spirit.
Having grown up among alcoholics, Marj dreaded harsh words and bad feelings. She ran a tight ship, a contradiction of my dark sophomoric writing: the ball game on TV, sound off. A relish tray on the coffee table. Each of us holding a drink, a smoke. It was very convivial, miles away from the rigid conventions of Brethren table talk. A classic mid-dle-class suburban Sunday held together by the good-natured matriarch, a Republican Methodist reader of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and I enjoyed their company even as their style was what I’d set out to avoid. I was a junior at the U, an editor at the Ivory Tower, trying to be talented, hanging out with artists who used the word “bourgeois” for everything shallow and insipid, and I liked Marj and Gene, bourgeois though they were, more than what I’d seen of bohemian life, the squalor and carelessness and self-infatuation of hippie friends. Eventually, I put Marj into the Lake Wobegon saga as the unflappable Marjorie Krebsbach, and she liked that. She wrote me a kind letter thanking me for “immortalizing” her, a few years after Mary and I broke up.
That Time of Year Page 13