23

Climbing Out of the Soup

I LIKED DENMARK, THE LOOSE elegance, the scrupulous honesty, the timely trains, the stout cheese, the hash they call biksemad, the fried herring, the streets of the beautiful city. I enjoyed hiking through Ørsteds Park and the great earthen walls of Kastellet to the Gefion Fountain with the immense bare-breasted goddess, her whip raised, lashing her oxen as water gushes up from the blade of her plow and sprays from their flared nostrils, and through the streets to Gråbrødretorv—the loveliest square in Copenhagen and the hardest to pronounce, with four separate r’s to swallow, and down to the sea to look at the lights of Sweden across the water. I loved the absence of chauvinism. Danes never said how proud they were to be Danish; they made fun of its insignificance, the guttural language, the high taxes. The sort of bombast required of an American politician—you couldn’t say those things in Danish. I liked the frankness of Danes. You could talk about death, God, sex, politics, how boring Denmark is, how thin the literature is, and the Dane is not offended. You can say anything you like so long as you do not speak badly of the Queen or comment on the peculiarity of her husband. Be an anarchist, if you wish. But even an anarchist must remember to send his mother-in-law a nice card on her birthday and attend her birthday lunch and arrive exactly at the designated time. I liked Ulla’s friends, serious people, well-read, who loved the back-andforth of conversation, give-and-take, no harangues, no monologues.

In this small country of seagoing people, children start learning English in the fourth grade along with their multiplication tables; everyone is bilingual, even tri- or quadri-, and English is their language for travel. So it makes little sense for an American of 45 to try to learn Danish. Nonetheless, I tried. We went to dinner at a Dane’s apartment, his shelves packed with American and British literature, and he said, “Shall we speak English?” and I said, “Nej, nej, vi er i Danmark, så skal vi taler dansk naturligvis.” I enjoyed the feel of Danish on the tongue, the musicality, the comfort of the many cognates: a table is bord, cup is kop and glass is glas, a knife is kniv (pronounced k-NEE-oo), so with English (Engelsk) under your belt (baelte) you’ve got a good start (starten). But the real reason was pride. I didn’t want to be an Ugly American so I became a Half-Witted One.

I took my elegant mother-in-law Elly out to lunch, champagne and oysters—“This is what Karen Blixen loved to eat,” she said. She told me about her train trip to Moscow in August 1939 with her lover Jacob, a sailor who had no interest in traveling for pleasure, but he consented to going overland to Russia and they traveled through peaceful countryside and arrived back in Denmark on September 1, the day Germany invaded Poland and the war broke out. She told me about Victor Borge, who played in a jazz club back then and how she danced with him a few nights before he fled to Amsterdam and then New York. She wept as she described the war years, the stringencies, the shame of the German occupation, her brother Harry active in the Danish Resistance helping to smuggle the Jews over to Sweden. Then she brightened up and showed me the picture of our wedding in the newspaper Aftenbladet, the smiling bride and groom standing in a garden. I didn’t tell her how unhappy the bride was only a few months into the marriage.

We came back to St. Paul to try to make a Danish Yule and we roasted a goose. We put it in the oven and put candles on our Christmas tree. I got the goose out of the oven in its glass baking dish and hot goose grease spilled on my wrist and I dropped the dish and it shattered, and the carcass skidded across the floor collecting cat hair, dust balls, and glass fragments. We scraped it clean as my family arrived. I opened an expensive white wine, which was too dry for them, and they stood holding their glasses politely as my stepson Morten lit the candles in the next room and when he came out, I threw open the door and there was the storybook tree, ten feet tall, candles burning on every bough, and my mother smothered a scream—her lifelong nightmare there before her eyes, what looked like a Christmas tree fire. We trooped around the tree, singing carols, Mother still quaking, and then we started to open gifts. My family was reluctant to open my gifts—they sensed lavishness, but they had to unwrap them, and indeed, everything was much too much, imported glassware, art work, exotic woolens, wondrous picture books, an atlas the size of a coffee table, and afterward the goose was greasy and the sweet potatoes overcooked and the pie was boughten pie from a bakery, and when finally my family extracted themselves and escaped into the night, I went upstairs and lay on the bed and wept. What I thought was generosity was bullying and boastfulness. Ulla wept because she missed Denmark. We lay in bed, grief-stricken, on the joyfullest day of the year, and after a while, I said, “Det kunne vaer vaerre (It could be worse).” And she said, “How?”

I took a break from the radio show in June 1987, flew back to Denmark for Midsummer’s Night and took the train to Svendborg, to our friends Ole and Hanne’s farm, and sat with thirty guests at two long tables in the garden behind their 300-year-old farmhouse looking down a slope of hay meadow toward the fjord. A festive three-hour dinner of shrimp and salmon and salad and lamb and seven songs and six speeches. The lady next to me said, “Skal vi taler Engelsk?”—Nej, nej, I said, but it turned out she was a Brit, a Cambridge grad, the author of a monograph on Milton, and so we spoke English, and made fun of what obsessive planners Danes are, their lives locked into itineraries and agendas. And the after-dinner speeches that night. Very clever, well-crafted, and rather lacking in feeling. She agreed: “It’s a nation of dentists. Everything clean and well-done. No poetry.” She leaned toward me and spoke softly: “Their dirty little secret is how well they got along with the Nazi occupation. They like to talk about how they helped the Jews escape to Sweden, but they leave out the fact that the German commandant told them when the Jews would be rounded up. So the Danes took the Jews across the Storbaelt to Malmo. Big deal. You didn’t see a Danish Resistance like the French. Basically, they put salt in the Germans’ pepper shakers. It was a very comfortable occupation.” We all strolled down to the shore where Ole lit the bonfire and the children came bearing the effigy of a witch on a broom, a black dress stuffed with straw, and threw her on the fire as we sang hymns to Denmark and St. Hans. In the dark, you could see bonfires along the shore for miles. At 2 a.m., we adjourned to the house for coffee and cake. A Dane tried to engage me in a discussion of the American bombing of Vietnam and I told him, politely, to go fuck himself.

I was working on a novel, Love Me, in which I was the New Yorker writer Larry Wyler, whom Mr. William Shawn fires after Wyler’s piece on backpacking in Alaska (“Our Far-flung Correspondents: Humping the Chilkoot Pass”) is found to contain dozens of sexual euphemisms (“parallel parking,” “the man in the stocking cap rowing the boat,” “warming the bratwurst”) that escaped the eyes of the fact-checkers. I sat in the maid’s room, laughing at my own wit, and when Ulla looked in, I read her the passage and she didn’t think it was funny. A problem a man doesn’t anticipate when he marries into another language. It made me miserable to not be funny at home. We lived in a magnificent apartment, but I was out of place in Denmark. I missed Lake Wobegon. I missed baseball. I do not consider soccer an organized sport; it is only recreational milling. I can manage herring, but I don’t eat fried eel. I missed English in which you know dollars from doughnuts, open and shut, rain or shine. I attended a little Anglican church, and one Sunday when the opening hymn was “All hail the power of Jesus’ name, let angels prostrate fall,” I got teary-eyed.

We decided to get away and talk, so we rented a stone cottage on a hill on the island of Patmos and spent a month there, reading, biking, lying on the beach, eating in little cafés in town. The month was supposed to draw us together, and it only made us uneasy together. It was a waste of time, two people trying to have a vacation and not face up to the obvious. It is not possible to talk another person out of their unhappiness. She had been lonely before she met me, and now she missed her loneliness. We were impersonating a marriage. One night we had dinner with her father, Jacob, the sailor who had seen the world but always from the same ship, a joyful man who made everyone around him happy, Jacob with whom Elly had taken the lovely train trip to Russia, arriving back home the day Germany invaded Poland. Elly conceived Ulla by him and left him soon after for an optician, Otto. In Jacob, I was sure I saw the man Ulla wished I were, not the diligent farmer of comedy, haunted by Brethren ghosts, but a man who loved to laugh. She was his long-lost daughter, kept from him for almost thirty years, and the sight of her made him very happy. I loved Jacob. Other Danes might be rule-bound, punctilious, but he overflowed with kindness and good humor. There was no language barrier, language didn’t matter, when Jacob laughed we all laughed with him. And between dinner and dessert, he thought of a song and sang it and jumped up and took Ulla in his arms and danced her around the table and she was delighted. She got a look of transport on her face. Sheer happiness. My wife who’d been so disheartened in Minnesota, all she needed was a dance, some lightness and gaiety.

I decided to be frank and admit that the marriage made no sense and had nowhere to go but down. She and I were a contradiction. I was a provincial from Anoka, an earnest striver from the potato fields who flew away to an exorbitant fairy tale to discover that he is not a sailor, not a dancer, he is a patient assembler of sentences, a repairer of paragraphs, capable of an obit, a limerick, a radio sketch, but unable to delight my wife. Money led me astray and now I must give up my illusions and resume my life. One day I packed a suitcase and called a taxi to take me to Kastrup Airport. I carried my suitcase out the ornate front entrance on Trondhjemsgade and did not look back. I felt no hesitation. I boarded a flight to New York and walked into the terminal at JFK and was delighted. I could overhear dozens of conversations at once—I didn’t need to study someone’s mouth in order to grasp what they were saying—I was surrounded by symphonic English and could hear every instrument.

My great experiment was over, the attempt to become bilingual, European, tolerant, community-minded, secular, egalitarian, rule-following, turn-waiting, a lover of order, and I went back to being my own confused and disorderly self. And New York was the right place to land. Minnesota is my home and family, and New York is colleagues and fellow travelers. I saw it with my dad when I was eleven and then when I was twenty-four and looking for a job. When Malene enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, Ulla and I had bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, and that’s what I came back to—she got the majestic Treaty of Ghent flat on Trondhjemsgade, and I took a cab to my building and up the elevator to the apartment and out on the terrace that looked out over the roofs of brownstones like the deck of a ship anchored in the city, a sea of lights below, cliffs of lighted facades around.

High in the tower above the terrace, Sinclair Lewis had lived in his last years before he went to Italy to die in 1951. I read Main Street and Babbitt when I was in seventh grade because he was a Minnesota writer and I wanted to be one, too. He fell out of favor, crushed under the weight of a Nobel Prize and his own alcoholism and irascibility, and sat in his tower, awaiting death, aware that he’d been eclipsed by Mailer and Bellow and a new generation and that his own ambition had led him to write a stream of potboilers as his star sank lower and lower. His presence up above was a cautionary reminder: Your time is short, your successors are waiting in the wings, you’re not invincible, so be sensible, and above all, avoid winning prizes.

I stood on the terrace and I called Bill Kling and told him my sabbatical was done. Ulla remained in Copenhagen. Each of us had a fax machine, and some days we’d exchange twenty letters across the Atlantic, accusing, pleading, protesting our love, alternately sentimental and bitter, hopeless, grieving, until there was simply nothing more to say. We were a wonderful romance but we never got to be friends.

The sabbatical from the show wasn’t a real one: we’d been doing Farewell Shows steadily, even a Farewell Tour, kept saying goodbye until I came back in 1989. But it accomplished what a sabbatical is meant to do: it gave me a break from business and a chance to be a nobody again. The show had burst into phenomenal success in 1985 and landed me in the craziness of fame that America bestows now and then, like a typhoon, flattering offers and invitations, requests for interviews that promise to be flattering, everybody admires you, there is no bad news anywhere, people want you to write something about anything at all, sign your name, answer questions, endorse something—it was unreal and had nothing to do with me. I still thought now and then of the FBI knocking on the door and asking if I was the Gary E. Keillor who failed to report for induction, and I thought how quickly all of this admiration would dry up when the news came out, Prairie Home Host Indicted for Draft Dodging. Nobody would speak my name kindly in public again, I’d be in the paper, head down, handcuffed, on the steps of the federal courthouse, a common criminal.

Denmark was a break from all that. The deck was cleared. I resumed the show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the name The American Radio Company with New York actors and a sixteen-piece band, The Coffee Club Orchestra, led by Rob Fisher, a botanist from Norfolk who, America being the land where people can change their minds, became a Broadway conductor (Chicago, Wonderful Town, Anything Goes, An American in Paris), and we nabbed him in between engagements. He loved that band, designed to play rags, stomps, swing, boogie, B’way, bop, himself bouncing at the keyboard.

We hired a St. Paulite working at the Academy of Music, Christine Tschida, as our producer, who brought her showbiz fervor (she was a tap dancer) to radio. She had several qualities that I lack: one was business sense and another was glee—when she saw a performance she loved, she jumped up and down. And she had gumption. I am unable to bring myself to ask a favor of a stranger. She didn’t hesitate. She got Allen Gins-berg to come and read from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” He was uneasy about whether I’d be interviewing him, relieved when she said, “No, it’s only the Whitman and you choose the passages.” She talked the New York Public Library into allowing a live broadcast from the Rose Reading Room, the audience sitting at long oak tables with study lamps. A historic first for the library, a day’s work for her. A doo-wop group sang “Book of Love,” Dave Barry sang “Proofreading Woman,” and we did a version of “John Henry” in which he’s a writer and is challenged to race against a steam-powered computer.

Once, a few days before Christmas, I thought I’d like to close down West 43rd Street so the audience could stand in the street and sing “Silent Night.” The NYPD was slightly incredulous when she called them—“Close what? When? Is this a joke?”—but she got them to send over six cops and they closed two lanes and a thousand people stood and sang “Silent Night.” I still run into people who were there, and they get choked up remembering it, singing Radiant beams from Thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace and looking west toward Times Square. They recalled that snow was falling. There was no snow, it was too warm. But in their memory it was snowing. In my memory, it is a beautiful three minutes of pure childlike sincerity a block away from Yowza Yowza USA. It was moving.

I created the private eye Guy Noir, muttering out of the corner of his mouth in Brooklynese, complaining about the landlord and other lowlifes, dealing with Mafiosi, gun molls, con men, shysters, chantoozies, footloose dance-hall tootsies, bozos, bimbos, demented duchesses, tycoons, Lutheran galoots, whatever. Walter Bobbie played Pete, who walked into Guy’s office and they got into an argument over some triviality such as “Was it Sal Maglie or Tom Magliozzi who lost Game 5 of the 1956 Series to the Yankees, Don Larsen’s perfect game?” and they shot each other and died after an extended death scene during which the argument continued.

Guy was anti-Midwest: he minced no words, tolerated no fools unless they were paying clients. He paced his office in the Acme Building, hoping to foil the insidious schemes of the Bogus Brothers (XXX-Large, solid muscle, legs like tree stumps, shaved heads, eyebrows the size of fruit bats, scar tissue from breaking down doors with their foreheads . . . they were known for knocking off irksome guys and making them part of construction projects) and the poet-turned-con man Larry B. Larry, a convicted plagiarist who liked to leave a poem at the scene of the crime, his calling card.

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have taken the body

that was in the icebox

and which you were

probably saving for evidence.

Forgive me it smelled bad

So pale and so cold.

Every week, the urban misterioso theme song, a smoky-voiced woman sang, “He’s smooth and he’s cool and quick with a gun, a master in the boudoir. A guy in a trench coat who gets the job done. Guy . . . Guy Noir.” It was one of those grim January days when the sun sets around five and people go around bundled up so you can’t tell men from women and when it’s this cold it doesn’t even matter—gender is no more important than shoe size. Your face won’t smile, your heart is a lump of anthracite, your manhood has shrunk to the size of a peanut. This is why October birthdays are so rare.

Walter Bobbie also played my mom. You have such a lovely voice, Honey. You sound so professional. It’s a shame you can’t find a job. A twohour show on Saturdays—I don’t call that a job. The problem is: you sound so Minnesota. It’s that long O. People hear you talk and they know you were raised on meatloaf and potatoes and your best friend was a Leghorn chicken. Otherwise, you’d have an office with a big walnut credenza and a secretary named Megan. Walter could do it all, hitman, Mom, the prophet Jeremiah, he sang a walloping “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and he sang, from his childhood, a Polish carol, “Gdy się Chrystus rodzi, I na świat przychodzi,” that made us all misty-eyed.

And then the world turned and Walter directed the musical Chicago on Broadway, which ran for years and bumped Walter into a higher tax bracket, but if I met him today outside of Gray’s Papaya on 72nd, he’d be the same Walter and give me the same big grin, and that’s a sweet thing about New York. Underneath the churn of business, friendship is what counts. I still see Rob Fisher once in a blue moon, the most positive man in show business, and it’s like old times. Our old violinist Andy Stein, who played swing with a little megaphone wired to his fiddle, is the same free spirit he always was.

I got back to New York as Mr. Shawn was leaving The New Yorker and I had lunch with him at the Oak Room. I had a hamburger and fries, he had dry toast and a cup of hot water. It was an awkward lunch, since we weren’t friends and he wasn’t an editor anymore, so what was the point? It was to thank him for what he did for my life by publishing the story in 1974 about the Grand Ole Opry. No doubt about it, the prestige of the magazine was what got me the chance to do A Prairie Home Companion on hyper-status-conscious public radio and gave me decades of pleasure. But he was having none of it. He said, “I take no credit for that. That was Mr. Whitworth’s story.” Closed subject. I tried to be cheery and suggested he start on a memoir. He said, “I wouldn’t know how to begin writing about myself. I’m not a showman like you,” and he said “showman” with no admiration intended. I asked him about Liebling, and that cheered him up. “Joe was the exception,” he said. “He enjoyed his own work. You could hear him laughing down the hall in his office. He’d take the paper out of the typewriter and look for someone to read it to.”

“So he was a showman then.”

“You could say that,” said Mr. Shawn.

“I could write your memoir—‘as told to me,’ ” I said. He said he wouldn’t care to read it, so why would anyone else?

“You lived a life that nobody will ever live again. You edited a magazine that was loved like no other. You were responsible for publishing ‘In Cold Blood’ and Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Silent Spring’ and Edmund Wilson’s stuff on the Dead Sea scrolls—” He interrupted me: “Any editor who saw those manuscripts would’ve published them.” It dawned on me that Shawn didn’t know about the adoration of thousands of small-town Midwesterners like me who pored over the magazine every week, their badge of membership, proof that they were not provincials. He, the captain, had been so engrossed in his work, he was ignorant of its import and reach. He was the isolated provincial, not us. I picked up the check. There had been plenty of books about the magazine and he declined to add another to the pile.

Roger Angell wangled me an office at The New Yorker, and I rode the B train to work, standing in the front of the first car as we came through the tunnel, past rows of beams, the sharp curve below 59th to the Seventh Avenue station and then down Sixth Avenue to 42nd. I wrote unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, the gray matter around the cartoons, the real stars of the magazine. I’d been writing for The New Yorker since I was fourteen, though they weren’t aware of it at the time, so I knew the breezy tone of “Talk” and loved the anonymity, writing about the statuary at Woodlawn Cemetery, the different styles of pedestrians jumping over large puddles, National Frozen Food Month, restlessness, the meaning of life in Midtown, whatever came to mind. I was befriended by Mark Singer and Ian Frazier, Calvin Trillin, and the legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould, who, as her eyesight dimmed, had become a fan of my radio show.

I liked to write in the Rose Reading Room at the Public Library and eat lunch in Bryant Park among plantings of tulips and irises, beside a plane of lush grass, looking around at a box canyon of handsome buildings, my face turned up to the sun. I ate egg salad sandwiches with Veronica Geng there, and she and I planned a performance for an Authors Guild dinner, an exchange of love letters between S. J. Perelman and Flannery O’Connor that we had written. Perelman was easy, I just used a thesaurus, but her O’Connor was a piece of genius.

I’m only a tourist in New York, and I’m dazzled by the knowingness, the competence, the pride of waiters who take waiting seriously, cabdrivers who study the city. I admired the editing to be found at The New Yorker, diligent people balancing clarity and comedy and idiom, Mr. Shawn’s penciled comments in the margins of galley proofs gently suggesting “among” replace “between” since there were three people involved, writing, “Isn’t this too confusing even if the confusion is intentional?” I love the fact that, on any given night in New York, you might go to a show that knocks your socks off—maybe A View from the Bridge at the Met or Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks at a little club in Midtown or Sweeney Todd with Patti LuPone strutting on stage and playing the tuba or Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, and as you get older and your socks get tighter, this is more and more exciting. You hear the Berlin Philharmonic play Brahms at Carnegie and you head for the subway, walking on air. You descend into the station packed with people and feel relieved that some of the job of waiting has been done by others—and along comes the train. You sandwich yourself into the crowd, avoiding eye contact, reading the ads for teeth whitener and bunion removal, and feel united with humanity.

It was good to be back with work to do, maneuvering in English. I started a novel about a radio station in Minneapolis, WLT, with a crippled songstress, Lily Dale, and a radio preacher, the Rev. Irving James Knox, and a gospel quartet, the Shepherd Boys, who liked to light the newscaster’s script on fire. I was back where I belonged. I assembled a collection of stories, We Are Still Married, which was published as the divorce from Ulla went through.

The marriage to Denmark started to feel like a beautiful piece of foolishness, a necessary mistake. It brought a bountiful benefit: a daughter, Malene, who managed very well to love two antagonists, as only a Dane can; it is a nation of amiable mediators. She was happy at Bryn Mawr College, and one spring she went to LA with me to interview Ronald Reagan for the Times. The editor made it clear that I was to be humorous at the old man’s expense. When we saw Mr. Reagan at his office in Century City, a shadowy version of himself, with a young woman minder to prompt him, it put a whole different light on things. He was not himself. And then my daughter, a fan of 1940s Hollywood, asked about the Warner Brothers Studio days, and the old man’s eyes lit up. She mentioned her favorite movies, and they all starred old pals of his. He was delighted that a college girl liked the old Hollywood. It was a sweet afternoon: I came with cruel intention and she made an old man happy who needed that. I never wrote the story and the Times never asked me to write again. Malene went off to London and there, having dinner with the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine, she met Peter Sheppard, a violinist, and he became my son-in-law and they produced Marius, a grandson. So it was an unhappy marriage with an extravagant bonus. They settled in London, so now I have a reason to go there and a guide who knows all the Wren churches and aspects of English history omitted from history books, such as the square where his ancestor the famous highwayman Jack Sheppard was hanged in 1724 before a crowd of 200,000.

And in due course, I happened to find my own life, which was a short walk away, up on 102nd Street.