19

FITZGERALD

I was losing track of time, being away from my big city life. “Is it May or June?” I asked Betty.

“June,” she said. “Late June.”

“It feels like August. I’ve lost all sense of time. I feel like my mother’s going to walk in and say, ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. We’re supposed to be at gospel meeting in half an hour, get a clean shirt on.’”

“It happens in June, around the solstice. Agelessness. I read a book about it.”

“I feel lost and adrift. Have you been feeding me cheese?”

“Never. What happened to Hilmar Bakken?” she said.

He killed his dogs and took the money and bought a little condo in Seattle. He thought he was dying, and he didn’t want to die in Minnesota where people’d feel sorry for him and when he got to Seattle he felt much improved and decided he wanted to go to sea. He went to a doctor for the first time in his life and found out he had prostate trouble, and a surgeon lasered out a chunk of it and they gave him a DNA test and found out he’s only about 41 percent Norwegian with some Celt and Anglo and about one-third Spanish and that completely clarified his thinking. He’d felt Spanish and now he had an excuse to go all the way. He dyed his hair black and wore it in a slight ponytail and grew a black mustache. He went on cruise after cruise, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Baltic, Atlantic, everywhere but Norway, his spirit lightened, he became a charmer, wore ornamental shirts with silver studs, learned dialogue from romance novels he found around the ship: I love being at sea, every day like the one before except better. Life is a backward glance, a wave, and then off to what’s new. I never knew my father. So I set out to be who I wished he had been. When asked, he was Rhode Island–born and had made a career in the submarine corps, which nuclear secrecy forbade him to discuss. He enjoyed being courted by mature European widows and spent hours around the piano in the lounge, singing old standards off the teleprompter. He could waltz, jitterbug, and approximate a tango. There are caterpillars who anchor themselves to a stick and create a chrysalis around themselves and two weeks later emerge as butterflies. Hilmar punched out a cow who shat on him and he got a whole new life out of it.

“Speaking of Hilmar, when do we get to read your book?”

“Never. I decided not to finish it. I threw it away. I’m done.”

“What’s the problem?”

For one thing, the manuscript fell on the floor and the pages (unnumbered) got out of order, and I tried to arrange them and nothing made sense anymore. I worked at it for an hour. I got unhappier and unhappier. This happens to me often. I put my nose to the grindstone and write and rewrite and look at it a week later and it’s sloppy, verbose, wordy, long-winded, tedious, monotonous, redundant. And also repetitive. I don’t think as fast as other people do, sometimes it takes me hours. I’m still trying to figure out things that happened decades ago. Everyone else has made up their minds but not me.

It had been 30 years since I said on TV, “Not the end of the world but you can see it from there,” and I portrayed the town as populated by inarticulate men and crazed bachelor farmers, a stronghold of mediocrity and suspicion, and now I decided to live that down and not be the betrayer of my people. I want to be a loyal son of the Maroon and Gray, our Lake Wobegon. So I dumped my novel, all 200 pages, heavily marked, into Betty’s trash barrel, and decided to pack my bags in the morning and leave town quietly and get to work on the memoir.

I’d been working on books for years and what I learned is: Nothing you do is ever good enough. This should be inscribed over the doorway to education, not Founded in the faith that men are ennobled by understanding. Ha! Humbug! There is no ennoblement going on, only confusement and stupidification. I learned that from Scott Fitzgerald when he lived in a retirement home near Loring Park in Minneapolis, and, no, he didn’t collapse of a heart attack in Sheilah Graham’s apartment in LA, he went to AA, not LA, and worked for the Billy Graham association as a gardener and was known as Fran and he hated The Great Gatsby and refused to allow a copy of it anywhere near him. I remember him saying, “My God. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Where did I come up with that nonsense? People will think I’m back on the sauce. The inexhaustible variety of life? It sounds like a sophomore at Vassar.” Nobody read his books anymore, for which he was grateful. He loved gardening and canasta and bread baking and croquet, none of which you’ll find in his fiction. He and Zelda lived in a two-room apartment and were quite sweet on each other and fiercely private. She changed her name to Agnes. I met them in 1964 when he was 68, and I recognized him and told him that I was a writer too. He said, “Whenever you feel like writing a book, just remember that all the people in this world aren’t as interested in your life as you are.” He smiled understandingly in a way that seemed to understand me as I understood myself, and believe as I believed, that I was no better than average and probably somewhat less. I promised him that I’d never divulge his secret and I’ve kept that promise until now. He hated to hear that the University was offering courses in creative writing. He said, “Writers should be discouraged, not the other way around. Very few people have anything worthwhile to say—I can think of only three or four—and that leaves a hundred thousand who were meant to be raising tomatoes or sweeping sidewalks. A well-kept sidewalk is worth more in the greater scheme of things than an inferior novel. One good farmer is worth the whole damn bunch of lousy novelists put together. They’re careless and they smash up things and let other people clean up the mess they made. That’s why Ernest put the shotgun in his mouth. He saw that he was going to live too long and likely write again and it would be a mess, and he didn’t want people to forget he’d been great at one time. That would be his final defeat and he decided not to go there. You can’t live forever, but if you write a great book, full of the mystery and beauty of the world, you can imagine you might. I wanted Gatsby to be my great book, my green light, a book that would write itself, inspired by romantic readiness and the gift of hope, but it kept receding, eluding me, though I ran faster and faster, arms outstretched, and then I wrote that godawful line about ‘boats against the current’ and it was three o’clock in the morning and I had lived too long with a single dream, swimming underwater and holding my breath, and I sobered right up and made plans to return to Minnesota. And here I have held two opposed ideas in my mind at the same time—I am a great man and I am a groundskeeper—and I retain the ability to function. I mow the lawn and the world is better for it. Advertising contributes nothing and journalism contributes very little; a well-mowed lawn is worth slightly more than a newspaper, and ‘slightly’ is good enough for me.” He was raking grass clippings in the yard of the Graham Evangelistic Association as he said this, and a man in a suit came out and said, “Francis, when you’re finished here, could you come in and help in the cafeteria?” and Fitzgerald smiled at him, a smile that spoke of diamonds and moonlight and champagne, and headed for the food line to dish up macaroni. He seemed quite satisfied doing that, saying hello to the employees and ladling the hotdish and green beans, asking, “Would you like rye bread or whole wheat?” as if they were two different roads in life.

I’d run into him when I was reading Tender Is the Night my last year in high school. My mother saw the book and said, “I know a Fran Fitzgerald, he’s a friend of your Aunt Ina’s, he works for Billy Graham.” I scoffed, of course. I knew that Fitzgerald had died in 1940. But she insisted I look him up, and that summer I got a job as a dishwasher at the Evangeline Hotel by Loring Park and I walked over to the address Ina gave me and there he was, an old man with white hair slicked back but he had an elegant bearing that suggested an interesting backstory. I showed him the book and he said, “What about it? How’d you find me?” But when he found out I was a dishwasher, not a literature professor, he relaxed. “That was from a restless time,” he said. “A haunted lonely time, poignant in a way, even enchanting, but in the end, shamelessly wasteful and selfish. I loved Paris, I loved New York, but it occurred to me once—I was in a little cafe in Montmartre and I heard a woman singing to her French lover, a song I knew from childhood—Minnesota, hail to thee, hail to thee our state so dear, thy light shall ever be a beacon bright and clear—she sang it in French, Votre lumière sera toujours un phare lumineux et clair—and she put her arms around him. ‘France ou moi?’ I heard the whole thing. The air was thick with moonlight and mystery, but she knew where she belonged and needed to be there. ‘I am a Golden Gopher,’ she said. Except there is no French word for gopher so she said she was a golden squirrel: Je suis un écureuil. Which made him laugh. Which offended her. The most precious thing is to know from whom you have sprung and be true to your school. To be read and admired by strangers is no great feat, what is remarkable is enduring friendship. He laughed at Minnesota, and she stubbed out her cigarette and spat on the ground and that was that. It is what it is. C’est ce que c’est.”

The memory of Fitzgerald was a great revelation, and I realized that my book, The Lake Wobegon Virus, wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause. I thought, “I’m retired. Out of the game. My life is a story of misdirection. Forty years ago, my wife sent me to the store for plastic wrap, and the store was out and I asked a man where I could buy Cling and he said, “My name is Kling” and he was a radio manager and that’s how I got into radio. I needed a sponsor and Jack of Jack’s Auto Repair in my hometown offered to do it because he was hopelessly in love with my cousin. He courted her by sending her a tape of his favorite song, “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” and she hated it and married a tire dealer and broke his heart. I kept going with radio because I had no other possibilities. I wasted half my life on it and now I’m trying to live longer so it’ll be less than half. I’m in favor of mandatory retirement at 40. Gives a man a chance for a decent second act.

Betty begged me to let her read the book and I said no. I said, “It was going along pretty well and then I came to a part where God speaks to a man through his dog, Fred, and it’s the simple factual truth and nobody will accept it, so why bother?”

“Let me see it,” she said.

“I threw it away. Too late. Don’t give it another thought.”