The Wrong Direction as the Right Direction

Running Away to My Ancestors

The thesis of this Substack is that it’s possible to make big mistakes that are actually the right choices. It’s possible to fail into a success. It’s possible to be going in the wrong direction and the right direction at the same time.

If these sound like a paradoxes—well, spiritual truths are often paradoxical.

Spiritual truths? Really? My post-Harvard stumbles and lies and swerves away from great opportunities have a spiritual dimension?

I think so, and one of my jobs in these pages will be to explain why I think so.

As I’ve written, one of my biggest mistakes—later a favorite—was to swerve away from an academic career into a poorly defined sense of myself as a poet.

But the swerve had another dimension: a homecoming.

After a bit more than a year as a security guard at the Morgan Memorial Goodwill Center in Boston, I got on a bus and moved to Minneapolis. I rode back to the Midwest, into the landscape of my ancestors on both sides. On the Spayde side: western South Dakota. On the maternal, Swedish, Carlson side, Cannon Falls, MN, Saint Paul, and eastern South Dakota.

I hadn’t yet confessed to anyone that I didn’t intend to continue on my academic track in Japanese literature—I was barely able to admit that to myself. My official story, the one I was telling my parents, was that I was going to spend a few months brushing up my Japanese at the University of Minnesota, where I had spent a summer doing that very thing a few years previously, before heading to Japan for an academic year of study of old Japanese poetry.

Tell No One Anything

To announce to my parents that I did not wish to continue as a J-lit prodigy, and was in fact no longer skillful enough to convince anybody that I was one, seemed like an invitation to family chaos. My mother, I was sure, would retreat into pained silence and gastric upset, sending displeased communiques to me via my father. It had happened before.

My plan was simple: tell no one anything, and live my 22-year-old-life as much by impulse and improvisation as I possibly could, until the time came to duck and flee the darkness that would form over the expectations I was disappointing. I had a few months before I was supposed to be anywhere. Why not enjoy them?

I had a $10,000 check in my pocket--an inheritance from my grandfather, perfectly adequate for a couple of years of late-hippie living in a middle-sized midwestern city in 1973. I actually intended to live on lentils and brown bread from the Twin Cities’ thriving co-op grocery stores.

My first order of business was to find an apartment--my first real apartment. I never considered any part of the city but the West Bank neighborhood, near the University of Minnesota, where Cedar and Riverside avenues meet.

For those who knew, it was a storied quarter. In the first decades of the century Cedar-Riverside had been to Scandinavian-American theater and vaudeville what Second Avenue and Tenth Street were to Yiddish show business. Theaters and bars lined the streets, and green Swedes and Norwegians and Danes who worked in the nearby railcar yards or did seasonal labor in the North Dakota wheat fields filled these places of amusement--young men in cheap dark suits and derby hats.

In the Southern Theater (which was a branch of a famous playhouse in Stockholm) or Dania Hall or the Star Theater they could see and hear mandolin bands, road-show productions of Ibsen and Strindberg--untranslated, of course--and vaudevillians like Hjalmar Petersson, whose stage name was Olle i Skratthult (Olle From Laughterville), and whose jokes and songs were famous throughout Swedish America. My South Dakota great-aunts never missed Olle’s radio show from Chicago, which lasted into the Forties--when Petersson had a conversion experience and became a Salvation Army gospel singer.

The Seventies, for Real

The 1970s have been reconstructed by today’s marketers of pop-culture memory as little more than a flea market of polychrome kitsch: avocado kitchens, fondue sets, polyester-print disco shirts covered with clocks or race cars or Van Gogh paintings. It was, we are told, a silly time of bad haircuts, the Brady Bunch, and the Captain and Tenille.

But those of us who lived through the Seventies as adults remember them as the era when the United States finally discovered that it possessed a culture, or rather cultures, of its own. It was in the Seventies that developers and architects first got the idea that noble old 19th-century warehouses and retail buildings were treasures to be restored and re-used, not eyesores to be flattened. It was in the Seventies that Americans discovered the cuisine of Louisiana and other regions as alternatives to out-of-the-box chicken Kiev and veal cordon bleu from faux-French “fancy” restaurants. It was in the Seventies that ethnic musical traditions like zydeco and Hawaiian guitar made themselves heard, from Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label to the smooth tracks on Ry Cooder’s albums.

Minneapolis, which had sucked up to everything ersatz and “modern,” which had, in the early Sixties, demolished a whole downtown neighborhood of some 150 nineteenth-century buildings, in one of the great urban-renewal holocausts of postwar America, was finally beginning to keep faith with its past.

The West Bank, in particular, was rediscovering its history. There were Hjalmar Petersson posters for sale in many of the hippie stores on the Bank, sepia images that showed him in costume as Olle, the fresh-off-the-boat Swede naif with a billed cap and rouged cheeks, for whom everything in America was a wonder or a puzzle. A University of Minnesota folklorist (a New York-born Jew) organized a summer music festival that invited the last Scandinavian dance bands in the region, long-unfashionable outfits from Minot or Menominee, with names like Bob Larson and the Scandi-Tones, to come and play for a week in the still-standing Southern and Dania Hall, in the Viking Bar and the Triangle.

Olle i Skratthult (r.) onstage in 1916

This ethnic ethos blended seamlessly with the other musical tradition of the West Bank: countercultural blues. Minneapolis was the home of a handful of white musicians whose devotion to the country blues had helped found the musical style of the Sixties--musicians’ musicians like Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, and Tony Glover. Their 1964 Blues, Rags, and Hollers was a cult record that inspired Bob Dylan. And, of course, during a stab at being a student at the University of Minnesota before he packed up for Greenwich Village, Dylan himself played the Triangle Bar and other clubs on the West Bank.

Right at the heart of the neighborhood, at the intersection of Cedar and Washington avenues and a block from Riverside, stood a brand-new apartment building where a studio went for $140 a month, plus sauna and pool privileges. No, it wasn’t the ideal Seventies writer’s hideaway; a semi-derelict hippie building with a bookstore on the ground floor would have filled the bill better. It was the sort of building you lived in if you had just graduated from a Lutheran college and were taking up your first job, as a loan officer trainee at Norwest Bank. I chose it anyway. It made me feel like a grownup. I could walk to anywhere on the West Bank: the thrift shop where I bought dishes, the Cedar Theater where there were concerts and European movies, and the bars: the Viking, the Triangle, the 400.

The Viking Bar (photo by Clare Kennedy for Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

Greet Those at Home

One afternoon, as I sat with a beer in the Viking, I saw a little hunchbacked woman in a red bowling-alley windbreaker, with rat-colored hair that looked like a toupee, come in, greet the longhair bartender and the four or five elderly male drinkers lined up in front of him, and then seat herself awkwardly at the beat-up upright piano that stood at the foot of the Viking’s tiny carpeted stage. Her feet didn’t reach the pedals. She made an old-fashioned, churchy, rolling chord with her left hand, and then with her right she banged out a song I knew: “Hälsa Dem Darhemma,” “Greet Those at Home.”

Every immigrant group has its song of displacement and sorrow, its “why did I leave the places and people I love to come to this cruel country?” song, and “Hälsa Dem Darhemma” was that song for my mother’s people, the Swedes, in Fargo and Minneapolis, on Chicago’s West Side, in Des Moines and Denver and San Francisco and Brooklyn.

The rat-haired woman sang it in Swedish, tonelessly, her brown popeyes gleaming, and the old guys at the bar joined in in various keys as the sad old waltz made its way down the scale. It was four o’clock. In a few hours the blues-rock band would show up to play John Mayall and Jimi Hendrix songs, and the place would fill with U of M frat boys in letter jackets and razor-cut helmets of hair.

But this was the Hälsa Dem Darhemma hour for the last of the old ones, the long-retired car-yard workers and flour-mill laborers who had been left behind by the middle-class Swedish exodus to then the suburbs. I looked at what the solemn old guys--and the gnomelike piano woman too--had in front of them, and by God it wasn’t beer, it was cheap brandy, brannvin, exactly what the boys in the black suits and bowler hats, the vanished ones in the old photos taken in Dania Hall, held in their hands.

I ordered one, then another, then another. I couldn’t remember being happier in my life.

To be continued…

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