As I was reading Mark Helprin’s latest (marvelous) novel, Elegy in Blue, I was struck by his evocation of life in the New York borough of Brooklyn, a community not commonly cited as a spiritual or esthetic center. Thus does memory transmogrify location. It put me in mind of the place I remember as my happiest home, also not a particular beauty spot, but transfigured in memory.
It was my final year of college. I went to Augsburg College (now known, hubristically, as Augsburg University) in Minneapolis. Augsburg was always a rather cramped institution, shoehorned physically into the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood (due to historical developments I know about but won’t bore you with). It’s Little Somalia now, but back then Cedar-Riverside still remembered the time when it was nicknamed “Snoose Boulevard.” It clusters around a seven-cornered intersection where Scandinavian immigrants flocked in the 1880s and ‘90s. Bars and churches were scattered about.
My roommate and I (he was a large, impressive young man who eventually became a Russian Orthodox monk and now resides in a mental institution in California) took over the upstairs apartment from some friends who were moving on. The benefits of the place were a) its proximity to the college, and b) its proximity to five pretty Christian girls in an apartment next door. The main drawback was the landlady. She was a human relic, alcohol and tobacco-permeated. White as an albino, purely from staying indoors. Wrinkled and saggy and quivering, like a walking blancmange. She used to yell up the stairs for me or my roommate to come help her move something heavy, and occasionally she would poke around in our space when we were gone.
A steep staircase led up to our quarters. To its left there was a small, L-shaped room. “This,” said my roommate, who was more impressed than I with my plans to be an author, “will be your office. You will write here.” And so I did. My steel desk, disassembled for the move, fit exactly into the lower angle of the “L”. My personal library sat behind me, on bricks-and-boards bookshelves.
Next to my office was the living room, with one window pane broken and covered in cardboard (it was never fixed in my time). There my roommate set up his multitudinous library, hundreds of books, some of which I think he may have actually read. Then there was the bedroom and the kitchen, floors covered in undulating linoleum. At the back, the bathroom and a back staircase – a comforting amenity in a building where squirrels sometimes nibbled the wiring.
I studied in my little office, of course (managed a cum laude), but when I sat down to write I felt like an absolute fraud. I spent a lot of time thinking about one of the Girls Next Door. I had fallen for her before I moved in, which, from a purely operational perspective, was bad strategy. I should have gotten to know them all to see if there was a reciprocal spark with any of them. But I bet my shirt on one and, needless to say, lost said garment.
But for a while there, I was a man in love. I enjoyed being in love, and I enjoyed thinking of myself as a guy in love.
After the Great Disaster, I sat in that office, looking out through the much-repainted window frame where I’d seen her passing below many times, and decided that, okay, I was fated to be a tortured artist. I’d better get on with it.
I did two fateful things then. First of all, I pulled the textbooks I’d saved from my old college Norwegian classes off the bricks-and-boards shelf. I began systematically studying the language; I hadn’t really worked at it when I took the classes. I think I had a vague idea of going to Norway someday and finding Love. In any case, the study paid off in time.
Secondly, I took my little Sears portable typewriter (brown in color) and began the first draft of what would become my novel, Wolf Time. I didn’t finish that draft then, but eventually I would. Later I would rewrite it entirely. But it was a start. You’ve got to start someplace.
When I looked out my narrow window, the view wasn’t a bad one. Minneapolis is a green city, and it was greener back then. The house we lived in no longer exists – they razed the whole block some years later, to build a chapel devoted to whatever God it is they worship at Augsburg now. But back then I could look across the street to see bits of Augsburg’s brown brick on my left. Directly across, a number of houses, many of which were probably used for apartments like ours. The second house from the corner I will never forget, because it housed a musician who used to climb up on the roof from time to time in the evening and play the flute. I don’t think anybody complained. He played well, and this was the 1970s. Everybody understood, I think, that having a flutist on a roof in our neighborhood gave us countercultural cred.
On the corner was the co-op grocery store, another stab at the Man. Neither I nor my roommate ever shopped there.
Time passed. We moved out and went on to other things. Augsburg tore our house down (no great crime against art or humanity in itself) and apostatized (I don’t think the two actions were related). Cedar-Riverside moved on to fresh minorities. Minneapolis ceased to be the kind of place where people return your wallet if you drop it.
And I, as you know, became rich and famous. But in some sense it started in that apartment.