same rural town which I tried so fiercely to escape. I could not help noticing that personal and professional failure were not my private bailiwick. I knew almost no one still on their first marriage. Friends, too, were short of money and doing work that at twenty they would have thought demeaning or tedious. Children were not such an unpremeditated joy as maiden aunts led us to expect, and for the precocious mid- ‘ die aged, health and physical beauty had begun to fail. It looked, as the old clichd had it, as if we were going to die after all, and the procedure would not be quite so character-building as the Reader’s Digest and the Lutheran minister implied. Heard from inside, the music of failure sounded not the loudest, gayest marches for cornets and drums, but a melancholy cello, strings slowly loosening, melody growing flaccid, receding toward silence. The country closed its ears against the tune; citizens denied that they had ever heard it. “Tomorrow,” they said, but this was only another way of saying “yesterday,” which did not exist quite as they imagined it. The first settlers of America imagined paradise, God’s city made visible on earth. Grand rhetoric for a pregnancy, it was, like all births, bloodier and messier than anyone imagined at the moment of conception. English Puritans who came to build a just and godly order began by trying to exterminate Indian tribes. They tried to revise the English class system of rich landowners and poor yeomen by sharing a common bounty, but this lasted only until somebody realized that true profit lay in landowning, here as in England. The same settlers who declared with Proudhon that “property is theft” She was one of millions in a culture that had been bamboozled for reasons no one quite understands into accepting a cheap destructive idea of success. wound up working as real estate agents. Old European habits of success died hard. Hypocrisy is not unusual in human history; it is the order of the day. What has always been unusual in the United States is the high-toned rhetoric that accompanied our behavior, our fine honing of the art of sweeping contradictions under the rug with our eternal blank optimism. But if we examined, without sentimentality, the failures and contradictions of our own history, it would damage beyond repair the power of that public rhetoric, would remove the arch-brick from the structure of the false self we have built for ourselves, in Minneota as elsewhere. I labored under the weight of that rhetoric as a boy, and when I am tired now, I labor under it still. It is the language of football, a successful high school life, earnest striving and deliberate ignoring, money, false cheerfulness, mumbling about weather. Its music is composed by the radio, commercials for helpful banks and deodorants breathing out at you between stanzas. In cities now, ghetto blasters play it at you in the street; you are serenaded by tiny orchestras hidden in elevators or in rafters above discount stores. It is the music of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It is not what Whitman had in mind by beating and pounding for the dead. True dead, unlike false dead, hear what we sing to them. The music of experience; the noise of failure. Years ago, I traveled to Waterton, Alberta, the north end of Glacier Park, and spent a whole sunny, windy August afternoon sitting on a slope high in the mountains listening to an Aspen tree. I wrote a small poem about that experience: Above me. wind does its best to blow leaves off the Aspen tree a month too soon. No use. wind, all you succeed in doing is making music, the noise of failure growing beautiful. I did not understand my own poem at the time. As a smalt boy, I sang loudly, clearly, and as elderly ladies told me, wonderfully. I knew better, but knowledge didn’t interfere with love(as it so often doesn’t), and music remained the true channel to the deepest part of my feeling life. Happiness (or at least emotion) could be described by notes with stems, and the noises of the inner life made audible by reading and sounding-those marks. Though never so skilled a musician as to have made a genuine living from it, I was skilled enough to know precisely the deficiencies of every performance I ever gave. In an odd way, this melancholy knowledge of my own musical imperfection goes on teaching me something about the wholesomeness of failure every day of my adult life. I have sometimes, like the United States, been too obtuse to remember it, but then I hear again the noise of aspen leaves. Pauline Bardal at the piano. I first heard a piano in the backroom of Peterson’s farmhouse, three miles east of my father’s place. An only child, too young and disinterested to do any real work, I was left indoors while my father was out giving Wilbur a hand with some chore, probably splitting a half-pint to make the job more pleasant. Wilbur was a bachelor, but lived with his aged father, Steve, and employed a sort of combination housekeeper and nurse, Pauline Bardal, to look after both of them. Pauline was born in 1895 to the first generation of Icelandic immigrants in western Minnesota. When I knew her in the late 40’s or early 50’s, she must have been nearing 60. Age is relative to children, so I did not think of her as being particularly old. She was simply Pauline, and would remain that way until she died 30 years later. She was almost six feet tall, without a bit of fat on her, and this made her bones visible, particularly in the hands, joints moving with large gestures as if each finger had reasoning power of its own. Her leanness was partly genetic, but partly also the result of continual work. In the cities she would have been called a domestic, though her duties at Peterson’s and elsewhere always involved nursing the infirm and dying. In the more informal class labeling of rural Minnesota, she was simply Pauline. After finishing her duties with bread, chickens, or tending to old Steve, Pauline retired to the den for a half hour of music. I was invited to listen and always delighted by the prospect. She sat herself on the bench, arranging her bones with great dignity and formality. Music was not a trifling matter even if your hands were fresh from flour bin or hen house. Pauline did not play light music; though she was conventionally religious in a Lutheran sort of way, I knew, even as a child, that music was her true spiritual exercise. She always played slowly, and I suppose, badly, but it made no difference. She transported both herself and me by the simple act of playing. Her favorite pieces were Handel’s “Largo” from Xerxes, and a piano arrangement of the finale of Bach’s Sf Matthew Passion: “In Deepest Grief.” She had never learned true fingering, and got most of her musical experience at an old pump organ that she played for chifrch services. She did not so much strike the keys as slide with painstaking slowness from one to the next, leaving sufficient time for the manual rearrangement of the bones in her hands. This gave all . her performances a certain halting dignity, even if sometimes questionable accuracy. It was always said around Minneota that her most moving performances were at funerals, where' enormously slow tempos seemed appropriate. She played the sad Bach as a post- lude while mourners filed past the open coffin for the last time. But Pauline at the keyboard was not a lugubrious spirit. Watching that joy on her bony face as her fingers slid over the yellowed keyboard of the old upright, it became clear to me even as a child that neither her nor my true life came from kneading bread or candling eggs or fluffing pillows in a sick bed, but happened in the presence of those noises, badly as they might be made by your own hands. They lived in the inner lines of that Bach, so difficult to manage cleanly with work-stiffened fingers. You felt Bach’s grandeur moving under you at whatever speed. The Handel “Largo,” though it has become something of a joke for sophisticated listeners through its endless bad piano transcriptions is, in fact, a glorious piece, one of the great gifts from Europe. Even on farms in rural Minnesota, you deserve the extraordinary joy of hearing it for the first time, as if composed in your presence, only for you. I heard it that way, under Pauline’s hands. The Minneapolis Symphony playing Beethoven’s Ninth in the living room could not have been so moving or wonderful as that “Largo” in Peterson’s back room. Pauline, in American terms, was a great failure: always poor, never married, living in a shabby small house when not installed in others’ backrooms, worked as a domestic servant, formally uneducated, English spoken with the odd inflections of those who learn it as a second language, gawky and not physically beautiful, a badly trained musician whose performances would have caused laughter in the cities. She owned nothing valuable, traveled little, and died alone, the last of her family. If there were love affairs, no one will now know anything about them, and everyone involved is surely dead. Probably she died a virgin, the second most terrible fate, after dying broke, that can befall an American. The history of a failed immigrant. Minneota is a community born out of failure about 1880. By that I mean that no one ever arrived in Minneota after being a success elsewhere. It is an immigrant town,.settled by European refuse, first those starved out of Ireland, then Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium. Given the harshness of western Minnesota’s climate and landscape, people did not come to retire or loaf. They came to farm, and had they been successful at it in the old world, would not have uprooted their families, thrown away culture and language, and braved mosquitos and blizzards for mere pleasure. Minneota is, of course, a paradigm for the settling of the whole country. We are a nation of failures who have done all right and been lucky. Perhaps it is some ancient dark fear of repeating our own grandfathers’ lives that makes us reluctant to acknowledge failure in national or private life. Pauline’s father, Frithgeir, came in 1880 in the third wave of nationalities to Minneota: the Icelanders. He likely read one of the pamphlets circulated by the American government in all Scandinavian countries, describing free and fertile land available on the Great Plains for farmers of sturdy, sufficiently Caucasian stock. The United States was always particular about the race of its failures. The pamphlet probably mentioned glowingly the bountiful harvests, rich topsoil, good drainage and pasturage, cheap rail transport, and healthful bracing climate. Frithgeir Joakimsson, who took his new last name, Bardal, from his home valley in north Iceland, arrived in 1880, found most of the best land gone, and picked perhaps the hilliest, stoniest, barest though loveliest farm acreage in that part of western Minnesota. He was 37 years old, single, and, in all likelihood, knew not a word of English when he came. Pauline, when she was old, disposed of her family’s books to good homes, and gave me her father’s first English grammar and phrase book that she said he used on the boat. It was in Danish, English, and Icelandic, well-worn though intact. Pauline clearly treasured it. Leafing through it now, I imagine rough farmer’s hands some- 'thing like Pauline’s, holding the book on an open deck in mid-Atlantic, sea wind rustling the pages under his thumb—"Hvar er vegurinn vestur till Minneota?” Pauline once fried steaks in a farmers’ night club out in the country, an odd job for a teetotaler, and for this she was probably paid a pittance. My mother tended the bar, and the two of them often drove out together. I saw them at work once; in the middle of loud country music and boisterous drinking, they tended these rough farmers, not like hired help, but like indulgent great aunts looking benevolently after children having a good time. Pauline owned an old Ford which she drove with enthusiasm. Well into her eighties she took friends on vacation and shopping trips, and made lunch runs for the senior citizens. Speaking of people sometimes 10 or 20 years her junior, she said, “They’re getting old, you know, and it’s hard for them to get around.” Pauline’s gifts to me included not only music. She tended both my parents at their death beds, and when my mother, a week before she died, lost her second language, English, and spoke to me only in her first, Icelandic, which I did not understand, Pauline translated. The gifts of the unschooled are often those we did not know we would need—the right words, the right music. Eternal though she seemed to me, age caught her. The end began with the trembling hands of Parkinson’s disease, a cruel irony for a woman who took her delight in playing music, however badly. Soon she went into the nursing home, and died not long after, still peeved with the universe, I think, for taking music away from her at the end. I don’t even know who was there to tend her bedside at the last. Probably she had had enough of that, and wanted to be alone. Indeed, the solitariness of her whole life prepared her for it. This was 1981, 101 years after her father left Thingeyarsysla for a new life. She had lived in America 86 years. Pack rat houses, and what they tell. The opening of the Bardal house, of which Pauline was the last occupant out of a family of six, was not greeted with amazement and that is, in itself, amazing. Traditionally in Minneota, as in villages all across the world, pack rats, generally unmarried, die in houses stuffed to the ceiling with moldy newspapers, rusted coffee cans full of money, and an over-population of bored cats. The first astonishing fact about the house was the sheer amount inside it. It was neither dirty, nor disorderly. The piles had been dusted, and the narrow crevices between them vacuumed and scrubbed, but within some mounds, nothing had moved for 40 years. Papers were stacked neatly in order, probably put there the week they arrived, from 1937 onward. The Bardal family had been schooled historically and genetically by a thousand years of Icelandic poverty of the meanest, most abject variety. They moved to a poor farm in the 6 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1988
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