That’s not right. That’s not exactly where I lived, in my third-floor apartment in Hyde Park, in the ‘eighties, while I studied literature at the University of Chicago. It sounds right, and that’s the way I remember it, but Google Maps says it’s wrong. Anyway.
I had a fancier apartment than many graduate students because every summer I worked in Chicago as a highly-paid secretary, and I socked that money away. Maybe I also had money left over from my lucrative year as a copywriter at Kenyon and Eckhardt advertising, in an office along the Chicago River. They hired me right out of Northwestern with a degree in English. The guy in charge looked at me, and looked at the writing sample I’d brought — an analysis of despair in The Hunger Artist — and laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do this. I’ll put you in a room with a typewriter. I’ll throw some ideas for ads at you. You’ll write the ads. One radio, one tv, one print. I’ll give you a half hour. If I like what you wrote, I’ll hire you.”
That was Chicago, beloved city.
In the evening, in my apartment on Blackstone or wherever it was, I’d turn on the radio and grimace through the Studs Terkel show. I really didn’t like it. I didn’t like him. And I hated his sign-off: Take it easy, but take it. But I listened to him, while I made spaghetti (only spaghetti, ever), or read Herzog, or rooted under the couch for my cat’s toy. … Why did I think take it easy but take it was stupid then, when now, reading Charles Wright’s poem Disjecta Membra (here’s some of it), maybe my favorite poem of all, I applaud the wisdom at its end:
…Take a loose rein and a deep seat,
John, my father-in-law, would say
To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.
Same idea. Maybe it was Terkel’s cloying sentiment. Maybe I thought intensity galore was the ticket. Now that he’s died, I hear the strange grain of Terkel’s voice so clearly, the eager breathy sound he made…
On the eve of an election where we may well elect a Hyde Parker, I think of that place. Andrew Sullivan quoted Norman Maclean on his blog the other day, and that made me think of the place. Maclean was very old by the time I got to the University of Chicago — I saw him around once or twice. I probably thought he wasn’t very interesting. Old-fashioned, from somewhere out west… Why did I think he was uninteresting then, when now I read and re-read A River Runs Through It, loving its sly, beautiful prose, and finding its description of Maclean’s self-ruined brother a source of comfort as I think about the self-ruined people I’ve known? Like all great writing, it’s comforting not because it’s trying to comfort, but because it allows itself to be taken by the enigma of existence. It lets what’s taking you take you.
These little Hyde Park reminders that lately stud the blogs and the papers; and then this larger, this immense Hyde Park story of Obama… I’m grateful to them for nudging me back to that place.
