Part 16 (2/2)

This is the first indication of Don's plans to leave New York on an extended trip. Helen Moore Barthelme claimed in her memoir that Lynn Nesbit had urged Don to ”travel because he 'had not been anywhere.' ” The truth is, he left to ”get away from Lynn, who wanted to marry him,” Angell says. ”I was ready to have children,” Nesbit admits. Don (who was still not divorced from Helen) wanted the excitement of an affair, not the commitment of another marriage. ”He would say to me, not just once but over and over, 'Astonish me,' ” Nesbit says. ”That's a pretty big burden to lay on a twenty-four-year old.” Also, Don was pressuring himself to produce a second book, a novel, and this caused tension between the two; Nesbit realized she needed to separate business from her personal relations.h.i.+p with Don.

”I had a friend and I introduced her to one of my clients, Per Laursen from Denmark,” Nesbit says. ”Per was in America, traveling through the South, and he would have written the first book about civil rights-before any of us really knew what civil rights was-but he got terrible writer's block.

”Anyway, he and my friend Carol married in Maine, and Donald and I were the best whatevers at the wedding. Then they went to Denmark. Donald said, 'I'll go to Denmark with Carol and Per and you can come over in six months and we'll see where we are.' I think he thought it would rea.s.sure me if he went to Denmark with my friends, rather than going off to Paris or something. You know, he'd just be working. That sort of thing.”

Don asked Nesbit to look after his apartment while he was away. Eventually, she sublet the place to Tom Wolfe (whom Don had encouraged her to read). In the first week of September, Don left the States with a little New Yorker New Yorker money in his coat. He had discussed with Herman Gollob the possibility of turning ”A Shower of Gold” into a novel. This was to be his overseas project. ”The President” had just appeared in money in his coat. He had discussed with Herman Gollob the possibility of turning ”A Shower of Gold” into a novel. This was to be his overseas project. ”The President” had just appeared in The New Yorker The New Yorker, and it pleased Don to see people reading the magazine on the plane.

He intended to visit his family in Houston at Christmas, and return to New York around the first of the year. He felt the change of scenery would free him of his tensions. He also hoped that, away from the jazz clubs and the art parties, he'd drink less.

Years later, Don's eldest daughter, Anne (p.r.o.nounced Anna Anna), heard the story of his travels this way: ”He was vacationing in Europe with some other gentlemen. I don't know who they were. I think he had been to Barcelona and Paris, and they had gone to Scandinavia.” In letters to Helen, Don never mentioned the Laursens. He said he had gone directly to Copenhagen-the home of Sren Kierkegaard. He told Helen he had rented a ”small but pleasant flat for five weeks at the end of which I'll have to get out and hustle up another.” He intended to write, not sightsee, but the ”truth of the matter is that I haven't been doing as much Serious Thinking as I should be doing, but I hope to remedy that shortly. But first I have to stop and write a new story as I'm getting to the point where I'll need some money.” He had decided that ”A Shower of Gold” was too self-contained to be developed any further. He said he was ”still groping for a handle” on a novel; ”[I have] a fair idea of what I ought to be doing, if not precisely how to do it.”

The city, he said, was ”very beautiful and old-worldish with cobblestones instead of good sound asphalt and no building taller than six stories.” Cigarettes were seventy-five cents a pack, and Scotch was ”ten dollars a bottle.”

For fifty-two cents, he could get a ”seat in the last row of the top balcony” at the Copenhagen Ballet. He saw a Balanchine performance and, on another occasion, Cavalleria Rusticana Cavalleria Rusticana. One night in the theater, he sat next to an eighty-year-old man who ”spoke...about the wickedness of old New York, thumping me in the ribs from time to time. He had lived there as a boy, heh heh.”

He informed Helen he had gone to ”an old church and sat in the royal box. And the organist was practicing. And then into the graveyard next to the church. Here lies Anna Pederson, a good woman. I threw a mushroom on the grave. Bach streaming from the church windows. I felt like Old Werther.” The graveyard would find a place in the next story he'd write, ”The Indian Uprising.”

Of course, he visited Kierkegaard's grave. It was a fourteen-minute bus ride from the center of town, in a.s.sistens, a former churchyard-c.u.m-park. The monument was triple-tiered (aside from Sren, the grave held his mother and father and other family members) and topped with a thick stone cross. A low wrought-iron fence surrounded it. Nearby, on the park lawn, in the dappled shade of palm trees, women in bikinis sunbathed in the unseasonably warm weather, reading paperbacks, propping their purses and bags against moss-covered tombstones.

In the late afternoons, Don strolled past the outdoor cafes along the Nyhavn Ca.n.a.l. He smelled the fresh fish unloaded from wooden schooners, listened to seagulls and to waves licking the boats' hulls. Square stone buildings with pitched red roofs lined the bank. The buildings were painted yellow, orange, blue, and pink. The cafes served overpriced salads and beer. Men and women sitting at the tables flirted with one another. Here and there, along the ca.n.a.l, day laborers, just off s.h.i.+ft, dangled their feet in the water and munched fat falafel sandwiches.

He went to the street market for food. Next to the bins of fruits and vegetables, jewelry and candle sellers set up flimsy wooden booths. Has.h.i.+sh-illegal but quite plentiful and cheap-could be purchased in thick, broken chunks.

Don wrote to his parents that he had gone on a date one night with a ”beautiful blonde Communist.” She took him to a ”cafe where there were a great number of depressed-looking young men sitting around being depressed.” Later, in the woman's place, he made the mistake of ”chuckling about some aspect or other of the Hungarian Revolution.” In a huff, the woman said, ”You are a fool. Get oudt uf my room.”

Wherever Don went, he was pestered with questions about the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination and America's role in Vietnam. On August 7, just three weeks before Don had left the States, the U.S. Congress pa.s.sed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Don was desperate for English-language newspapers. Not only was Johnson deploying more American troops to Southeast Asia but China, North Vietnam's neighbor and ally, had just successfully tested an atomic bomb.

Don a.s.sured his folks that his public encounters weren't all all awkward. He had ”met a girl named Birgit who seems a little less doctrinaire” than the blond Communist, he said. awkward. He had ”met a girl named Birgit who seems a little less doctrinaire” than the blond Communist, he said.

According to Anne, her father wrote to his grandmother, ”I've met this crazy Danish lady.”

Anne says, ”My dad was with some other men. They were looking for a bar and they stopped this woman on the street and asked her for directions. Then they asked her to join them and she did. They were all wooing her, apparently. My father didn't want to lie to her, but he didn't think it sounded all that impressive, being a writer, so he told her, 'I'm a typewriter repairman.' ”

Birgit Egelund-Peterson was the daughter of a university science professor. ”During the Second World War, her father smuggled Danish Jews to Sweden,” Anne explains. ”When he told me he had worked in the Underground, I thought he'd built a tunnel. My grandmother was a nurse. They had four kids. My grandmother had Huntington's disease, and spent the last ten years of her life bedridden in a hospital. My mother watched her own mother die horribly.”

Birgit was ”ethereal, she was beautiful, detached, a scary-fairy woman,”

Anne says. ”She was as brilliant as my dad was. That was their attraction. But she was not as together as he was. She spoke Russian, French, German, English, Danish. She read Kierkegaard like it was d.i.c.k and Jane d.i.c.k and Jane. But there was just something that didn't connect with her. She couldn't keep a job in Copenhagen.”

Seeking steadiness, Birgit latched onto Don. Almost immediately, she moved into his flat. Don's plans changed. He canceled his flight back to Houston, having decided to stay longer in Denmark. ”I got letters from him and I could tell something was going on, but I didn't know what it was,” Nesbit says. On December 24, Don exchanged Christmas telegrams with Helen. He didn't mention Birgit. Shortly after that, he wrote Helen and suggested that they get a divorce.

30.

UPRISINGS.

”Edward put his hands on Pia's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The nipples were the largest he had ever seen. Then he counted his money. He had two hundred and forty crowns. He would have to get some more money from somewhere.” These lines from Don's ”Edward and Pia” neatly summarize the way Don spent 1965: living with Birgit and fretting over cash.

When he sent the story to Roger Angell in May, Angell a.s.sumed it was autobiographical. In a subsequent letter, Don warned his editor, ”Please do not confuse my fiction with my life, my life.” But the story was the most straightforward Don had written, and its details matched his ”life and times.”

Angell told Don, ”I plan to fight for...Pia's nipples, but I have not yet discussed them with Shawn.” (The nipples did did grace the magazine.) grace the magazine.) Birgit tended to be as restless as Don. Together, they traveled to the Netherlands, Germany, France, and England. Don wrote Helen that London was ”gray and dismal.” He said ”hordes of Indians and Frenchmen and Italians cruis[ed] the streets in cheap overcoats and too much hair and nothing-to-do (a lumpen-proletariat if ever there was one; what hope, what felicity for these troops?) and a general air of having settled for much, much less than any minimal idea of human possibility known to me or thee-cities are deadly, the j.a.panese in Tokyo in 1953 looked more human than this.”

Everywhere, people stared at Birgit, a stunning beauty who dressed fas.h.i.+onably, if sometimes oddly. She wore white plastic boots and plastic hats, green velvet skirts, many, many rings, and handmade necklaces with gla.s.s and wooden beads. She also wore heavy black mascara.

Her family owned a small farm in Sweden, just outside of Markaryd. She and Don stayed there off and on, returning every so often to Copenhagen and Don's rented flat. At the farm, Don chopped wood-most of the time the logs were too wet to catch in the fireplace. He tried to control his drinking (he was heavily into gin at this point). Frequently, he made himself dry vermouths with onions on the rocks. He cooked fried chicken for Birgit. He had trouble breathing the sharp, cold air and felt minor pains in his chest. To Birgit's dismay, he wouldn't go to a doctor; eventually, the pains went away.

The farm was remote from shopping areas. Don and Birgit would take a bus into Markaryd and stock up on household supplies for the week. Local children cheered them as they hauled their overflowing bundles onto the bus.

He found little in English to read: a few Ross Macdonald mysteries, The Penguin English Dictionary The Penguin English Dictionary, infrequent copies of Time, Newsweek Time, Newsweek, and Life Life (the big story in America in late 1964 was the most recent James Bond movie, (the big story in America in late 1964 was the most recent James Bond movie, Goldfinger-Life Goldfinger-Life splashed a gold-painted lady across one of its covers). splashed a gold-painted lady across one of its covers).

Back in the Copenhagen flat, Don and Birgit entertained a stream of visitors, including several of Birgit's friends. The visitors lounged about the flat, drinking tea or cheap wine, strumming Joan Baez songs on guitars, and testing Don's responses to their increasingly anti-American att.i.tudes. In ”Edward and Pia,” he wrote, ”Edward talked to a Swede. 'You want to know who killed Kennedy?' the Swede said. 'You killed Kennedy.' 'No,' Edward said. 'I did not.' ” Lyndon Johnson had just authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam's transport system. Birgit's friends peppered Don with questions about the war in Southeast Asia, and he grew weary of having to say he didn't support America's foreign policies. killed Kennedy.' 'No,' Edward said. 'I did not.' ” Lyndon Johnson had just authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam's transport system. Birgit's friends peppered Don with questions about the war in Southeast Asia, and he grew weary of having to say he didn't support America's foreign policies.

Early in 1965, Don's mother fell ill. It's not clear what was wrong with her, but she spent two days in a Houston hospital. She regained her strength quickly, and urged Don not to make plans to hurry home. To cheer her up, he wrote her a lengthy, fanciful letter about his landlord, who, he said, had ”soft-footed in” and taken away the sixty-watt lightbulb above Don's writing desk: ”Cunning Landlord. He thinks I will not Notice, But I have counted the Watts and having a very good Grammar School Education by the Nuns, I Noticed that a few Watts were gone.”

Don also told his mother that he went to a bar where people were ”talking in a Strange Language. After a time it came to me that they were speaking English. And I said to myself what a beautiful language! I would like to hear more of it.” He mentioned a trip to the Copenhagen zoo, where the giraffes wore ”Neck Sweaters.” Like ”the rest of Denmark, [the zoo] was not Heated Properly.” He had ”no other Intelligence of moment except that I have thrown away a lot of bad Prose that I made myself. And that I am still Endeavoring to complete a new Work with which to Finance my future Life, if any.” As in his letters to Helen, he failed to mention he was living with Birgit.

In the mornings he wrote fiction. He felt adrift from his friends and fellow writers. Eagerly, he awaited the arrival of red-and-blue air mail envelopes through the gold mail slot in the door of his flat. He sent Angell anxious notes: ”Are you there or are you gone?”

He found a jazz club in Copenhagen, the Montmartre, and spent a happy evening there listening to the trumpeter Don Cherry, backed by a Scandinavian rhythm section featuring a young Alex Riel on drums. As in the States, jazz halls in Europe were giving way to ”Big Beat” clubs. The Danish press called rock ”pigtrad”-that is, barbed-wire-music. Don ignored it for the cooler sounds of the Montmartre.

With Birgit, he took long walks through Copenhagen. One night, she pointed out a street corner where she had been knocked off her bicycle by a car when she was a child. She pointed out the Botanical Gardens near the Round Tower, where she was once a.s.saulted by a man. Her history in the city, and her mother's early death from Huntington's, made her wary.

Don took Birgit for boat rides, on tourist cruises in the harbor. He walked her past Tivoli Gardens, past the Old Stock Exchange building, with its oxidized copper roof and statues of dragons, past the Royal Library's sleek black gla.s.s facade, past iron railings in front of shops gilded with faces and figures. The city's whimsical architecture gave whole sections of town a giddy, fairy-tale air-but the air was darkened by Birgit's expectations of violence around every corner.

Dear Roger:Here is THE INDIAN UPRISING...I have also sent you a purple-and-yellow Christmas card.Best,D.

With this note, sent near the end of 1964, Don began the most intense correspondence he ever had with Angell over one of his stories, an ”endless transatlantic seminar on punctuation and the uses of the English sentence,” Angell said. Don submitted the story in early December. On the fifteenth,

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