Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  One evening in workshop, I raised my hand when Frank asked for the following week’s submissions and he said, “You and you,” meaning me and someone I no longer remember. (This happened a third of my lifetime ago.) I submitted my chapter for photocopying and then returned to work, feeling exposed and vulnerable.

  I aimed for five hundred words a day, sometimes more. The novel’s momentum had increased, but I couldn’t determine if the story was good or bad. It felt right, but that didn’t mean it was right. Often what feels best reads worst. Nevertheless, I wrote seven days a week and I stopped in midsentence—using Hemingway’s trick, which helped. Often, I would revise the previous morning’s page before continuing. Frank hadn’t read a word of what I’d written since my arrival, and, even though it had become our habit after workshop to sit together at the Mill, he never asked about the novel’s progress. So I didn’t know how he’d react to the new chapter, which increased my anxiety. But he had a stake in what I submitted to workshop as well. One afternoon I’d learned why everyone but Charlie treated me oddly. At the end of an editorial meeting for the Iowa Review, yet another person said, “Oh, you’re the baseball guy.” Immediately, I turned to Fritz McDonald, a second-year student who sat beside me. I said, “Would you please tell me what’s up with the baseball shit?!” He lowered his head and, even though we now were the only ones in the room, he spoke softly. “Well, last spring, Frank came out of his office holding your manuscript, shouting, ‘Get me this guy’s telephone number.’ Some of the TWIFs [second-year teaching-writing assistants who teach creative writing classes and screen application manuscripts] read your pages and thought DeLillo had submitted his work as a goof.” Later, I heard that Fritz had referred to me as “Golden Boy,” but his comment didn’t bother me because I had absolutely no confidence, and I worked manically, out of terror. Only Charlie understood that I was a bundle of neuroses, plagued by moods that swung from elation to despair.

  I entered the next workshop as taut as a guitar string ready to snap. I’d staked my identity on my novel, and my novel’s worth on Frank’s opinion of it. What if my new work disappointed him? Emotionally, I was still a boy, and I’d projected my desire for a father onto him. No matter what others said about my work, the only important voice to me that day was Frank’s.

  As the author, I wasn’t permitted to speak on my work’s behalf. Instead, others spoke as if I weren’t in the room. (At least, in theory.) Personal attacks weren’t tolerated; we focused exclusively on the text. (Not that comments didn’t sting, or, in rare instances, reduce someone to tears.) As always, Frank asked someone to begin the discussion. Then we argued about narrative grace, about a story’s flaws, about what “worked” and “didn’t work.” People often said they “wanted more,” although what “more” was wanted remained ambiguous. Some students were silent and never commented. Others suggested the existence of nonexistent problems. Initially, Frank stayed out of the conversation, but his reputation for fierce, often scathing criticism influenced what was said. To him, sentences were fiction’s bedrock. If a writer’s sentences lacked aesthetic integrity, if the sentences were careless, sloppy, clichéd, or imprecise, the story failed. Also, a character’s actions had to be understood at a purely functional level, which might involve a character simply starting a car. (“When did we learn the character was old enough to drive?! He behaves like a twelve-year-old!”) Motivation had to be irrefutable. (Why does she run off to Canada?! All her boyfriend said was, “Can I call you back?!”) Then Frank would lower his voice and advise us to “use exclamation points infrequently.”

  I remember little of what was said. Mainly, my peers hated the chapter. “I was lost.” “Do people really speak this way?” “If the narrator’s a baseball player, how come he’s intelligent?” One exchange, however, resonates so vividly that when I recall it I feel like I am sitting in room 457, thirty-four years old again, rather than fifty-four.

  Steve Kiernan said to Frank, “There are too many metaphors.”

  “Where?”

  “Page three, next to last paragraph.”

  Frank scanned the passage, along with the rest of us. “I don’t see a problem.”

  “Can I read the paragraph?”

  “Sure.”

  “The next pitch glided by me with a cartoon slowness, the drug (a cigar-sized joint) letting out the waistline of time, seconds doing rubber-band stretches. A lost-in-space weightlessness flowed through me as I saw the ball stop and hover, still as a hummingbird, over the plate [my narrator was at bat], while I, insubstantial as a movie image, slashed and chopped at it like some amphetamine-crazed samurai.”

  “So?”

  “So, he’s in a cartoon, time’s slowing down, the ball’s a hummingbird, he’s a movie image and a samurai?”

  “What do you want? He’s stoned!”

  Earlier, Frank had read a long phrase from the text aloud. I’d written, “. . . the earth, in that drought year, as dense, hot, and parched as a pizza stone.”

  “You see the image,” Frank said. “It’s concrete, and the relationship between object and simile is superbly balanced.”

  Frank’s comments made me uncomfortable. Was he defending my work, or his judgment? Maybe my application manuscript hadn’t been scholarship material. Or perhaps the new work hadn’t lived up to the earlier work’s promise. At one point, Charlie suggested that the novel’s ambition could be found in its prose. Otherwise, no one agreed with Frank, the conversation’s energy died, and class ended.

  I stayed behind until the voices in the stairwell faded to silence. Then I slipped into my denim jacket and walked into the hall. Headed for the elevators, Frank stopped when he saw me. “They didn’t get it,” he said. He compared my wild prose to the comic anarchy of a Marx Brothers skit. “Worry about maintaining the power of the voice. Forget the rest.” Then he hopped onto the elevator. I took the stairs. I wasn’t eager to stop at the Mill, but I had to. Otherwise, I’d appear to be sulking, rather than confused by all I’d heard.

  In the packed bar, though, students who weren’t in my workshop but had read one of the copies left on the hallway’s shelves said they loved the chapter. It was funny, many claimed. And they’d heard the class went well. Max Phillips disagreed with Frank on a minor issue. Frank had suggested that I change “wanna” to “want to.” As in, “I don’t want to hit.” Max said, “But ‘wanna’ captures the character’s infantile nature.” I never made the change. To my ear, “want to” sounded stilted. As writers, debating this minutia constituted our lives.

  All evening, I avoided Frank. I didn’t want anyone to think I’d approached him for consolation.

  At my desk the following morning, my classmates’ voices rioted in my head. I couldn’t hear my narrator, and if I lost his voice I’d lose the novel. I worked for six hours and composed two sentences. But I’d silenced the other voices. And they never interfered with my work again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jody and I hadn’t experienced winter in three years.

  “Winter,” in Key West, meant a temperature plunge from 80 degrees to 60 degrees. Two days later, when the temperature reached 75, spring began. By late September in Iowa, though, the leaves had turned candle-flame yellow and apple red. Kids trick-or-treated on Halloween amid bare-limbed trees. And for the first time since I was a kid in Queens, I had to rake and bag leaves. From my desk, I could see the narrow road and the dingy garages and dying backyard grass that bordered it. The sun set at 4:30 PM, frost glazed our lawn each morning, and while pumpkins still rested on our neighborhood’s front porches, I completed Book One of my novel. Instinctively, I knew I’d reached its midpoint. Its scope could no longer be enlarged, no characters added. Conflicts would now be resolved, not developed. As always, I’d tracked how long I’d worked and how many words I’d produced daily in a small, gray-covered assignment pad. In seventy-two days I’d written one hundred and fifty-three pages. Of them, Frank had read only the chapter I’d put up in workshop. One night at the M
ill, where we now regularly shared a table, I told him I was burning out. “So take a break,” he said. “Slow down.” I received no other advice from him. But in a sense, I didn’t need it. His presence was all that mattered.

  Still, I couldn’t decide if he was my teacher, mentor, friend, father, or a composite of these figures. By chance, a French filmmaker making a documentary about America had come to Iowa City. He planned to include the workshop in his film, but baseball intrigued him as well. Foreigners can’t understand the game’s attraction. Why is it called our “national pastime”? And, unlike other sports, why does baseball lore and mythology exist? Frank told him that if someone could deconstruct baseball for the French, it was me. “He’s coming to the house to watch a World Series game,” Frank said after class. “Why don’t you come over?”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be sure? We’ll drink beer and watch a ball-game.”

  I said, “Okay,” but later, at home, I began to agonize over the situation. My problem was that I didn’t know who to be in my relationship with Frank. “He wants to be your friend,” Jody said. “So be his friend.”

  “But I’m his student.”

  “Then be both.”

  For me, this was difficult. I was comfortable having drinks with Frank once a week. Deepening our relationship, though, meant I had a greater chance of being rejected by him if I let him down in any way. I couldn’t admit this outright, but I couldn’t conceal my anxiety, either. I’m not good at that. This is why I write. It’s my way of controlling my world and my emotions. I focus on sentences. For several hours a day, nothing else matters. I live inside language. And while I’m often frustrated by writing’s difficulty, I’m also at peace.

  So I set aside my novel and concentrated on composing a letter to Frank. Over the course of two days, I revised it twenty times, tossing entire drafts, tinkering with individual words, contemplating punctuation. Like a good passage of prose, the letter’s tone and tempo had to be perfect. I was trying to express a lifetime of insecurity in two hundred words. At the same time, I didn’t want to seem pathetic. I would like to read that letter, all these years later, and, occasionally, I wonder if it’s tucked inside one of Frank’s books, although I doubt it survived. Frank wasn’t sentimental. I can’t re-create precisely what I wrote, but here’s the gist of the letter:Frank,

  I don’t quite know what to say about your invitation, other than thanks. I have to admit, though, I’m not sure where the line between teacher and friend lies, and I don’t want to appear too eager to cross it, or too indifferent not to cross it. I also don’t want to complicate my writing or your reading of my novel. Your critical voice already dominates my thoughts as I write. And while it would be one thing for my work to disappoint you as a teacher, it would be another matter to disappoint you as a friend. I hope you understand my confusion. Please don’t interpret it as a lack of gratitude. What I feel is the exact opposite. If I didn’t, I never would have written this letter.

  Sincerely,

  Tom

  When I laid the sealed envelope containing the letter in Frank’s office mailbox, a momentary peace flooded my heart. It evaporated before I reached the mailroom door.

  I thought Frank might call once he read the letter, but he didn’t. Jody said, “It’s fine, don’t worry. The man has a life that doesn’t revolve entirely around you.” I wrote with my office door open, anyway, so I could hear the telephone ring. Then my concentration collapsed and the sentences I managed to write required endless revision. After five days, I’d advanced the novel by a single page.

  Frank didn’t say anything until we were once again at the Mill, alone at a table. He didn’t lean forward, as if he were about to speak to me in confidence, but he did look at me directly when he said, “Listen, I read your letter, and I understand. But here’s the deal. You can think I’m the biggest prick in the world and it won’t affect how you write your novel. The work’s strong enough to find its own direction. So this other stuff ”—he waved one hand over the table, as if dispersing a puff of cigarette smoke—“don’t worry about it. Do what you need to do. Otherwise, you’ll make yourself crazy. You follow?”

  “Yes.”

  We never watched a World Series game together. The French filmmaker had left town unexpectedly. Shortly afterward, November arrived, and by the time we left workshop each week the temperature was in the forties, or lower. So I began to ride to the Mill with Frank. And if we happened to stand at the bar for an hour, oblivious to everyone else, I didn’t fret about it. We’d become friends, which surprised no one but me.

  A week later, Frank spotted me outside his office. “Come in and shut the door,” he told me. I did. Then I sat across from him and slouched in the armchair I’d come to think of as mine. My compulsion to sit erect had faded. “How would you like to travel with the Mets?” he said.

  “The baseball team?”

  “Who else?”

  During a flight to New York, Frank had been seated beside a man who dropped his pen. When Frank leaned down to retrieve it, he noticed the chapter of his novel published by GQ in the man’s open briefcase. Its pages had been torn out of the magazine and stapled together. After sitting up and returning the pen, Frank said, “I’m Frank Conroy. I wrote the pages in your briefcase.”

  Frank told stories about his adventures in the same excited voice as the boy he’d described in Stop-Time. It was as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  “Then I found out who he was,” Frank said. “Frank Cashen, the general manager of the Mets! Look, he even gave me this.” Frank handed me a dark blue pen with the Mets orange logo printed on it. “And guess what? He’s a big reader. I’m talking about good stuff, not shit. Hey, let’s face it, he was reading me!” Frank laughed. He always laughed when he congratulated himself. It was his way of saying, I pulled off another trick! And nobody caught me! “Then I told him about you. If you want to spend time with the team for research, call.” Frank handed me Mr. Cashen’s card. “Ask for Jean.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I sent him fifty pages of your book. He said they reminded him of early Richard Ford.”

  At the time, I hadn’t read the “early” Richard Ford, but I was struck by the precision of Mr. Cashen’s compliment. How many people would divide a writer’s career like that?

  “You can fly to Florida in March,” Frank said, “during spring training. And if you need money to cover the trip, let me know and we’ll work something out. You can pay it back after you sell your book”—something he never doubted would happen, although I did. “Come on, let’s go grab lunch.”

  Generally, Frank preferred to eat lunch alone, before heading home to work on Body & Soul. He liked the act’s mind-cleansing solitude. There couldn’t be any other reason, given that most of Iowa City’s restaurants served awful food. But a drugstore with 1940s décor had survived. Eight immovable metal stools topped with padded leather cushions faced a lunch counter manned by a soda jerk and a short-order cook, each of whom wore a white paper hat. They whipped up vanilla milkshakes and chocolate malteds, toasted grilled-cheese sandwiches, constructed BLTs, heated Campbell’s soup, and scooped ice cream from round containers before slathering it with hot fudge. “You can get a cup of soup, half a sandwich, and a shake for a dollar ninety-nine!” Frank said. But the drugstore was his private space. Body & Soul was set during World War II, so he may have felt a special connection to the place, and we never ate there together. Instead, he took me to diners where he could get a hamburger. I can’t remember him ordering anything else. Frank ignored warnings about high cholesterol, got drunk nightly, and couldn’t write without a cigarette. Sometimes, he even hastily announced a workshop break so he could sneak into his office and smoke a Marlboro. “Have you noticed,” he once said in class, “that characters portrayed as creeps are always cigarette fiends? We’re regressing toward Puritanical hysteria. It’s insane.”

  I called Jean and made pl
ans to spend a week in Florida and a week in New York with the Mets. Around that time, I submitted my novel’s second chapter for workshop and it escaped the thrashing the first one had received. Some of my classmates actually liked it, and the initial sentence, “I come from nowhere and everywhere” resonated with Charlie, who understood that my subject wasn’t baseball, it was America. Other than Frank and Jody, he was the only person I trusted to read my work.

  One evening near the end of the semester, Jody and I were washing the dinner dishes when we noticed something odd happening outside the kitchen window. At first, we were puzzled. Then we recognized what the white flakes swirling in the wind were. And, as if we were little kids again, we stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the snow fall.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Like me, Frank didn’t compose his first drafts using a typewriter. From what he told me and I later saw, I learned that wrote in a long, narrow, somewhat dim room on the second floor of his house. He would sit on a twin bed with several pillows pressed against the bed’s headboard to support his back, pull up his knees, and rest a legal pad on his thighs. His handwriting fit easily between the lines of a page, and when he revised sentences he blacked out words with a Magic Marker, then substituted new words written in letters so minute as to be indecipherable. Beside his right hip rested an ashtray, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Because of his confidence, he wrote with a ballpoint pen and composed Body & Soul slowly, his prose never more than two drafts from perfection. Initially, a paragraph would take shape, but it would often falter after two lines. A second attempt would produce a longer passage, one imbued with direction, a clear meaning, narrative continuity, and dramatic momentum. He would listen to it repeatedly, judging its tone, assessing its tempo, and decide that several weak phrases would be improved by further revision and others would be jettisoned altogether. A third draft built upon the previous drafts’ strengths. And then, like a photographer delicately adjusting his lens, Frank would alter a few critical punctuation marks, invert a clause, and remove an ellipsis, until he believed that a striking clarity would resonate in a reader’s mind. After three hours, he would set aside his pad and pen, collect his cigarettes and lighter, walk downstairs, past the grand piano in his living room and into the kitchen. There, he’d find his wife, Maggie; their son, Tim; a cold beer; and a shot of whiskey waiting for him. And the novel’s world would vanish until the following day.