by Grimes, Tom
For instance, I wrote, take this paragraph with Claude and Catherine and consider its lack of specificity:Passion was a force to be fed, eagerly and gratefully fed like some hungry angel with them in the room possessed of the power to lift them out of themselves. Out of the body, out of the world to some deep blue otherness where their souls would join, in and with the blue. Sailing along together in the blue, the blue insupportable to a soul alone.
You use the word blue four times, and I count nine prepositional phrases. Also, are the words otherness and insupportable precise? And the adverbs: eagerly, gratefully, hungry. Do you rely on them too much? Think about it.
Convinced I’d done the right thing, I ignored the obvious. Who would shout, “Wait, Tom says don’t print 75 to 125,000 copies?!” Before I dropped the letter into a mailbox, I showed it Jody. As she read it, her expression changed from attentive to astonished. “You can’t send this,” she said.
“Why not? I’m trying to help.”
“This won’t help, believe me.”
We debated the letter’s merits. (It had none.) But for every rational point Jody made, I made an irrational one.
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like when you try to force me to agree with you until you drive me out of my mind.” Knowing I wouldn’t listen to her, she said, “Go talk to Connie. Ask her if she thinks you should send it.”
Skimming the letter, Connie said, “Oh God, no. Please, please, please don’t mail this.” She may have said, “Are you okay? You seem a little frantic.” I can’t remember. But I believe she did say, “Listen, Frank knows you want only what’s best for him. Okay? And this isn’t what’s best for him right now. He needs you to be happy for him. Okay?”
She repeated the word okay the way a mother assures her child that everything is all right. My energy spent, I nodded. Whether I left the letter with Connie or destroyed it myself, I can’t say. Most likely, once my confidence turned to guilt with the ease of a coin turning from heads to tails, I obliterated the letter, tearing it into postage-stamp-sized pieces and then scattering them, a few scraps at a time, into Iowa City’s downtown sewers.
One evening, a week later, the phone rang. Sam Lawrence was looking for Frank. As I said, “Hi,” I pictured myself serving him dinner in Key West. His voice sounded gruffer than I remembered.
“He’s on Nantucket,” I said, calm and terrified. “But I know the number.” Once he’d made sure he had written it down correctly I said, “My name’s Tom Grimes. I used to live in Key West. A couple of years ago, you wanted to buy my novel.”
He paused. Then he yelled, “The waiter! You wrote the baseball book. Whatever happened to that thing?”
“It was a disaster.”
“Who published it?”
“Little, Brown.”
“Why the hell did you go with them? Why didn’t you come with me?”
I said, “I made a mistake. I had only fifteen minutes to make up my mind.”
“Who told you that?”
“My agent.”
“Listen,” he said, “the next time someone tells you that you have fifteen minutes to decide what to do with a book you spent two years writing, you tell him to go fuck himself. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What are you working on?”
“A novel.”
“Well, you send it to me when it’s done.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will.”
Several days later, I wrote a tactful letter. This one I did mail.
Dear Mr. Lawrence,
It was nice speaking with you last week—about Season’s End, about Key West, and other things. And I do appreciate your generous offer to take a look at my new novel when it’s complete at the end of the year. I will have the manuscript sent your way at that time. I hope to have a good book for you, and this time I won’t get, as you say, ‘distracted.’
Thanks for the advice, and all the good writing you’ve published over the years. I will be in touch.
Sincerely yours,
Tom Grimes
On July 16, 1993, he replied:Dear Tom,
Many thanks for your friendly letter of June 22. We look forward to reading your new novel with great pleasure.
Best wishes in your work ahead.
Cordially as ever,
Sam
Frank’s People magazine photograph shows him dressed in black and stretched across the closed lid of his Yamaha grand piano, comically reaching for the keyboard as he smiles at the camera. The full-page New York Times Book Review’s ad simply reprinted his book-jacket image. But Time magazine’s snapshot of Frank, seated, dressed in a striped shirt, one palm pressed against his forehead, captures his irritated expression, as if Frank suspects the tenor of the forthcoming review. And he’s correct. The reviewer’s tone, which is typical for him—he’s an obscure, mediocre novelist who likes to ridicule famous writers—is snide and envious. Titled “Great Expectations, No Satisfaction,” the review begins, “Body & Soul isn’t a minor let-down but a major disappointment. No one could help rooting for this 57-year-old first novelist (even if he is the head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), whose 1967 memoir Stop-Time remains much admired.” But “Conroy’s characters are well-worn stencils, like the sexy, snooty rich girl (Estella meets Daisy Buchanan) and the gluttonous Italian violin virtuoso (Paganini meets Zorba meets the cartoon chef on the pizza box.” Something other than the review, however, must have bothered Frank while the photographer snapped his picture—the heat, perhaps, requests for another pose—because he later said to me, “I was laughing so hard by the time I reached the ‘pizza man’ line I had to stop reading. I mean, the guy’s an idiot!”
As Frank ’s book tour began, other reviews followed, and the array of conflicting opinions echoed workshop discussions.
Vanity Fair: “Beautifully written, and hypnotically readable, the best story I know of in a long, long time.”
The Boston Globe: “The novel is a gesture back to those great, wonderful, fat books with character and plot. It also heralds the return of a gritty writer who has kept a low profile for 25 years.”
The Dallas Morning News: “A big, old-fashioned book as satisfying as a fine evening at the symphony.”
The Chicago Tribune: “A literary event, a grand saga. Body & Soul was written under the spell of Dickens, not to mention Stendhal, Tolstoy and the other 19th-century titans. Conroy bedazzles readers!”
Elle: “A riveting, neo-Dickensian saga.”
Entertainment Weekly even “graded” Body & Soul: “This isn’t Dr. Faustus or any sort of great novel about music, but the first half is full of enchantment. B+”
Most importantly, the New York Times Book Review treated the novel with admiration and respect: “Utterly sincere, unironically devoted to re-creating an America that I would have thought by now had ceased to be an inspiration. . . . A legitimate and moving piece of Americana. Full of rich characters and tricky twists.”
I called Maggie to ask how the book was selling, and she sounded cautiously upbeat. “Well, they printed 57,000 copies, but they say any returned books fill new orders.” Foreign sales alone had repaid Frank ’s advance. The $3.75 he earned for each American hardcover sold easily doubled it. Yet, despite being eagerly hoped for—and, to a certain extent, even expected—Body & Soul never appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. And, given the novel’s uneven critical reception, literary prizes seemed unlikely. This disappointed Frank, but—unless I’m mistaken—it didn’t drive him into a cave of self-pity. He lacked the gene for dejection. I didn’t. Knowing this, he had written to me from Nantucket the previous summer.
Dear Tom,
I trust you are cheering up? Cheered up? I’ve seen Season’s End at both of the island’s bookstores. In one of them (the more highbrow establishment), it is moving well. I don’t know about the other place. So your baby goes off and makes its unpredictable way through the
world, sans daddy. Look at Patrick O’Brian (and you should). I’d never heard of him, and since June 1 I’ve read fifteen of his historical novels. (Capt. Aubrey/ Dr. Maturin sea stories, same period as Hornblower but much, much better) and am complètement desolé that there are no more. Let the word carry the word.
But Frank’s serenity eluded me. And, compared to his joy, my gloominess puzzled him. As he wrote in the same letter:I never know what to make of you when you excoriate yourself for alleged bad behavior at a social function. This exists in your mind, my friend. Maybe it’s because you get squiffy so easily, but not squiffy enough to forget what you’ve said. You want bad behavior? Frank at a stuffy dinner being offered salad by a lovely matron, a total stranger. “May I hold it for you?” she says, presenting the bowl. “Don’t talk dirty,” sez me, never to be invited back again.
One night, driving home from the Foxhead, the two of us shivering, I said, “Do you think you’ll ever write another memoir?”
Without taking his eyes off the road—which was good, because he was drunk—Frank answered, “No, I want to do novels now. I want to do the longer work.” Then he raised one hand from the steering wheel and, gesturing toward the darkness beyond the streetlights ahead, he added, “Novels. That’s where the juice is.”
Writers always look toward the future. In a sense, we have no past, only whatever time we have remaining to write the perfect book to mask our emptiness—or my emptiness, any way—the book that won’t defeat us, the book we’d like to be remembered by, if we’re remembered at all. And Frank will be remembered; Stop-Time is a singular achievement. A sui generis insanity governs its style and the very act of its creation. “I’d write a chapter and then take four months off and fuck around,” Frank told me, recalling how he wrote his memoir—after he’d accepted the failure of his first novel, a novel about a priest. I haven’t read it, and I won’t; Frank considered the work so weak that a sense of shame, perhaps, attached itself to the manuscript. Yet, he didn’t destroy it. Boxed and marked, it remains in his archive. I can’t ask Frank now why the pages still exist, but I’m a writer and I know why: he wants it to be read so that his life’s work is understood completely. He’s even mentioned its failure. In an essay, he called the novel “dead on arrival.” A corpse. This stain of failure never entirely vanished, but Stop-Time overcame it. In fact, Stop-Time’s anger and bitterness is, I’m sure, grounded in Frank’s buried novel. He wrote about a priest, and nothing is interesting, dramatically, about a priest who’s celibate and virtuous. My guess is that Frank, like me, wasn’t able, in his early twenties, to confront the shame he felt about his family, how broken, sad, confused, hysterical, and nearly tragic his childhood was. But, once again like me, when he was angry enough to see beyond the bullshit façade of “literature,” he found Stop-Time’s narrative voice. In the first sentence of the prologue, he announces what every writer wants to be able to say: “I worked well.” He then describes a harrowing, drunken, high-speed drive to his “small countryside house about twenty miles outside of London.” The game is: how fast can Frank drive without killing himself? He leaves the question unanswered, for the moment, then leaps into chapter one, the first sentence of which is, “My father stopped living with us when I was three or four.” It’s Frank’s anger over this wound that smashed his Jaguar’s gas pedal to the floor. Then there’s the first chapter’s title: “Savages,” which recounts the merciless beating of Frank’s classmate by fellow classmates at an “experimental boarding school in Pennsylvania called Freemont.” Reluctantly, Frank participated. Years later, he still considers the boy’s beating part of his life. He worries about the incident and his behavior for a long time. But in the end he learns nothing other than that brutality happens easily. Then come Stop-Time’s other mad chapter titles: “Space and a Dead Mule”; “Hate, and a Kind of Music”; “Shit”; “A Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up”; “The Coldness of Public Places”; “Death by Itself.” The book ends when Frank, after escaping his childhood by entering Haverford College, survives, by accident, his manic dash through London’s suburbs. And yet he’s disappointed when he doesn’t die. Swerving toward a concrete fountain, he relaxes. “Let it come,” he thinks. And then, gleefully, “Here it comes!” Only, he fails. He stumbles out of the car. All he’s accomplished is waking an old man, who yells at him from a window. “My throat burning with bile,” Frank writes, “I started to laugh.” What killed his first book, I believe, was sincerity, or a striving for atonement. What electrifies Stop-Time is its demonic anger. But, ultimately, it’s funny: he can’t even kill himself. Perfect freedom! Only by reaching the point where he accepts his desire to obliterate himself—and I’m talking about me here, too—does he feel cleansed. Of course, I’m speculating. Frank may not have felt this way at all. But he didn’t burn his dead book, and that failure shaped him. He knew it and he remembered it. Failure burned away every slippage of language, intellect, or sentimental feeling in Stop-Time. The book’s beauty is its darkness; its bitterness is its grace. “The bad work leads to good work,” Frank used to tell us in workshop. “You rarely get one without the other.” So, he wrote the book he’ll be remembered by.
But I’m remembering Frank here and, of course, he’s laughing, although bile no longer burns his throat. In me he found his biographer. Yes, he rescued me. I applied to Iowa with an incomplete novel’s opening pages. In retrospect, submitting that material was a bold, idiotic move. On the one hand, I risked rejection, and I would have had the justification for it had I been rejected. I didn’t submit my best, published work: that was my out. On the other hand, I wanted to court failure, and I did. My all-consuming ambition urged me to write something so far beyond my skill that I could only fail. I insisted that Season’s End wasn’t a baseball book; it was about America. Its scope stretches from America’s defeat in Vietnam to Reagan’s election as president. The working title for Season’s End was “Love and Death in the American Novel.” Only someone stupid enough to risk failure on a grand scale would brandish that title (which is why the novel was sold untitled). I purposely stole the title from a work of literary criticism by Leslie Fiedler. And it’s clear to me now: I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk, believing I could overcome it. Every great novel, it’s been said, is a “long story with a flaw in it.” Well, I’ve mastered the flaws and have diligently produced long stories to contain them. But something all along was missing—me. And this book redresses that absence. For twenty years, I believed Frank filled that absence. But he didn’t; my idolization of him did; moreover, my fictionalizing of him did. Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me. By writing about Frank, I could no longer turn away from myself, which is what I’ve done all of my life. Now, I’m gazing at myself.
But, by the time we had become friends, Frank’s gaze had turned toward the future he’d imagined for himself. In it, he would write more novels. Body & Soul simply materialized first. And if its immediate fate fell short of fulfilling his wishes, he saw no reason to despair. Who could predict any book’s future? “For twenty-five years Stop-Time ’s been in print,” he once told me. “I’m constantly amazed.”
So, he enjoyed his tour. And he wrote inside our copy of Body & Soul:Dear Tom & Jody,
Your cats left some fleas [which, unfortunately, was true], but I got to talking to them and they have a compelling story —————
Much love to you both,
Frank
Then he signed a copy for the wealthy New York dowager who would hold a celebratory dinner for him in her posh, Upper East Side apartment, Let’s eat. I’m starving!
His happiest moment, though, came one evening when his hotel telephone rang and the operator said she had a call from a Mr. Shaw. “I thought, okay, he’s the local auto mechanic,” Frank told me. “But it was Artie Shaw! One of the greatest jazz clarin
et players who ever lived! Once I realized who it was, I was like, ‘Maestro!’” Artie Shaw had tracked down Frank to tell him no one had ever written so beautifully about how it felt to play music.
Frank never bragged about his writing, but he routinely told me about the amazing jazz quintet he played with each summer on Nantucket. “You have to hear this!” he said one night, after we’d closed the Foxhead. He drove me back to his house. Maggie was seated on a living room armchair when we arrived and she closed the book she’d been reading as Frank inserted into his VHS player a live performance he’d taped of his band. “Listen, the blues number is amazing.” It was past 3:00 AM, and, as I sat on the couch, I faded in and out of consciousness. Several feet away, Frank watched with an expression that approached unadulterated bliss. I felt as if the tape had been playing for hours. Desperately wanting to crawl between my bed’s warm sheets, I said, “Are they ever going to play the blues piece?” Frank stared at me in disbelief. “They’re playing it now!” he shouted. Maggie said, “Frank, let Tom go home. He’s sitting on the couch with one eye open.” I don’t remember walking home, but I’d learned that music, as much as literature, had shaped Frank’s identity. During his childhood, he’d taught himself how to play the piano, but it hadn’t been easy. “I could not just learn a tune, however slowly,” he once wrote in an essay, “and go on to another one. I had to play it over and over, so many times that it became engraved in the neurons of my brain, the muscles of my arms and hands, the nerves of my fingers.” Yet he assembled a repertoire. And, in his late twenties, while he still lived in New York, he played nightly gigs at a bar. One evening, between sets, his bass player vanished. Having no choice, Frank nervously took the stage.