by Grimes, Tom
“Who’s Tom?”
As I tried to distill an answer, I pictured my brain’s dark canals and my mind’s eye flying above them as firing neurons brightened the terrain the way a lightning storm illuminates a desert floor. Then I said, “A writer.”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t mean, What do you do? I mean, Who are you?”
The concept still baffled me. Who is anyone? Are our personalities static or fluid? From moment to moment, don’t we change? Finally, I said, “I don’t know.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “There’s no ‘you.’ You’re a brilliant mimic. But take away the fictional personas you invent and nothing exists. Without a novel to write, you have no idea who you are.”
Then he wrote a prescription for Prozac and warned me to stop drinking. “Prozac won’t help if you drink every night.”
As I took the slip of paper from his hand, I said, “Will Prozac change the way I write?”
He shrugged. “I can’t say.” Then he escorted me to the door. So what was I, a void capable of creating masks and imagining voices? If Prozac worked and my obsessions waned, would my desire to worry about characters wane, too? Would the medication scramble my brain in a way that it couldn’t be unscrambled?
Once it became apparent that I would not sleep, read, or write well again until chemicals subdued my paranoia, I filled the prescription and brought home ninety green and white capsules. Facing our bathroom mirror, I stared at the hollow shell once known as “me.” Then I swallowed a capsule, flicked the light switch, and the room instantly turned black.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY
As it was early summer in Iowa, Frank wore sneakers, khaki pants, and a rumpled long-sleeved shirt with its sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. When the streetlight changed from red to green, he crossed the narrow, tree-lined, two-lane road outside the Foxhead without looking to see if a car approached from either direction. Jody and I were leaning against the small community theater building. Inside, Maggie was directing Dogg’s Hamlet, a play in which Tim had a role as one of the schoolboys attempting to mount a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. We hadn’t seen Frank for a year. I’d been taking Prozac for six months and had made a modest effort to drink less. Frank hadn’t. Smiling like a mischievous teenager, he strolled toward us carrying a clear plastic cup filled with bourbon and ice. He stepped onto the sidewalk, kissed Jody, then shook my hand.
I said, “Shouldn’t you be inside?”
Frank jiggled the ice in his cup. “I decided it was time for a refreshment. You know, the play is about Hamlet. That doesn’t mean it is Hamlet.”
Several weeks earlier, in late May, Connie had telephoned to ask me to teach once again at the workshop. By then, Frank and Maggie had rented their house to a visiting Israeli professor. For the first time in three years, Jody and I wouldn’t be staying there. We would see Frank and Maggie that evening only, and the brevity of the time we would spend together signaled an era’s end. Six and a half years had passed since the Key West morning Frank and I first crossed paths. The encounter didn’t feel like it had occurred yesterday, yet neither of us noted time’s passage. Seemingly, our friendship had no beginning or end. Instead, we inhabited a continuous now. Frank’s presence in my life and, I imagine, my presence in his, superseded corporeality. My need to be near him had diminished, but, to me, his voice had become as essential as air. Silencing it would be like silencing an octave’s note by extracting an ivory key from a piano’s keyboard.
As the three of us waited for Maggie and Tim, neither Frank nor I realized how infrequently we would see each other in the coming years. But rather than growing distant, like objects observed through the wrong end of a telescope, our separation created a magnifying effect and we felt closer to each other. Our telephone conversations seemed singular and continuous, as if we’d barely paused midsentence. Yes, our appearances changed. Frank’s silver hair thinned. His jowls thickened. His neck grew puffy. And his midsection no longer resembled Body & Soul’s eerily sleek author’s photograph—although, as yet, he didn’t rely on a cane to support his arthritic joints. Meanwhile, from playing basketball, I’d become muscular. I wore reading glasses. And my beard had faded to white. But, invisibly, our affection deepened. And we saw no need to acknowledge it.
At sunset, the play ended. In separate cars, we drove to Frank and Maggie’s house. Several window lamps glowed and illuminated patches of lawn. Knowing Jody and I wouldn’t spend the summer there made me melancholy. Also, I’d hoped to explain my paranoia to Frank, but two poets arrived. One had a bottle of tequila, and every few minutes he raised it overhead and shouted, “Hecho en Mexico!” The other lit a joint, took a hit, and then offered it to me. I passed. I didn’t throw back shots, either. I drank beer, judiciously, to Frank ’s surprise. Soon he began to play the piano, and blues filled the living room. Over the din, Maggie said she hadn’t seen Frank so animated in months. Yet, he had less energy; that was clear to me. He’d also stopped closing the Foxhead three nights a week, in part because he’d outgrown his need for its atmosphere. The students were younger, the anxiety he felt while writing Body & Soul had dissipated, and his disappointment over the novel’s reception had sapped his strength. He resembled a boxer who, after his best punch failed to knock down his opponent, returned to his corner psychologically defeated. As for me, had Frank noticed my emotional vulnerability, he would have asked about it.
But we didn’t reveal our secrets. Instead, we squandered the evening. The next day Frank left town, and three years passed before I returned to Iowa City.
Two months after Frank headed for Nantucket, W. W. Norton & Co. published City of God. Before the novel reached bookstore shelves, Publishers Weekly called it a “clichéd, disappointing yarn.”
Charlie’s blurb described the novel as “funny, smart, dreamy, brilliant, exact and surreal.” Kirkus countered with a “starred” review, which began: “Pungent with the lunatic language of consumer-driven tabloid America, this horrifying prophecy of a book . . . seems closer to social commentary than satire.” It ended: “Grimes makes a quantum leap into DeLillo land.”
The novel received six reviews. Total. Most positive, some ecstatic. But the New York Times Book Review ignored the book, and four thousand copies sold before my once again never-paper-backed novel vanished.
But in the United Kingdom, the prestigious house Picador published the novel. And in France, Gallimard issued it. According to London’s newspaper, the Guardian, Gallimard had the “best back-list in the world.” The firm had published Proust, Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, and Roth. Its authors had won eighteen Nobel Prizes, twenty-seven Goncourt Prizes (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer), and eighteen Grand Prizes for the Novel awarded by the French Academy. Gallimard’s reputation exceeded FSG’s, and its name now graced my novel’s cover.
So, was I a success, or a failure? That’s the wrong question to ask. While revising this book I’ve had to press the language more firmly. As Frank repeatedly said, a reader must always feel the pressure of the writer’s soul behind the words. What he meant by soul I would call one’s deepest sense of self. My psychiatrist claims that whenever I’m not writing I don’t know who I am. But I know exactly who I am. I’m a writer, and despite my failures, rejections, and minor successes I’ve never questioned my longing to be a great writer. Now, I’ve nearly run out of time and I may never become one. Yet all along I’ve known so deeply who I am that, until now, I’ve been ashamed to admit it, even to myself.
In addition to keeping my literary ambitions to myself, I also deftly masked my shattered state of mind. But this is what a writer does: creates and wears masks. So no one I worked with sensed, or at least never asked me about, my paranoia, although after reading City of God someone did say to me, with regard to the dialogue of various characters, “You must hear voices in your head.” I answered, “You have no idea.”
Late one Friday afternoon, the English depart
ment’s chair summoned me to her office. I was certain that she planned to fire me. Instead, she asked me to direct the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and as its reputation developed Frank enjoyed taking partial credit for the program’s growing national stature. His son Will once told me, “Dad would shout, ‘That’s my boy down there!’” Then, after a slight pause, Will added, “Whenever your success reflected well on him, of course.”
“Befriend your dean,” Frank told me. “It also wouldn’t hurt if you knew your university’s president.”
“I play basketball with him three times a week.”
“Well, if you guard him,” Frank said, “let him score.”
I was afraid the job would steal my writing time, and it did. Still, the quickness with which the five-year-old program developed was due, in part, to good fortune. I was allowed to hire two well-published writers, and within a year secured an Endowed Chair in Creative Writing position, which, to my astonishment, I began to fill with my literary idols: Tim O’Brien, Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, and Robert Stone. My bad luck as a writer had been transformed inexplicably to good luck as the program’s director. Writers who were once my heroes were now my friends, and I found myself having conversations I’d never expected to have. But we understand one another. As writers, we each strive for perfection. I’ve known Tim, who continues to teach in the program, for ten years now. And he’s so modest that occasionally I have to remind him that he wrote The Things They Carried, a book he revises each time a new paperback edition is issued. He says, “I can always make the book a little bit better.” We also understand that our next novel will be as hard or even harder to write than those we’ve already put on a shelf and forgotten, and we often doubt ourselves, and our purpose. “I don’t know if I even believe in the efficacy of words any longer,” Barry said to me one day. For years, he’s struggled with an unfinished novel. “There’s a lot of Christ in it,” he’d announce from time to time, hoping to make the book make sense to him, the writer writing it, who’s completely lost. One evening in workshop, he read the Twenty-third Psalm to his students. “Aspire to create language of that power and beauty,” he told them. We treat students as young writers. Most of them enter Tim’s workshop expecting to hear about blood, war, and metaphysics. Instead, he lectures them about proper pronoun and comma usage. “Meaning, sense, clarity”: Frank’s mantra, repeated endlessly.
I no longer write Frank ’s words on my classroom’s blackboard as frequently as I did. Instead I say, “Every good story contains a clock, a period of time during which all dramatic events must begin and end. After Holden Caulfield is kicked out of Pencey Prep, he has three days to get home for Christmas. Nick Carraway rents a cottage beside Gatsby’s. Summer begins when he arrives; fall arrives when he departs. The seasons contain the story. Understanding how time operates in your story will help you write it.” As I speak, I see students jotting down what I’ve just said, making notes. It’s taken me thirty-five years, but, in my idiosyncratic way, I can now talk to young writers. And, as the program’s director, I’ve matured the way Frank must have matured, by learning that we are all simply writers who travel in the same literary universe.
Two years after I became the program’s director, a colleague at work told me that Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home, located ten miles from the university, had been put up for sale. Many critics consider Porter one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her fiction, but I hardly knew her work. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to do what I could to keep the house she’d lived in from vanishing.
The small, nineteenth-century building stood on a corner lot in Kyle, Texas, ten miles from campus. The town’s population: 2,000. The town: nothing more than a central Texas railroad line’s way station. I’d made an appointment to look at the house. Carroll Wiley, a fund-raiser for the university, accompanied me. Standing on the street, we saw a weather-stained clapboard shack listing on the brittle stone foundation beneath it. In her fiction, Porter describes the house as a Southern mansion, a kind of Tara.
A pecan tree shaded the weedy backyard, and a rotting lean-to had fallen onto a pile of rusted gardening equipment. The porch’s roof and floor were soggy; a torn, decaying sofa, covered with dog hair and damp to its core, sat near the rear door. Cobwebs from the low eaves brushed my head as I stepped inside. The small kitchen had been remodeled in the 1950s with tin cabinets, a yellow Formica countertop, and a porcelain sink. I scanned the dining room’s maple floors and its casement windows. The room gave off a serene vibration. With sunlight and some white curtains, it could be pleasant. Off the parlor was a sitting room; through that a small bedroom with an unattractive built-in closet, but a surprisingly spacious bathroom, which I later discovered had been the bedroom Porter had shared with her three siblings, as, back then, everyone in the family had used an outhouse.
Carroll stood next to me, waiting. “Well, what do you think?”
“It’s a mess,” I said. Then, with a comic sense of hope, I added, “Let’s save it.”
I said this quixotically, but perhaps karma guided me because Sam Lawrence had been Katherine Anne Porter’s publisher. In the same way he convinced Frank to write Body & Soul, he’d convinced Porter to finish her only novel, Ship of Fools.
But preserving the house—which she described, in a letter to a friend, as a “dreary little place, empty, full of dust, even smaller than I remembered it”—would be expensive. So, Carroll, I, and a few Kyle residents formed a committee and announced our preservation efforts. Between April and September, we raised $35,000. As the house alone cost $75,000, we decided to have a fund-raiser in the backyard. In ninety-degree heat, I outlined my vision to twenty people seated on folding chairs. I explained that I saw the house as a writer’s residence and a place to bring visiting authors. “Let them use Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home,” I said, “to extend literature.” After I finished speaking, a tall gentleman approached me and said, “I’m very interested in this.” Then he left.
He was Bill Johnson. During the Great Depression, his father had purchased Kyle ranchland for nine dollars an acre. Through the thirty-five-hundred-acre ranch ran the Blanco River, where Porter had swum and fished in a deep green pool called “Halifax Hole.” Later, she wrote about the place in her novella Noon Wine. By the time I met Bill, he ran his family’s multimillion-dollar foundation. Wanting to do something for Kyle, he wrote a check to buy the house. Then we began to restore it.
We replicated historical detail as best we could. We agreed that the front porch had not originally rested on concrete, so we jettisoned the cement and set the porch on wooden posts. Then we balanced the house on a new foundation and screened in the back porch. At that point, I estimated that we needed another $400,000 to complete the renovation and $1,000,000 to operate it and fund a visiting writers series. I was hesitant to proceed until we had money to cover both.
One evening in his office, where we’d been meeting, Bill said to me, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” He’d contribute $400,000. Then, if we needed $25,000 a year to cover initial operating expenses, he’d handle that as well. Bill had discovered personal, cultural, and historical threads he didn’t wish to see broken. By preserving the house, we were weaving these threads, and then the weave grew more intricate.
Curt Engelhorn, the fourteenth-richest man in the world, was the son of Porter’s childhood friend Erna, who had lived across the street from the house. At seventy-one, he lived in Switzerland, but his sister Elizabeth owned a ranch in west Texas. Her close friend, Mary Giberson, said to me, “You know, Curt’s coming through town. I think he might like to see the house where his mother played.” Three months later, Curt arrived. As he walked through the rooms of the small house he, like Bill, may have sensed the thread stitching us all together, because, after I wrote him a letter requesting a gift, he gave us $1,200,000.
Two years later, the house was designated a national literary landm
ark. At the ceremony, Tim spoke about Katherine Anne Porter. As I listened and contemplated the improbable story of preserving her house, I thought of Frank, Sam Lawrence, and me, and how mysteriously all of our lives had been woven together. And how the weave continues to add new colors as writers come to read their work, hold classes for MFA students, and pay homage to Katherine Anne Porter’s ghost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Publishing a fiction anthology by Iowa graduates was Leigh Haber’s idea. She was an editor at Hyperion, the firm owned by Disney to which Pat Mulcahy had defected when she left Little, Brown. Leigh called Henry and asked him to recommend an editor. When he named me, Leigh agreed. I was certain I could do a good job, yet I’m still shocked whenever I see my name below the anthology’s title. But I told Henry and Leigh I wouldn’t edit the book without Frank’s approval. So Henry contacted Frank to ask for it.
“At first,” Henry told me, “Frank thought I was asking him to edit the book.”
Frank explained that he couldn’t take on the project as he was already editing an essay collection by Iowa grads called The Eleventh Draft.
Henry said, “There was an awkward silence when I told him I was asking for his blessing for you to edit the anthology.”