by Grimes, Tom
Briefly flustered, Frank answered, “Oh. Of course, Tom. Absolutely.” Then he gave Hyperion permission to use the workshop’s name “in connection with the sale, advertising and promotion of the book.”
I decided to select stories from 1930 to 1999, write a foreword, and add a brief overview of the workshop’s seventy-year history. Every writer or writer’s estate would receive the same compensation for reprint rights, $500, and every living author would contribute a three- to five-hundred-word preface to his or her story. All profits would be donated to provide scholarships to workshop students. I wanted Frank to write an introduction, too, but I didn’t know what would be a reasonable fee. So I called and asked “How much? ” thinking Frank would say $1,500.
He answered, “For you, my friend, $3,000,” which was the exact amount he’d paid me for my The Eleventh Draft essay. He’d simply taken back my money. Plus, I gave him five thousand words, and he returned twelve hundred.
“Bastard,” I said, while Frank laughed, softly.
I knew he’d write a succinct, graceful introduction. Elegant brevity defined Frank’s nonfiction. But, at the time, I didn’t know that anxiety also accounted for his concision. Several years later, he described his feelings in, ironically, an essay entitled “Observations Now” that begins:
“I think most people who attempt to write with a degree of seriousness are curious about others doing the same thing. Writing is a lonely enterprise, after all. Some seem comfortable in the mental solitude.”
But, Frank admitted:I am uncomfortable writing, and I know a number of writers (although I won’t mention them) who feel the same way. The isolation, self-doubt, perfectionism and other idiosyncratic impediments to action—some completely irrational, almost like superstitions—mix in various ways in various people to create something close to dread at the sinister urgency of the blank page. For myself, once I’m up and moving, if not running, through the lines, I zip back and forth between feeling okay and feeling terrified. Once in a while I am exhilarated, but more often it is as if my inner self, my sense of myself, is at risk. Something like the tension one might feel watching the ivory ball circumnavigate the roulette wheel after having made a large, foolish, impulsive bet.
Given this, it’s odd that Frank chose to become a writer, but, as he said, a writer’s life is irrational. True, elation sometimes makes its way from a writer’s fingertips to his or her heart and, for a moment, the writer believes that he or she has fashioned a chain of perfectly conjoined words. But the feeling recedes. Then the sublime seems trite, the harmonious dissonant, and perfection imperfect. Writing’s daily difficulties humble a writer; few writers earn a living from their work; fewer still receive accolades; and, at best, two dozen a century are remembered. So what compels us to do it: a naïve but persistent hope for transcendence through art?
In his anthology introduction, Frank wrote:When I was a kid of eighteen I went to Paris. I had very little money, lived in an Algerian slum, ate so badly I lost half the hair on the back of my head from a vitamin deficiency, got robbed, got beaten up, and endured various other hardships. Nevertheless, I stayed, because I had read about prewar Paris—about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and all the others who used to hang out in “Boul Miche” at The Dome or The Select. Surely it would all start up again now that the war was over. I wanted to meet artists, I wanted to connect with the literary ex-pats I assumed must be there. But of course I was too late. There was no doubt an artistic community, but it was no longer open and welcoming, if indeed it had ever been as open as I imagined.
Dejected, Frank returned to the States, but he never forgot his youthful literary longing. Concluding his introduction, he added, “It has never surprised me that young American writers want to come to the Iowa Workshop. A place to read, write, and talk, a place to test ideas and to experiment. A literary community of some sophistication. Of course they want to come.”
By the time I entered the program, twenty-four new students came each August. Many of us published, many didn’t. Of those who did, I could choose very few to represent each decade. Between June and October of 1998, I read eighty story collections (having decided that novel excerpts would be less satisfying to readers). I wanted to present a variety of voices, subjects, styles, and sensibilities to refute the widespread notion that a formulaic “workshop story” existed. Tacitly, the anthology asked readers to decide whether Denis Johnson’s work differed from Jane Smiley’s work, or if Jayne Anne Phillips mimicked Raymond Carver.
Also, I felt the anthology needed to give the reader a sense of time, place, and student experiences, rather than simply being another soulless compilation of stories. So, I solicited recollections from graduates. Some had hated the workshop. A few griped about being overlooked. A famous Latina author accused the workshop of racism, which I asked her to write about, believing her remembrance would provide a unique perspective on the late 1970s; she politely refused. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham recalled “a fellow student slapping a story of mine down on the table and announcing to the members of our workshop, ‘This is just pornography.’” James Hynes wrote that, “In many ways, being at the Writers’ Workshop was like being in high school again. It was a cliquish, judgmental place, where your reputation could be decided in a moment. You weren’t judged on your hair or clothes, however, but on the contents of your bookshelf.” Despite these comments, though, a singular theme emerged. “What I loved best about the Workshop,” Tom Barbash wrote, “was that it was, and still is, a place where writing is sacred, paramount.” Cunningham added, “I actually walked around at night sometimes and stood for a while under certain lighted windows, knowing that inside someone I admired was struggling to put something down on paper, and that what was getting put onto paper might, in fact, be extraordinary.” Occasionally, something was. Flannery O’Conner’s classmate, Jean Wylder, remembered that “On the opening day of class, Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over against the wall. She was wearing what I was soon to think of as her ‘uniform’ for that year: plain gray skirt and neatly ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings, and brown penny loafers. Her only makeup was a trace of lipstick. [The writer] Elizabeth Hardwick once described her as a ‘quiet puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.’” But, several weeks later, “after Flannery finished reading her story, we sat there until Andrew Lytle gave meaning to our silence by saying Workshop was over for the day. For once, there was not going to be any critical dissecting.” Later that day, Wylder and a classmate went around Iowa City, picking flowers from people’s front yards. Then they walked across town and carried them to the cramped, second-floor apartment where O’Connor lived.
That fall, before I wrote the anthology’s foreword, I flew to Iowa City, hoping that a Proustian memory rush would close the nine-year gap between my arrival in Iowa and the workshop’s current incarnation. But the trip had the opposite effect; it made the era when I was a student seem geologically remote.
Frank had convinced the university’s administration to give the workshop the two-story, 150-year-old Dey House. It overlooked the Iowa River, had white clapboard siding, and jade green paint trimmed every windowsill, eave, and porch column. As I approached, walking along a curved cement path bordered by neatly clipped lawns, yellow leaves fell from the front yard’s tree. Inside, students sat in a spacious lounge, its walls painted a subdued, oaky color. And, although the fireplace didn’t work, upholstered couches surrounded a plush rug that lay on the polished wood floor. By contrast, our EPB lounge had had buzzing overhead lights, a plastic couch, a coffee-stained table, and a gray tile floor tattooed by crushed cigarettes. But more than the house, the students disoriented me: most of them appeared to be fifteen.
Once I’d entered Connie’s large office and hugged her, I said, “I know I’ve gotten older, but have these guys gotten younger?”
Connie nodded and said, “Yeah, a little bit.” A hundred e-mail messages striped her computer screen, and papers seemingl
y scattered in a tornado’s wake covered her desk. But once we took our seats, she ignored it all, leaned forward and said, “So tell me everything,” by which she meant my program, my writing, and the anthology.
“I want a 1999 graduate’s story to end it,” I said. “Whose work should I read?”
Without hesitating, Connie said, “ZZ Packer.” Then she gave me ZZ’s number.
After I left Connie’s office, I walked down the hall and knocked on Frank’s partially opened door. He positioned it this way, intentionally. The slim crevice created an illusory passageway between his world and the world outside that made him seem omnipresent, yet unavailable, except to Connie. When I stepped inside and saw his personal fireplace and the long, antique mahogany table around which he and his students gathered for workshop, I said, “Nice digs. You couldn’t have done this ten years earlier?”
He smiled. Then he said, “Sometimes you have to suffer for your art, Tom.” Knowing my eye would follow his, Frank scanned the room, as if to say, “Pretty sweet, no?” He wasn’t quite boasting. But, clearly, acquiring the coveted Dey House pleased him.
I lowered myself onto a cushioned armchair and its pillow’s soft exhalation whispered that, in a tangible way, the luxurious surroundings matched Frank’s age and stature. The workshop’s EPB offices and classrooms had been cramped and grim. But Frank had been leaner, then, and had no laurels to rest on. Now, his jowls bulged, he was sixty-two, and, the previous year, U.S. News & World Report had ranked Iowa number one among the nation’s three hundred creative writing programs. “It’s harder to get into the workshop than it is to get into Harvard medical school,” he told journalists, repeatedly.
“What’s up with the teenagers in the program?” I said.
Frank shrugged. “The MFA degree’s culturally acceptable. Most students earn a BFA and come straight here after college.” Then he pointed a finger at me and added, “But just because they’re young doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly talented. Read their stuff. Some of it’s terrific.”
“I have. I’m anthologizing Brady Udall’s ‘Buckeye the Elder.’”
“Great story,” Frank said.
In Brady’s preface, he admits:Frank had dismissed my first offering as the worst kind of amateurish yearnings, so I wasn’t hopeful about the reception “Buckeye” would get. For the first fifteen minutes of class, Frank allowed my fellow writers to do what comes natural in a Workshop class—they tore the story to bits. Frank fidgeted, shook his head sadly, and finally, when he could take no more, held up his hands to halt the proceedings and announced that “Buckeye the Elder” was a perfect story, there was not a flaw or blemish in it, not even a comma out of place, and no amount of second-guessing and nit-picking would change that. Send this story off right away, he urged me, and it will certainly be published.
The story won Playboy’s college fiction competition.
Frank said, “Come by the house for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll raise a glass.”
From my hotel, I called ZZ and asked her to meet me the next morning to talk about contributing an anthology story. After hesitating and dodging my request, she said she’d be at a downtown coffee shop around eleven.
“How will I recognize you?” I said.
“I’ll be the black one.”
I laughed. “Come on, ZZ. It’s not that bad.” But it was.
At first, she resisted my request for a story. To an extent, ZZ distrusted the swift, clamorous interest her work had generated. Before coming to Iowa, in her late twenties, she’d been a high school teacher, an SAT tutor, a coffee shop barista, and a barmaid. Given that I’d been a waiter when Frank accepted me, I understood her uneasiness. Good things were happening too fast; the effect could be disorienting. But she had that inexplicable aura of literary confidence. The instant I spotted her, I thought, writer. Despite this, ZZ and I had a problem: all of her stories were either published or unfinished. The only material she had was a novel excerpt that needed editing. “So send it to me,” I said. “We’ll edit it together.” And, by FedExing envelopes to each other over a period of two months, we did.
That evening, I brought a six-pack of Guinness to dinner, but Frank, I learned, no longer drank bourbon and beer. His internist had ordered him to begin a regimen of fast walking at the gym and to quit smoking—for good. He had also limited Frank’s daily alcohol consumption to two glasses of red wine, since red wine supposedly contains antioxidants that may prevent heart disease. Standing in his living room, Frank carefully tapped his huge, brimming glass against my bottle’s neck. Lowering his voice so Maggie couldn’t hear, he said, “The doctor specified ‘two glasses,’ but he didn’t specify what size.” Frank’s “two glasses” emptied a bottle of cabernet.
An hour later, Tim, who was eleven, and Frank topped off dinner with vanilla ice cream. “And pour some chocolate syrup over it,” Frank yelled to Maggie, who, from the kitchen, yelled back, “Great diet for a diabetic, Frank.” He merely glanced at me and grinned.
The following fall, when the anthology was published, I traveled to Iowa City to participate in a panel discussion. Onstage, Frank, two other writers, and I sat behind a long table and looked out at two hundred people. As Frank introduced me, he told everyone that if they hadn’t read City of God, they should. I was stunned. I thought he’d forgotten my existence as a writer. After the discussion ended, Frank, clearly exhausted, stooped forward, headed for an exit, and I couldn’t make my way through the crowd to catch him.
The next day, I had lunch with Fritz McDonald and two other workshop friends. Although of the four of us I was the only one who had published and continued to write, it wasn’t a source of tension among us. Still, we represented a typical workshop graduating class: three out of four hadn’t survived as writers. So I concluded the anthology with Fritz’s recollection, which, to me, captured how not surviving felt.
He wrote:I was most haunted by the Workshop the year I graduated. Like the last guest at a party, I lingered in Iowa City. I hung out with the new crop of students, religiously attended readings, drifted around the cramped, smoky pall of the Foxhead. In the afternoons, light slanted dully through my apartment window while I labored to transform a short story into a novel, the one story that had earned a positive reaction from my classmates. Evenings, I applied for teaching jobs in the worst academic job market in decades.
I was numb. I’d come to Iowa to be elevated into a literary world I’d fantasized about since I’d first read A Moveable Feast. For two years, I brushed up against it—the heightened talk about fictional craft; the late nights drinking with famous writers; the odd rhythm of days liberated from having to make a living. Literary fame seemed plausible. Close. A visiting eminence would save me from the sorrow of an ordinary life.
But it hadn’t, and now I spent hours in Prairie Lights investigating dust jackets and The Best American Short Stories for evidence of other graduates’ success. One by one, friends went off to careers, marriages, other places. I spent more time alone. I went out of my way to avoid people I knew on the streets of Iowa City, even those who, like me, had been unable to let go of the dream. One day, I slipped into EPB, the building where our classes were held, and in a dark hall, listened to the articulate voices of a workshop in progress.
My apartment overlooked the Oakland Cemetery, and each day, long ruminative walks among the gravestones led me to the Black Angel, a life-sized statue memorializing an anonymous citizen. Legend had it that touching the Angel brings death; I stroked its outstretched palm and my novel died. I piled up draft after draft of the same two chapters—false starts, dead ends, revised revisions.
Eventually, I ran out of money. I took a part-time job teaching freshman composition to indifferent students at a local community college. I moved away from the graveyard and Iowa City. I boxed the novel and put away Workshop voices, and in time, the last of my illusions about the literary life faded. In a wet Iowa summer, I married the best person I’ve known and everything changed.
What did I learn? That life goes on with or without fiction. I work for a marketing firm these days and write fiction when I can steal the minutes. Under trying circumstances, sentence by sentence, I progress. And this is how it should be. As the first act in my writing life, the Workshop allowed me to confront my most destructive habit—getting lost in the lifestyle and not the work.
I have a photograph of us back in our heyday at the Mill, and whenever I look at it I feel lucky and blessed. On the long list of students who have attended the Workshop, many do not survive, their faith extinguished. Frank Conroy had said over and over that “the writing life is hard,” and I’d resented him for it. Now, I owe him a debt of gratitude and I think I understand him. How difficult it must be to pass judgment on so much hope.
A year ago, a prominent literary journal sent me a postcard; it had just published one of Fritz’s stories.
After lunch, we wandered through used bookstores, skimming long out-of-print novels and story collections. When I checked, the time was three o’clock. Frank had told me to come to his house that afternoon; I thought he meant late afternoon. So I waited. But when I called at four, he said, “I thought you were coming this afternoon.” Then he paused, and he must have glanced at a clock, because he added, “Well, I guess four o’clock still is the afternoon.”