Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  I’d misunderstood him; and today, I wish I had arrived an hour earlier. At three o’clock, autumn’s blue sky seemed eternal. By four, dusk began to fall, and a dull gray light covered the rooftops and the river. Uncharacteristically eager for me to arrive, Frank stared out a foyer window and watched the lawn darken. Soon, he turned on a lamp. Pacing through the rooms, he tapped a piano key and, briefly, a despondent, minor note reverberated. I’ve imagined this, of course. But Maggie was out; and down the street, Tim was playing with his friends. So when Frank answered the phone and asked where I was, I immediately felt his loneliness and regretted stealing the hour I hadn’t known he’d wanted.

  At first, I didn’t understand Frank ’s urgency. But sometime earlier he’d begun to suffer from depression. When he told me, I admitted that I’d been paranoid for a year and I sent him excerpts from my journals, which, he said, riveted him. Now he wanted to talk about our experiences.

  Angry with myself for making him wait, I ran through campus, then sprinted across the bridge. Breathless, I hustled up the long hill. Frank opened the front door before I rang the bell, and, as he shook my hand, I leaned forward and half hugged him. Still winded, I removed my coat. Frank poured two drinks, which we carried into the living room. As we sat opposite each other, logs burned in the fireplace, warming my skin. By then, we’d ceased to be teacher and pupil, or surrogate father and dutiful son. We were equals, trying to answer unanswerable questions. Frank got straight to the point. “That paragraph you wrote, about seeing an apparition of yourself crawling along the floor, begging you to kill it,” he said. “Why does the mind begin to attack itself?”

  I confessed that, after puzzling over the same question, I didn’t know. “Terror?” I guessed. “Pain? Maybe the mind wants to eradicate what it hates, which is its own projection.”

  “But the process contradicts the impulse for self-preservation. So the instinct can’t be hardwired into the brain.”

  “I don’t think it is. I think it’s learned, or nurtured.”

  I told Frank that another writer had explained to me that the brain has a “switch” connected to our “fight or flee” instinct, and its accompanying rush of fear. If the switch is flipped too many times, it can’t be turned off. So our fear never subsides, and after a while the brain can’t hold itself together.

  I added, “Writing a book changes you.” Frank nodded. “When you’re finished, if you’re lucky, you remain whole; if you’re not, you shatter.”

  Or “crack,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. In 1936, Esquire magazine published his essay “The Crack-Up,” in which he wrote, “There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that you will never be as good a man again.”

  Sixty years later, in a GQ essay, Frank wrote, “I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald as a kindred soul. I’m not thinking of the quality of his work . . . but of what I take to be his underlying state of mind—a tense mixture of manic energy and deep unease. I believe it was there long before his breakdown.”

  To read Fitzgerald’s confessional essays, Frank claimed, “is to understand not the etiology but the subjective reality, the pain, the darkness, the confusion, of a man hitting bottom.”

  “Such an experience,” he added, “puts an end to innocence. One is violently changed by such trouble. For most people, a nervous breakdown, whatever the causes, constitutes the most profound event in their lives, creating such deep changes in their understanding of themselves and of the world that they are forced in many ways to begin all over again.”

  “Have you come all the way back?” Frank asked me. “After the paranoia, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Not even with the pills?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  We talked for another hour and, although I can’t recollect what we said, I believe our conversation may have shaped what Frank wrote two years later. He’d collected his essays—forty years’ worth—and published them as a book titled Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On. To link them, Frank composed “observations” and, in 2001, he finally admits:The term ‘nervous breakdown’ is currently out of fashion, but I allow myself to use it because that is what I used, several years after the fact, to describe to myself what happened to me as I finished my autobiography thirty-five years ago. I’ve never written about it, in part because I don’t think I can adequately describe it. Indirection is the best I can do. A fear of consciousness itself, fear of myself, beginning on a single afternoon when the sky fell (Chicken Little was right!) and continuing for a number of years of panic and struggle. My condition became my life, and in those days there were neither pills nor any appropriate theoretical models of brain function to help explain what was going on. I could only, out of shame and great effort, hide the inner turmoil, put on a mask of normalcy and soldier through one day at a time. It was a close thing, a very close thing.

  Long past dark, Tim returned. Then Frank and I took our drinks into the kitchen, where I helped him prepare dinner, slicing whatever vegetables he slid my way on the countertop, as we stood side by side. The three of us ate in the small, single-windowed breakfast nook, our plates, glasses, and silverware set on an old metal table with a glazed white surface. Pretending to be completely absorbed by his food, and displaying a young boy’s guile, Tim said, apropos of nothing, “You know, I think a Mercedes would be a nice gift for the family.” Not for him, but for his parents, to whom the idea obviously had never occurred. As a meaningless aside he added, “X’s dad has one.” Having offered his father advice, rather than requesting a present, Tim returned to eating, seemingly unconcerned with his father’s response. Frank and I smiled. Then he said to Tim, gently, “Well, X’s dad is a doctor, and he makes more money than I do.” Tim asked how much more. “Not a lot,” Frank said, “but enough to make a difference.” Staring at a piece of meat before placing it in his mouth, Tim said, “Well, it’s just something for you to think about.”

  After we had cleared the table and laid our dishes in the sink, Frank said, “Come on, I’ll drive you to the hotel. I go to bed now at nine thirty.”

  With Tim and Gracie, their golden Labrador retriever, occupying the van’s backseat, Frank stopped outside the hotel doors. Then he looked at me and said, “I’ll see you.”

  Figuratively, Frank hadn’t “seen” me when we first met. I was a ghost he walked past in an auditorium’s lobby. Now he didn’t question the fact that he’d see me again. But had he wanted a cigarette rather than a cup of tea and walked out another door that morning—it was so bright and warm then in Key West, and so dark and cold in Iowa when I stepped out of his van—I never would have seen him. Instead, after waiting for twenty minutes, I would have pedaled home on my bike, not in a rush, simply disappointed, rather than enraged to the point where I tore Stop-Time in half and told Jody that Frank Conroy could go fuck himself. I was even angry the day he called, thinking I’d be asked to cover another waiter’s shift. But Frank’s voice had surprised me, and what he said directed me toward the life I’d hoped to lead. I didn’t get everything I longed for, but I got more than enough. True, nothing will quell my chronic doubt or fill my depthless emptiness, and I’m not ungrateful for all I have. I simply don’t know how to love it because I don’t know how to love me. But I’ve escaped my father’s mockery and earned Frank’s admiration. Yet had Frank not driven me that morning to the heart of my anger, which led to me shredding what he’d made and what I longed to make—a book—his opinion of me may not have mattered. (I never told him I’d ripped up a copy of Stop-Time, although his reaction likely would have been, “So you had to buy another copy. I’m a buck richer!” before adding, in a low voice, “But you know, Tom, Nazis destroyed books, too. Consider your company, my friend.”) In the end, I may have been no more than another student with some talent. Of course, what my other life might have been like is unknowable. But I know this: if I hadn�
�t met him, I wouldn’t be typing these words, hoping to marry meaning, clarity, and sense to memory in order to keep him alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Collecting Frank’s essays and publishing them in book form was Maggie’s idea. Frank consented, with a caveat: her idea, her task. Hunting through unmarked cartons, searching for yellowed newspapers and wrinkled magazines that contained his work, would have bored Frank before he opened box one. So, with his blessing, Maggie became his official archivist. “Miss Lee,” he called her, affectionately, referring to Truman Capote’s devoted assistant, Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Maggie enjoyed finding essays and articles Frank had written after he’d finished Stop-Time. He wrote strictly to make money, then. “Not very much money, to be sure,” he notes, in one of his “observations,” “but I did it occasionally. Stop-Time had been a critical success, but had brought in next to nothing.” However, the New Yorker had printed chapters of his memoir and the magazine’s legendary and eccentric editor, Mr. William Shawn, who lunched every day at the Algonquin Hotel on a dry English muffin, urged Frank to write Notes and Comments columns. Over the next two years, Frank composed a dozen pieces. But, he said, “I finally stopped because I overreacted to rejection. Whenever [Mr. Shawn] turned one down, even with good reason, it broke my heart.” (Frank later counseled students not to be “weakened by rejection”; handle it, or you’ll never be a writer.) Despite Frank’s New Yorker experience, he accepted magazine assignments. Between the late 1960s and 2001, he wrote about sex, shooting pool, music, his father, becoming a father—in his thirties, and then again at age fifty-two—the workshop, the jazz trumpet virtuoso Winton Marsalis, Charles Manson, and the Rolling Stones. “Who are they?” he asked his girlfriend. Believing that Frank was putting her on—he wasn’t—she said, “You haven’t heard the name Mick Jagger?” Frank answered, “He’s in the group, right? He sings?” (After meeting Jagger, Frank described him in the article as a “narcissistic egomaniac.”) Frank’s literary pittance, combined with tips he earned playing the piano at various Nantucket bars, kept him from starving, but not from collecting unemployment. During the island’s off-season, almost no work existed; hence, little shame was involved. His neighbors accepted government handouts, too. Frank decided that “the cliché is true: when you don’t really need money, it’s easy to get, and when you absolutely must have it, it’s hard to come by.”

  His literary friends asked him why he didn’t write another memoir. “A lot of people expected me to continue the story of my life,” he later wrote, “but I was determined not to write that kind of book again. Stop-Time stands alone, and I’m glad of that. I did not think of the book as the start of a career, I thought of it as a thing unto itself, and was astonished that I’d been able to make it.”

  Yet, one year after publishing his essay collection, he unexpectedly began another memoir, then hoped he’d live long enough to finish it.

  A malignant tumor in his colon had metastasized. By the time his physician detected it, Frank’s cancer had reached stage four. There is no stage five. In four to six months, he’d be dead.

  I hadn’t seen Frank since we’d had dinner, three and a half years earlier. We spoke often, of course. But my identity had been shaped so deeply by him that his physical absence no longer mattered. In my life, he was ever present.

  When I called one evening, Maggie answered. Frank now spoke to few people. He wanted to say only what was necessary, I imagine.

  After Maggie handed Frank the phone, he and I were momentarily silent. I remember lying on the couch in the room where I wrote, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind and before me, his books beside mine. We’d each written four and edited one connected to Iowa. 2,200 pages, 600,000 words, our lives converging like the letter V, moving through time from the moment we each said, “I want to be a writer.” Six words then, and six different words now. Midway through our conversation, Frank’s voice began to quake, and he said, “You know I love you, right?”

  He wanted to be certain I understood, and he was asking me to release him. “Right?” he said.

  Softly, but unequivocally, I said, “Yes, I know.”

  Then, beginning to cry, he said, “I have to go,” and the receiver rattled as his trembling hand dropped it into its cradle.

  He didn’t even hear me say, “Okay.” But then, he didn’t need to.

  While writing this memoir, I believed I knew Frank completely. The illusion was necessary. But the truth is: like all of us, Frank was a mosaic. We know a person not only by what we observe and what he or she says or tells us but also by what we infer, imagine, and are told by others. Toward the end of his life, the latter is how I knew Frank.

  A few weeks ago, I e-mailed Frank’s son Will to ask if I had certain dates right—the date Frank learned he had cancer, and the date Frank flew to Washington DC. The reason for his trip was simple. The news headline read, “Iowa Writers’ Workshop Wins National Humanities Medal”: The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop has been selected to receive the National Humanities Medal, presented by the U.S. government to honor America’s leaders in the humanities. Only one organization has been honored in the past—all the other honorees have been individuals—and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the first university-based organization to be honored.

  President George W. Bush will present the medal to Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop, in a White House ceremony today (Thursday, Feb. 27) in Washington, D.C.

  “The Iowa Workshop was the first in the country, and I am accepting this award for all the people who have built it over its 67-year history,” Conroy said. “We are deeply grateful for this national recognition.”

  Will answered:Dad was diagnosed shortly (like a week or two) before he took that trip to Washington. The trip happened between the diagnosis and the surgery, actually. A weird, dark time. When I asked Dad about that DC event I remember him saying it was surreal and that the various characters—Bushes, Lynne Cheney, Clarence Thomas, et al,. looked somehow like cardboard cutouts.

  My favorite story about that—which Maggie told me and which, to me, is pure Dad—had to do with the after party held in some White House room near the Oval Office—people mingling and sipping white wine, etc. There was a small military brass band on a little stage beside a roped-off piano that had been a gift from some king or sultan or someone—a piano not meant to be played, just displayed. But of course it was a nice instrument and Dad removed the velvet rope and walked to it and started to sit down. One of the band, a black guy, a bit startled, leaned over and informed Dad that he was not allowed to play the piano. Dad just nodded and said, “It’s cool, babe,” and got himself set and started to play. Probably “Autumn Leaves” or one of the standards he could swing through so well, or maybe a twelve-bar blues—I don’t know. But the surprised band checked each other and quickly realized they’d have way more fun with Dad than with whatever (undoubtedly stiff) playlist they’d prepared, and so they joined in. I guess it was a great jam—a real foot stomp in the White House—and it changed the feel of the whole room and prompted high fives on stage and smiles all around.

  I love that story. Not only could Dad always seem to understand the absurdity of the velvet rope/display piano kind of bullshit, he also had a quietly disarming way of making everyone else see the absurdity of it too. And as a result those guys just dug in and swung hard. How cool is that? But I’m only repeating this secondhand—Maggie was there. I wish I had been.

  Had I paraphrased Will’s e-mail, you would have experienced the episode thirdhand, and Frank would not have become “Dad.” After all, Frank had three biological sons. He wasn’t simply my surrogate father.

  Also, I got certain facts wrong; or not facts, exactly, but interpretations and perceptions. I’d mailed a published excerpt of this memoir to Maggie, Will, Tim, and Frank’s oldest son, Dan, offering them my version of “Frank.” But what if it didn’t conform to their version, or versions? Would Maggie hate her husband’s
portrayal? Would his sons loathe their father’s depiction? Would they despise what I’d written, and me as well? I realized that Frank didn’t belong solely to me, and I worried about what they’d think. But Will’s e-mail relieved me:Hey Tom!

  This is an excellent piece—really first rate, and I happily learned a few things I didn’t know about Dad.

  And his e-mail surprised me:

  Also—and because I can’t be any kind of fair critic of my father’s work I’ve appropriately kept my mouth shut about it—I really love Body & Soul and I was glad to read your thoughts about it. My dirty little family secret is that I love B&S even more than Stop-Time. . . . Body & Soul seemed to me to be as honest a book as Stop-Time, but it came mostly from love rather than anger. Needless to say I’m very glad Dad got to a point where he could write from such a place.

  And my perception about Frank’s hands, as described in the essay, was wrong. I’d written, “His hands were large, his fingers long, ideal for a piano player.” But, by e-mail, Maggie corrected me:I had to smile because actually, Frank had small hands. He was secretly proud that he couldn’t reach an octave but came up with a way to do it if required.