Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (30 page)
And, after being insane for six months, once we returned to Texas, I did.
He was a short, pudgy, cherubic man who wore a gray suit and shiny, black penny loafers. Separated by a coffee table on which he kept a box of Kleenex tissues, I explained what I’d done and why I was wanted. Then I listed my symptoms. When I finished, he smiled and said, “You have major depression with an obsessive feature.”
Next, I described a dream. In it, I stood at the front of a classroom. But as I tried to speak, tiny globs of shit, rather than words, spewed out of my mouth and dappled the students’ faces like rain-drops.
“Feces and depressive guilt are commonly connected,” he said. Then he studied me and asked, “Who are you?”
I said I didn’t understand his question.
“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
?”
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
A
s 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.
s 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
.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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 department’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.
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.
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