Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (33 page)
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.”
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.”
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.”
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:
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.
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
C
ollecting 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.”
ollecting 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.”
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