Mentor: A Memoir (11 page)
Authors: Tom Grimes
Frank and I had written our first books in our mid- to late twenties. Each concerned an absent father and adolescence. All comparisons end there.
Stop-Time
’s achievement eclipsed my novel by such magnitude that I dreaded telling Frank of its existence. I believed the book’s publication might diminish his affection for me, and he’d lose interest in the novel he expected me to write. He might even feel betrayed. Jody said he wouldn’t. When I admitted my anxiety to Charlie, he agreed with her.
Stop-Time
’s achievement eclipsed my novel by such magnitude that I dreaded telling Frank of its existence. I believed the book’s publication might diminish his affection for me, and he’d lose interest in the novel he expected me to write. He might even feel betrayed. Jody said he wouldn’t. When I admitted my anxiety to Charlie, he agreed with her.
In my study, Charlie sat in the gray armchair. I leaned forward in my desk chair, hands clasped between my knees. “I sold my first novel,” I said to him. “Not the one I’m working on, another one.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Great. When does it come out?”
“May. You think Frank will resent it?”
“No.”
“Then would you do me a favor? Read the edited version, because the book sucks.”
The clumsiness of my prose stunned me. Why would anyone want to publish the novel? I felt ashamed to have it attached to my name. For two weeks, I worked at the dining room table, rewriting the novel sentence by sentence. I red-lined deletions and penciled in additions. The finished pages resembled a Pollock canvas. As I retyped them, I continued to improve the book one word at a time. Exhausted, I let Jody read the new draft, and once she’d approved it, I handed it to Charlie and hoped for his blessing. I trusted his judgment for a reason besides friendship.
During our first workshop, he’d written a story called “The Point.” Frank, who rarely doled out praise, suggested it might even be publishable. “Although you use ‘and then’ a lot,” he said. “And you overdo the physical description of Mrs. Gurney.” He then read it aloud: “‘Her breasts sagged away like sacks of wet sand, slumping off to either side.’” Frank paused. When he continued, his voice rose as he pinpointed a textual flaw. “‘There were long whitish scars on them, as if [and I’m italicizing to convey Frank’s emphasis]
a wild man or a bear had clawed her
.’ They’re stretch marks, for Christ’s sake! Jesus! She’s thirty-seven! From where I’m sitting, that looks pretty good. Lighten up!”
a wild man or a bear had clawed her
.’ They’re stretch marks, for Christ’s sake! Jesus! She’s thirty-seven! From where I’m sitting, that looks pretty good. Lighten up!”
Before class, I’d found Charlie seated on the hallway floor, his back tilted against the brick wall. I squatted next to him. “The story’s great,” I said. “I don’t mean workshop great. I mean,
great
great.” I told Charlie to mail it to the
Atlantic Monthly
. Its fiction editor, Michael Curtis, had liked my work, and I wrote him a letter, praising “The Point.” He rejected the story. A month later, the
New Yorker
accepted it, and, later, the story appeared in
The Best American Stories 1991
.
great
great.” I told Charlie to mail it to the
Atlantic Monthly
. Its fiction editor, Michael Curtis, had liked my work, and I wrote him a letter, praising “The Point.” He rejected the story. A month later, the
New Yorker
accepted it, and, later, the story appeared in
The Best American Stories 1991
.
Why had Michael Curtis rejected Charlie’s story? Why had Frank been enchanted by my novel, which someone else had rated B-? No one knows. The ground a writer stands on is no firmer than water. Still, I needed Charlie’s assurance that my book was, at some level, good.
Several days passed, and I interpreted his silence as disappointment. But something else had kept him away. He found the book unspeakably sad. “At one point, I just had to put down the pencil and take a walk,” he said.
The revision astonished my editor. “What happened?” he said.
I answered, “I went to school.”
CHAPTER NINE
T
he week I submitted my revised novel with its new title,
A Stone of the Heart
(a line taken from a Yeats poem), Frank read in public from
Body & Soul
. I sat in the crowded auditorium’s balcony as he shuffled into the spotlight much like he had in Key West. His woolen blazer drooped from his shoulders, its visible pocket misshapen and baggy from being reached into repeatedly for a pack of cigarettes. Perhaps the balcony’s angle changed my perspective, but he appeared shorter than six foot two and projected less power from this distance than he did in class, which was the only setting where I’d seen him assert authority—authority that pertained solely to, as he called it, the “text.” At times, I believed Frank could run an entire workshop without students and not notice our absence. He and the “text” would argue.
he week I submitted my revised novel with its new title,
A Stone of the Heart
(a line taken from a Yeats poem), Frank read in public from
Body & Soul
. I sat in the crowded auditorium’s balcony as he shuffled into the spotlight much like he had in Key West. His woolen blazer drooped from his shoulders, its visible pocket misshapen and baggy from being reached into repeatedly for a pack of cigarettes. Perhaps the balcony’s angle changed my perspective, but he appeared shorter than six foot two and projected less power from this distance than he did in class, which was the only setting where I’d seen him assert authority—authority that pertained solely to, as he called it, the “text.” At times, I believed Frank could run an entire workshop without students and not notice our absence. He and the “text” would argue.
As a boy, he’d lived in New York City in a small, Upper East Side apartment where his bedroom’s shelves held eight hundred paperbacks. He wrote in
Stop-Time
:
Stop-Time
:
I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another. Safe in my room with milk and cookies I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. “I’m a novelist,” he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say.
In
Body & Soul,
he transferred these feelings, almost without a fictional filter, to his protagonist, Claude, a gifted pianist. Every writer has obsessions. A boy’s vulnerability was Frank’s. (He once asked our class to appreciate the main character’s plight in an otherwise weak story. “But you feel the defenselessness of the boy,” he said, “the boy.”)
Body & Soul,
he transferred these feelings, almost without a fictional filter, to his protagonist, Claude, a gifted pianist. Every writer has obsessions. A boy’s vulnerability was Frank’s. (He once asked our class to appreciate the main character’s plight in an otherwise weak story. “But you feel the defenselessness of the boy,” he said, “the boy.”)
Frank adjusted the podium’s brass reading lamp and microphone. Then he began to read about the summer afternoon Claude wandered into an RKO movie theater on Eighty-sixth Street and saw:
Cartoons! Followed by a newsreel, the narrator’s voice both urgent and important, sounding over the flash of images. And then the first feature, about a tough sailor who marries a librarian but doesn’t take life seriously until they have a baby. The second feature described the adventures of a boy who could talk to horses. Claude watched with total attention, so captivated that it was a shock when the movie ended, as if his soul had been flying around in the dark and had now slammed back into his body. Outside, the unnaturally still street and the implacable heat seemed to claim him, to smother the quicksilver emotions of the films and flatten him in his contemplation of the meaningless, eternal, disinterested reality of the street, of its enduring drabness. To come out of the RKO was to come down, and he rushed home to the safety and company of the piano.
The prose had vigor. Frank’s voice didn’t. It became apparent that he hadn’t prepared for the reading. His voice lacked inflection. He mumbled. At one point, he faltered when he read a passage concerning Claude’s abusive, and freakishly large, “six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound” mother:
Claude sat down on the floor. He was attentive to her mood, to its direction, in case escape was necessary. Sometimes when he ran around the couch or slipped under her arm she would lose interest. He knew that almost always when she hit him, she held back.
Then Frank’s voice croaked. He didn’t stop reading for long, but he adjusted his glasses before continuing:
There were times, for instance, lying on his cot with the radio off or sitting on the floor motionless, staring into space, when Claude would become sharply aware of his own existence and the fact that he was alone. Either the basement apartment was empty, his mother out to work or her discussion meeting, or she was holed up in her room. The sense of being alone would come over him, causing not so much fear as uneasiness.
Briefly silent, Frank reached into his pocket, removed a handkerchief, turned his head (I could see his profile), and blew his nose. He barely finished the chapter. The following morning, I went to see him in his office.
“I can see the headline,” he said, the moment I walked in. “Doddering Professor Bursts into Tears over His Own Work!”
“I don’t think anyone noticed,” I said.
“No?”
“Only a few hundred of us.”
“Bastard.” Then he smiled.
“Listen,” I said, “I have to tell you something, and this is kind of awkward.” I hesitated. “I’m having a novel published—but by a little house. The advance is only five hundred dollars.” I wanted to underscore the publication’s insignificance.
Unfazed, Frank said, “Well, you’ll get a lot more for this one.”
“There’s no problem?”
“Why would there be a problem?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought there might be.” At the time, I didn’t consider my persistent anxiety unusual. “Do you think I should ask people for jacket quotes?”
“No,” Frank said, “let’s save them for the new novel.”
When my slim book review galleys arrived, I gave him a copy. At one hundred thirty-one pages, the book felt measly. Frank must have read it in an hour.
I received a sample of the dust jacket and, like most writers, I hated it. When I called my publisher I was told the jacket couldn’t be changed. Besides, the sales force loved it. (My publisher had no sales force.) In the illustration, my narrator had thick black hair and a face so fat that the boy appeared to be chinless. I’d been overweight as a kid (and lean, almost skinny, ever since), but I may have overdone the physical description of myself and left the illustrator with only this to work from: “I undressed, and while I was naked I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror which hung above my bureau. I was enormous. There were two thick crescents of fat hanging from my pectorals and my navel was deep and wide enough to hold a walnut. Over my hips were bands of flesh as thick and soft as loaves of packaged bread. Beneath my stomach the wild, unfinished hair growing above my genitals seemed pathetic.” I studied the cover up close. Then I set it on a shelf and backed away to see how it would look to a stranger who noticed it in a bookstore. As I did, space became time. With each step, eternity swallowed another second, and the sensation matched the slight melancholy I felt whenever I looked through a car’s rear window, watching my life vanish at sixty miles an hour. The past turned the book into an object that belonged to someone else. Even my name, nine red letters at the base of the jacket, seemed unfamiliar, and rather than reinforcing my existence the finished book drained it of meaning. Years of work, frustration, doubt, anger, longing, and, finally, a tentative satisfaction with the novel no longer mattered. Notebooks, dulled pencils, typewriter ribbons, reams of paper, keystrokes, letters daubed with Wite-Out, smoked cigarettes, coffee rings, postage stamps, and letters—“Dear Editor, Thank you for your consideration,” “Sorry, it’s not right for us”—were erased in an instant, like a superfluous word from a page. I crossed the room, removed the dust jacket from the shelf, and filed it with the complete manuscript. Then I put it out of my mind and resumed work on the new novel, which, now, was where I lived.
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