Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (25 page)
The
Dallas Morning News
: “A big, old-fashioned book as satisfying as a fine evening at the symphony.”
Dallas Morning News
: “A big, old-fashioned book as satisfying as a fine evening at the symphony.”
The Chicago Tribune
: “A literary event, a grand saga.
Body & Soul
was written under the spell of Dickens, not to mention Stendhal, Tolstoy and the other 19th-century titans. Conroy bedazzles readers!”
: “A literary event, a grand saga.
Body & Soul
was written under the spell of Dickens, not to mention Stendhal, Tolstoy and the other 19th-century titans. Conroy bedazzles readers!”
Elle
: “A riveting, neo-Dickensian saga.”
: “A riveting, neo-Dickensian saga.”
Entertainment Weekly
even “graded”
Body & Soul
: “This isn’t Dr. Faustus or any sort of great novel about music, but the first half is full of enchantment. B+”
even “graded”
Body & Soul
: “This isn’t Dr. Faustus or any sort of great novel about music, but the first half is full of enchantment. B+”
Most importantly, the
New York Times Book Review
treated the novel with admiration and respect: “Utterly sincere, unironically devoted to re-creating an America that I would have thought by now had ceased to be an inspiration. . . . A legitimate and moving piece of Americana. Full of rich characters and tricky twists.”
New York Times Book Review
treated the novel with admiration and respect: “Utterly sincere, unironically devoted to re-creating an America that I would have thought by now had ceased to be an inspiration. . . . A legitimate and moving piece of Americana. Full of rich characters and tricky twists.”
I called Maggie to ask how the book was selling, and she sounded cautiously upbeat. “Well, they printed 57,000 copies, but they say any returned books fill new orders.” Foreign sales alone had repaid Frank ’s advance. The $3.75 he earned for each American hardcover sold easily doubled it. Yet, despite being eagerly hoped for—and, to a certain extent, even expected—
Body & Soul
never appeared on the
New York Times
best-seller list. And, given the novel’s uneven critical reception, literary prizes seemed unlikely. This disappointed Frank, but—unless I’m mistaken—it didn’t drive him into a cave of self-pity. He lacked the gene for dejection. I didn’t. Knowing this, he had written to me from Nantucket the previous summer.
Body & Soul
never appeared on the
New York Times
best-seller list. And, given the novel’s uneven critical reception, literary prizes seemed unlikely. This disappointed Frank, but—unless I’m mistaken—it didn’t drive him into a cave of self-pity. He lacked the gene for dejection. I didn’t. Knowing this, he had written to me from Nantucket the previous summer.
Dear Tom,I trust you are cheering up? Cheered up? I’ve seen Season’s End at both of the island’s bookstores. In one of them (the more highbrow establishment), it is moving well. I don’t know about the other place. So your baby goes off and makes its unpredictable way through the world, sans daddy. Look at Patrick O’Brian (and you should). I’d never heard of him, and since June 1 I’ve read fifteen of his historical novels. (Capt. Aubrey/ Dr. Maturin sea stories, same period as Hornblower but much, much better) and am complètement desolé that there are no more. Let the word carry the word.
But Frank’s serenity eluded me. And, compared to his joy, my gloominess puzzled him. As he wrote in the same letter:
I never know what to make of you when you excoriate yourself for alleged bad behavior at a social function. This exists in your mind, my friend. Maybe it’s because you get squiffy so easily, but not squiffy enough to forget what you’ve said. You want bad behavior? Frank at a stuffy dinner being offered salad by a lovely matron, a total stranger. “May I hold it for you?” she says, presenting the bowl. “Don’t talk dirty,” sez me, never to be invited back again.
One night, driving home from the Foxhead, the two of us shivering, I said, “Do you think you’ll ever write another memoir?”
Without taking his eyes off the road—which was good, because he was drunk—Frank answered, “No, I want to do novels now. I want to do the longer work.” Then he raised one hand from the steering wheel and, gesturing toward the darkness beyond the streetlights ahead, he added, “Novels. That’s where the juice is.”
Writers always look toward the future. In a sense, we have no past, only whatever time we have remaining to write the perfect book to mask our emptiness—or my emptiness, any way—the book that won’t defeat us, the book we’d like to be remembered by, if we’re remembered at all. And Frank will be remembered;
Stop-Time
is a singular achievement. A sui generis insanity governs its style and the very act of its creation. “I’d write a chapter and then take four months off and fuck around,” Frank told me, recalling how he wrote his memoir—after he’d accepted the failure of his first novel, a novel about a priest. I haven’t read it, and I won’t; Frank considered the work so weak that a sense of shame, perhaps, attached itself to the manuscript. Yet, he didn’t destroy it. Boxed and marked, it remains in his archive. I can’t ask Frank now why the pages still exist, but I’m a writer and I know why: he
wants
it to be read so that his life’s work is understood completely. He’s even mentioned its failure. In an essay, he called the novel “dead on arrival.” A corpse. This stain of failure never entirely vanished, but
Stop-Time
overcame it. In fact,
Stop-Time
’s anger and bitterness is, I’m sure, grounded in Frank’s buried novel. He wrote about a priest, and nothing is interesting, dramatically, about a priest who’s celibate and virtuous. My guess is that Frank, like me, wasn’t able, in his early twenties, to confront the shame he felt about his family, how broken, sad, confused, hysterical, and nearly tragic his childhood was. But, once again like me, when he was angry enough to see beyond the bullshit façade of “literature,” he found
Stop-Time
’s narrative voice. In the first sentence of the prologue, he announces what every writer wants to be able to say: “I worked well.” He then describes a harrowing, drunken, high-speed drive to his “small countryside house about twenty miles outside of London.” The game is: how fast can Frank drive without killing himself? He leaves the question unanswered, for the moment, then leaps into chapter one, the first sentence of which is, “My father stopped living with us when I was three or four.” It’s Frank’s anger over this wound that smashed his Jaguar’s gas pedal to the floor. Then there’s the first chapter’s title: “Savages,” which recounts the merciless beating of Frank’s classmate by fellow classmates at an “experimental boarding school in Pennsylvania called Freemont.” Reluctantly, Frank participated. Years later, he still considers the boy’s beating part of his life. He worries about the incident and his behavior for a long time. But in the end he learns nothing other than that brutality happens easily. Then come
Stop-Time
’s other mad chapter titles: “Space and a Dead Mule”; “Hate, and a Kind of Music”; “Shit”; “A Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up”; “The Coldness of Public Places”; “Death by Itself.” The book ends when Frank, after escaping his childhood by entering Haverford College, survives, by accident, his manic dash through London’s suburbs. And yet he’s disappointed when he doesn’t die. Swerving toward a concrete fountain, he relaxes. “Let it come,” he thinks. And then, gleefully, “Here it comes!” Only, he fails. He stumbles out of the car. All he’s accomplished is waking an old man, who yells at him from a window. “My throat burning with bile,” Frank writes, “I started to laugh.” What killed his first book, I believe, was sincerity, or a striving for atonement. What electrifies
Stop-Time
is its demonic anger. But, ultimately, it’s funny: he can’t even kill himself. Perfect freedom! Only by reaching the point where he accepts his desire to obliterate himself—and I’m talking about me here, too—does he feel cleansed. Of course, I’m speculating. Frank may not have felt this way at all. But he didn’t burn his dead book, and that failure shaped him. He knew it and he remembered it. Failure burned away every slippage of language, intellect, or sentimental feeling in
Stop-Time
. The book’s beauty is its darkness; its bitterness is its grace. “The bad work leads to good work,” Frank used to tell us in workshop. “You rarely get one without the other.” So, he wrote the book he’ll be remembered by.
Stop-Time
is a singular achievement. A sui generis insanity governs its style and the very act of its creation. “I’d write a chapter and then take four months off and fuck around,” Frank told me, recalling how he wrote his memoir—after he’d accepted the failure of his first novel, a novel about a priest. I haven’t read it, and I won’t; Frank considered the work so weak that a sense of shame, perhaps, attached itself to the manuscript. Yet, he didn’t destroy it. Boxed and marked, it remains in his archive. I can’t ask Frank now why the pages still exist, but I’m a writer and I know why: he
wants
it to be read so that his life’s work is understood completely. He’s even mentioned its failure. In an essay, he called the novel “dead on arrival.” A corpse. This stain of failure never entirely vanished, but
Stop-Time
overcame it. In fact,
Stop-Time
’s anger and bitterness is, I’m sure, grounded in Frank’s buried novel. He wrote about a priest, and nothing is interesting, dramatically, about a priest who’s celibate and virtuous. My guess is that Frank, like me, wasn’t able, in his early twenties, to confront the shame he felt about his family, how broken, sad, confused, hysterical, and nearly tragic his childhood was. But, once again like me, when he was angry enough to see beyond the bullshit façade of “literature,” he found
Stop-Time
’s narrative voice. In the first sentence of the prologue, he announces what every writer wants to be able to say: “I worked well.” He then describes a harrowing, drunken, high-speed drive to his “small countryside house about twenty miles outside of London.” The game is: how fast can Frank drive without killing himself? He leaves the question unanswered, for the moment, then leaps into chapter one, the first sentence of which is, “My father stopped living with us when I was three or four.” It’s Frank’s anger over this wound that smashed his Jaguar’s gas pedal to the floor. Then there’s the first chapter’s title: “Savages,” which recounts the merciless beating of Frank’s classmate by fellow classmates at an “experimental boarding school in Pennsylvania called Freemont.” Reluctantly, Frank participated. Years later, he still considers the boy’s beating part of his life. He worries about the incident and his behavior for a long time. But in the end he learns nothing other than that brutality happens easily. Then come
Stop-Time
’s other mad chapter titles: “Space and a Dead Mule”; “Hate, and a Kind of Music”; “Shit”; “A Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up”; “The Coldness of Public Places”; “Death by Itself.” The book ends when Frank, after escaping his childhood by entering Haverford College, survives, by accident, his manic dash through London’s suburbs. And yet he’s disappointed when he doesn’t die. Swerving toward a concrete fountain, he relaxes. “Let it come,” he thinks. And then, gleefully, “Here it comes!” Only, he fails. He stumbles out of the car. All he’s accomplished is waking an old man, who yells at him from a window. “My throat burning with bile,” Frank writes, “I started to laugh.” What killed his first book, I believe, was sincerity, or a striving for atonement. What electrifies
Stop-Time
is its demonic anger. But, ultimately, it’s funny: he can’t even kill himself. Perfect freedom! Only by reaching the point where he accepts his desire to obliterate himself—and I’m talking about me here, too—does he feel cleansed. Of course, I’m speculating. Frank may not have felt this way at all. But he didn’t burn his dead book, and that failure shaped him. He knew it and he remembered it. Failure burned away every slippage of language, intellect, or sentimental feeling in
Stop-Time
. The book’s beauty is its darkness; its bitterness is its grace. “The bad work leads to good work,” Frank used to tell us in workshop. “You rarely get one without the other.” So, he wrote the book he’ll be remembered by.
But I’m remembering Frank here and, of course, he’s laughing, although bile no longer burns his throat. In me he found his biographer. Yes, he rescued me. I applied to Iowa with an incomplete novel’s opening pages. In retrospect, submitting that material was a bold, idiotic move. On the one hand, I risked rejection, and I would have had the justification for it had I been rejected. I didn’t submit my best, published work: that was my out. On the other hand, I wanted to court failure, and I did. My all-consuming ambition urged me to write something so far beyond my skill that I could only fail. I insisted that
Season’s End
wasn’t a baseball book; it was about America. Its scope stretches from America’s defeat in Vietnam to Reagan’s election as president. The working title for
Season’s End
was “Love and Death in the American Novel.” Only someone stupid enough to risk failure on a grand scale would brandish that title (which is why the novel was sold untitled). I purposely stole the title from a work of literary criticism by Leslie Fiedler. And it’s clear to me now: I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk, believing I could overcome it. Every great novel, it’s been said, is a “long story with a flaw in it.” Well, I’ve mastered the flaws and have diligently produced long stories to contain them. But something all along was missing—me. And this book redresses that absence. For twenty years, I believed Frank filled that absence. But he didn’t; my idolization of him did; moreover, my fictionalizing of him did. Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me. By writing about Frank, I could no longer turn away from myself, which is what I’ve done all of my life. Now, I’m gazing at myself.
Season’s End
wasn’t a baseball book; it was about America. Its scope stretches from America’s defeat in Vietnam to Reagan’s election as president. The working title for
Season’s End
was “Love and Death in the American Novel.” Only someone stupid enough to risk failure on a grand scale would brandish that title (which is why the novel was sold untitled). I purposely stole the title from a work of literary criticism by Leslie Fiedler. And it’s clear to me now: I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk, believing I could overcome it. Every great novel, it’s been said, is a “long story with a flaw in it.” Well, I’ve mastered the flaws and have diligently produced long stories to contain them. But something all along was missing—me. And this book redresses that absence. For twenty years, I believed Frank filled that absence. But he didn’t; my idolization of him did; moreover, my fictionalizing of him did. Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me. By writing about Frank, I could no longer turn away from myself, which is what I’ve done all of my life. Now, I’m gazing at myself.
But, by the time we had become friends, Frank’s gaze had turned toward the future he’d imagined for himself. In it, he would write more novels.
Body & Soul
simply materialized first. And if its immediate fate fell short of fulfilling his wishes, he saw no reason to despair. Who could predict any book’s future? “For twenty-five years
Stop-Time
’s been in print,” he once told me. “I’m constantly amazed.”
Body & Soul
simply materialized first. And if its immediate fate fell short of fulfilling his wishes, he saw no reason to despair. Who could predict any book’s future? “For twenty-five years
Stop-Time
’s been in print,” he once told me. “I’m constantly amazed.”
So, he enjoyed his tour. And he wrote inside our copy of
Body & Soul
:
Body & Soul
:
Dear Tom & Jody,Your cats left some fleas [which, unfortunately, was true], but I got to talking to them and they have a compelling story —————Much love to you both,Frank
Then he signed a copy for the wealthy New York dowager who would hold a celebratory dinner for him in her posh, Upper East Side apartment,
Let’s eat. I’m starving!
Let’s eat. I’m starving!
His happiest moment, though, came one evening when his hotel telephone rang and the operator said she had a call from a Mr. Shaw. “I thought, okay, he’s the local auto mechanic,” Frank told me. “But it was Artie Shaw! One of the greatest jazz clarinet players who ever lived! Once I realized who it was, I was like, ‘Maestro!’” Artie Shaw had tracked down Frank to tell him no one had ever written so beautifully about how it
felt
to play music.
felt
to play music.
Frank never bragged about his writing, but he routinely told me about the amazing jazz quintet he played with each summer on Nantucket. “You have to hear this!” he said one night, after we’d closed the Foxhead. He drove me back to his house. Maggie was seated on a living room armchair when we arrived and she closed the book she’d been reading as Frank inserted into his VHS player a live performance he’d taped of his band. “Listen, the blues number is amazing.” It was past 3:00 AM, and, as I sat on the couch, I faded in and out of consciousness. Several feet away, Frank watched with an expression that approached unadulterated bliss. I felt as if the tape had been playing for hours. Desperately wanting to crawl between my bed’s warm sheets, I said, “Are they ever going to play the blues piece?” Frank stared at me in disbelief. “They’re playing it now!” he shouted. Maggie said, “Frank, let Tom go home. He’s sitting on the couch with one eye open.” I don’t remember walking home, but I’d learned that music, as much as literature, had shaped Frank’s identity. During his childhood, he’d taught himself how to play the piano, but it hadn’t been easy. “I could not just learn a tune, however slowly,” he once wrote in an essay, “and go on to another one. I had to play it over and over, so many times that it became engraved in the neurons of my brain, the muscles of my arms and hands, the nerves of my fingers.” Yet he assembled a repertoire. And, in his late twenties, while he still lived in New York, he played nightly gigs at a bar. One evening, between sets, his bass player vanished. Having no choice, Frank nervously took the stage.
“I sat down and began to play midrange chords with my left hands and an improvised line with my right,” Frank wrote. “The tune was ‘Autumn Leaves.’ Sometime in the third chorus a large black man got up from his dinner table and moved forward. . . . As he approached, I recognized Charles Mingus—the foremost jazz bassist in the world—and was afraid. Mingus, a manic-depressive, was famous for sudden onsets of rage.”
But he simply grabbed Frank’s AWOL partner’s bass and began to play, as Frank continued. It was “The most important night of my musical life, because I no longer had to think of myself as an impostor. If Charles Mingus got up to play with me, I must have been doing something right. I was no genius, but I was a musician.”
After receiving Mr. Shaw’s call, every doubt Frank may have had about
Body & Soul
—could it have been better, should he have taken more care with its latter half ?—slipped into silence, the way a hammered piano string ceases to vibrate, and the note it produced can no longer be sustained or heard.
Body & Soul
—could it have been better, should he have taken more care with its latter half ?—slipped into silence, the way a hammered piano string ceases to vibrate, and the note it produced can no longer be sustained or heard.
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