Mentor: A Memoir (36 page)

Literature was Frank’s school, his salvation, and his joy. One can’t separate Frank the writer, from Frank the reader, from Frank the teacher. Each aspect of his personality was of a piece. Forget for a moment any one of them and you’ll remember and cherish him incompletely.

 

As a boy Frank read his manic-depressive father’s entire library, which became his refuge. “Safe in my room with milk and cookies,” he wrote in Stop-Time, “I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful and more real than my own.”

 

Ultimately, reading turned him into a writer. As a genre, the memoir barely existed before Frank published Stop-Time, which, he once told me, was completely out of sync with its era. Yet the book became a classic because the purity of Frank’s perfect prose not only stops time, but renders time timeless.

 

Writing the book exorcised and, at the same time, celebrated his childhood; and by age thirty Frank had fulfilled what Susan Sontag deemed to be the sole responsibility of a writer—to write a masterpiece.

 

People speak of great writers, but few people speak of great readers, and Frank was one of them, perhaps the best reader I’ve ever known. He took genuine pleasure in the act of reading and somehow he was able to retain his complete innocence as a reader, to read as the boy he once was, alone in his bedroom, keeping his anxiety about his complicated childhood at bay by turning the pages of a novel.

 

Yet for all of Frank’s innocence, he never failed to pluck from each great book a master’s lesson, which he then selflessly passed along to his students. Frank read great writers without any fear. He didn’t worry about imitating them; he didn’t worry about being overwhelmed by them. Instead he took pleasure in them and learned from them, and by doing so he elevated reading to the level of art, which Picasso described as “serious play,” a phrase that captures Frank’s relationship to reading literature and to teaching it.

 

Frank was also a generous reader. Recognizing that his escape from his own Dickensian childhood had depended on chance, unexpected benefactors, and good fortune, he repaid the pleasure and enlightenment Dickens had given him by writing Body & Soul, a novel that astonishes us because it’s a truly happy book. For a second time, Frank had composed a work that was completely out of sync with its age. Not a single word in the novel is tainted by cynicism, postmodern game-playing, or lyrical pyrotechnics. Over all of Frank’s prose, from the books right down to his essays, there hovers an Olympian calm. He could even write about seven days on a cruise ship and make the experience seem somehow sacred.

 

Yet the boy in Frank never entirely vanished. Last fall, when I called to ask him how his summer had been, he said, “I read a book a day. It was heaven.”