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Frank Conroy: He was tough and generous
Excerpts from an editorial appearing in the April 10, 2005 Chicago Tribune - By Stephen G. Bloom
Ask any American writer today for a list of his or her literary idols, and Frank Conroy's name always rises to the top.
The author of one of the best books of our age, Stop-Time, published in 1967, as well as the director of the greatest incubator of literary talent ever assembled, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Conroy was as close to legend as any living writer gets.
Not to mention a Grammy winner—for best liner notes.
Despite a rough beginning, he made the most of a life that ended Wednesday (April 6, 2005) when he died at age 69 of colon cancer.
Stop-Time slays everyone who reads it.
The poignant, tough and lean prose is every much as great as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye or Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The literary establishment, from Norman Mailer to William Styron, fell before Frank's wobbly 31-year-old knees when the effervescent memoir was published. Every shimmering word in Stop-Time seemed to detonate as Conroy, from a teenager's perspective, detailed the pain and legacy of an abusive, manic-depressive father and an absentee mother.
The book was the best kind of fiction because it was numbingly true.
It's not Genesis, but to many writers, the opening paragraphs of Stop-Time are the bible of literary beginnings:
My father stopped living with us when I was three or four. Most of his adult life was spent as a patient in various expensive rest homes for dipsomaniacs and victims of nervous collapse. . .
I try to think of him as sane, yet it must be admitted he did some odd things. Forced to attend a rest-home dance for its therapeutic value, he combed his hair with urine and otherwise played it out like the Southern gentleman he was. He had a tendency to take off his trousers and throw them out the window. (I harbor some secret admiration for this.) At a moment's notice he could blow a thousand dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch and disappear into the Northwest to become an outdoorsman. He spent an anxious few weeks convinced that I was fated to become a homosexual. I was six months old. And I remember visiting him at one of the rest homes when I was eight. We walked across a sloping lawn and he told me a story, which even then I recognized as a lie, about a man who sat down on the open blade of a penknife embedded in a park bench. (Why, for God's sake would he tell a story like that to his eight-year-old son?)
I used to see him around town: nose in a book at Prairie Lights, the wonderful bookstore on Dubuque Street; hunched over a newspaper, his lanky legs and arms taking over a booth in the Chesapeake Bagel Company down the block, holding forth with Guinness in hand at The Mill on Burlington Street.
He surrounded himself with wonderful writers who also were wonderful teachers of writing, including Marilynne Robinson (who just won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction), Jim McPherson (who won the Pulitzer in 1978) and Jorie Graham (who won for poetry in 1996). Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stegner, W.P. Kinsella, John Irving, Raymond Carver, T.C. Boyle, and Jane Smiley cut their teeth as young writers at the Workshop.
Each year, Frank enrolled students who would go on to change the way we look at the written word. The Workshop is probably harder to get into than Harvard Law School: 800 applicants vie for 25 slots. Since its inception in 1936, many Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to former Workshop students.
raising eyebrows
The last time I saw Frank was right after he had caused some eyebrows to arch by accepting from President Bush the National Humanities Medal on behalf of the Workshop. It was the first time a university program had achieved such an accolade.
Frank was at Prairie Lights, the bookstore, and as we were both flipping dust covers, checking out too-serious visages of up-and-coming authors, I asked him about his experience at the White House.
And Frank, always the writer, always working, always trying to make sense of the world, said he enjoyed meeting Bush, despite their profound differences. Bush, he said, was caught up in the gears of some grinding machinery that couldn't be shut down. The president might be at the switch, but he wasn't in control. Bush, Frank said, really was a likable fellow but had become a victim, a hapless innocent.
And then I saw it once again, Frank turning generous, even magnanimous. But I could also see he was working. There was a magnificent story brewing here, and Frank was mapping out its plot.
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Stephen G. Bloom, the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, teaches narrative journalism at the University of Iowa.
