Thursday, April 7, 2005
Muchos gracias for all of the birthday greetings, they are much appreciated and unexpected, for I remember nobody’s birthday. I spent the day writing, finishing three ten-page papers for three different classes, unable to feel truly sorry for myself because of the emails and phone calls that came into my inbox and voicemail while I toiled. Besides, I was writing, and there are worse things to do on one’s birthday. After class I wandered through the throngs of half-dressed undergraduates drinking beer and bubble tea, lighting candles at the foot of the Pope’s portrait, and smoking from an honest-to-god hookah on the steps of Low Library in the sudden warm weather, forcing myself back into my litte studio to pound out another two thousand words on the laptop. Someone once told me that whatever you spend New Year’s Eve doing is an indication of how you’ll spend the next year. It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t really hold true, for I usually lost my kazoo by the middle of January. Maybe it’s something that can better be applied to birthdays.
One of those three papers was a 2500-word book review of a 1967 memoir by Frank Conroy, who unfortunately died the next day. So in honor of him I’ll post the review, read or click past as you see fit:
In a recent essay in the New York Times, William Grimes viewed with skepticism the mountain of memoirs piling up in bookstores: “The memoir has been on the march for more than a decade now. Readers have long since gotten used to the idea that you do not have to be a statesman or a military commander — or, like Saint-Simon or Chateaubriand, a witness to great events — to commit your life to print. But the genre has become so inclusive that it’s almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material.”
Following the article is a list of memoirs Grimes mentions, including:
Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure, by Jeannette Angell.
Batboy: My True-life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees, by Matthew McGough.
Rolling Away: My Agonies with Ecstasy, by Lynn Marie Smith.
All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache, by Paula Kamen.
The books, with their obligatory, complicated subtitles, actively defend themselves against Grimes’ claim. Which life is worthy of memoir? “Over here! Mine!”
One wonders how past titles may have been “extended” in order to defend their claim on the front table of Barnes and Noble: Angela’s Ashes: Confessions of a Hungry Irish Boy, or The Liar’s Club: My Creepy Childhood in Texas.
There is nothing terribly surprising in Grimes’ essay; people have been grumbling about the proliferation of memoirs for years, and he’s hardly the first to coyly suggest memoir subcategories such as “the traumatic-childhood memoir, the substance-abuse memoir, the spiritual-journey memoir”, etc.
Grimes’ most illuminating point is half-buried in the middle of his essay: “Neither the category, the premise nor the title can predict artistic success or failure. It’s all in the writing.” Perhaps it’s half-buried because it conflicts with his very argument. The point isn’t which lives are worthy of memoir, but which memoirs are well written? It’s not just a compelling story that readers crave (after all there are only twelve, or seven, or five stories in the world). It is what the writers make of that story.
If one wants to locate artistic success in modern memoirs, one can look for titles that have remained in print, such as Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, first published in 1967. Considered one of the first memoirs written with novelistic techniques, the book brought the author immediate literary acclaim. The particularities of Conroy’s story are not, compared perhaps to some more recent memoirs, especially harsh or alarming. He was born in New York City in 1936. His father was neurotic and institutionalized, dead of cancer by the time his son was twelve. His mother, Dagmar, born and raised in Denmark, was a less-than-maternal presence. She takes up with a handsome, “ne’er-do-well son of a collapsed aristocratic New Orleans family” named Jean. Along with an older sister, Alison, Conroy and his family split their time between Manhattan and an isolated town in Florida, always a step or two above poverty.
Conroy’s book covers a decade in the boy’s life, between the ages of eight and eighteen. At the end of the first chapter he sets up the structure and aim of his book: “My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life.” As its title suggests, Stop-Time examines, in vivid scenes, moments in Conroy’s life that delineate his growth as a boy and the struggle of his consciousness to define itself amid his childhood of neglect.
Led by the quixotic Jean, the family moves to Florida in pursuit of cheap land near Fort Lauderdale abandoned after the 1929 stock market crash. Armed with imagination and no real skills, Jean coaches the family through the construction of a ramshackle house that never quite reaches a point of completion. Soon Conroy meets Tobey, the only other boy his age in the isolated area, and the two become daily companions, building a tree house in the woods, swimming in the local quarry, and hunting through nearby deserted houses. During their wanderings they find a dead mule, which they talk about for weeks afterwards:
“What was its fascination? Death dramatized, something of unbelievable importance being revealed right in front of us. But something else too. (We) rambled over miles of wasteland trying to find the center of it, the heart, the place to know it. We sensed the forces around us but they were too thinly spread, too finely drawn over all the miles of woods for us to grasp them. The forces eluded us. We would run into a clearing knowing that just a moment ago, in that instant before we had arrived, something of importance had happened there. But when we found the dead mule we knew we were close, suddenly very close. Those forces spread like air over the woods had converged here, on this animal the moment he died, and were not yet altogether gone.”
The family returns to New York in order to earn enough money for another plot of land in Florida. His parents take weekend jobs as wardens at a mental institution in rural Connecticut, renting out an old cabin nearby. Alison, at sixteen, is considered old enough to stay behind in Manhattan, but Conroy, at twelve, accompanies them, “not because they felt they had to look after me but because I was useful. I drew the water. I tended the fire so the house would be warm in the morning when they return.” During their overnight shifts at the institution, Conroy is left alone in the cabin in its dark patch of woods, where he worries, among other things, about the unpredictable violence of escaped inmates, who in the past had killed animals on a farm down the road.
“After an initial surge of panic my mind turned itself off. Thinking was dangerous. By not thinking I attained a kind of inner invisibility. I knew that fear attracted evil, that the uncontrolled sound of my own mind would in some way delineate me to the forces threatening me, as the thrashing of a fish in shallow water draws the gull. I tried to keep still, but every now and then the fear escalated up into consciousness and my mind would stir, readjusting itself like the body of a man trying to sleep in an uncomfortable position. In those moments I felt most vulnerable, my eyes widening and my ears straining to catch the sound of approaching danger.”
Memoirs, of course, are about self-discovery. And while many books concentrate on external matters to their detriment, it is Conroy’s ability to capture the intangible with clear prose that contributes to Stop-Time’s endurance. The real beauty of Conroy’s story isn’t in what happened, but in how he manages to convey the process of his physical, mental, and emotional growth. One of the more memorable chapters of the book centers on the seemingly unremarkable event of his learning to yo-yo:
“The yo-yo represented my first organized attempt to control the outside world. I could see my progress in clearly defined stages, and because the intimacy of it, the almost spooky closeness I began to feel with the instrument in my hand, seemed to ensure that nothing irrelevant would interfere. (I was) finally free, in one small area at least, of the paralyzing sloppiness of life in general.”
Of course no story of adolescence would be complete without sexual awakening, and just as Conroy masters the yo-yo and feels for the first time some degree of confidence, he’s reminded of his sexual innocence while hanging around his older cousin, Lucky, a boy who focuses single-mindedly on the breasts of a young neighbor and riles up Conroy with his playful sexual innuendo.
“I threw my yo-yo nervously. That kind of talk had a strong effect on me. ‘I wouldn’t mind dancing right along with her,’ I said, aware that I’d struck a good balance between the sort of wisecrack one was supposed to make, and my true feelings–that to be there with her, to hold her and have her like it because I was a man, to learn the mystery from her, to die inside her would be, in no uncertain terms, the best possible thing that could happen.”
The beauty of this passage is in the detail of the yo-yo, the symbol of his mastery over childhood, suddenly rendered ineffectual in the face of more complicated forces.
Later Jean and Dagmar have a daughter together, Jessica, for whom Frank finds an affection thus far lacking in the household. “When she came home her utter helplessness shocked me into loving her. She seemed the quintessence of mortality. It made chills run up and down my spine just to look at her.” But shortly thereafter Dagmar takes the baby back to Denmark for several months. Alison has become a permanent house guest at a friend’s, leaving Jean and Frank alone in the house, but not for long. As Jean drives his cab around New York he finds a young woman of dubious mental balance recently evicted from her apartment and, with questionable motives, invites her to stay with them “for a couple of days.” With the same clear-eyed brilliance he brings to internal moments, Conroy describes Nell, the houseguest:
“My first view of her was from the rear, as she bent over to take something out of one of the boxes strewn up and down the long hall. The back of her white housecoat had risen as she leaned over, revealing two thin legs, the hollows behind her knees like white egg cups. Hearing me, she stood up and turned halfway around. A pale, bony face, eerily bloodless. Bright, hard eyes. She spoke in a high voice with tremendous speed, slightly breathless, her lips barely moving.
‘Hi. This is a mess, isn’t it? Have you ever seen such a mess?’ She touched her hair with the tips of her fingers. ‘The endless junk one collects. I never dreamed there was so much.’
I stepped gingerly over an ironing board. ‘What is it? Where did it all come from?’
‘It’s mine, sweetie,’ she said, standing perfectly still. ‘It belongs to me.’”
Nell, of course, overstays her welcome. After five or six weeks even Jean begins to withdraw from the house, leaving early in the morning, returning home at night only to sleep. Nell slips into a manic-depressive haze, wandering the apartment in a nightgown. Driven by instinct and hopelessness, Frank runs away briefly, only to be led home by the thought of his baby sister. Dagmar, back from Denmark, makes short work of evicting Nell. Unable to win her forgiveness, Jean’s behavior becomes more erratic. Conroy’s desire to escape his home life builds, and the summer of his sixteenth year he heads south again, this time with his mother’s blessing, Florida shining “like a vision of paradise in my mind’s eye.” He tracks down his old friend, only to see first-hand how time can affect memory:
“Tobey pushed open the screen door and stepped into the yard. I hadn’t thought about how he would look. The image I’d carried through the years was too bright, too strong to have changed. But Tobey was not the same. His slender body had thickened and his face was swollen with acne…
‘Well Jesus Christ if it ain’t Frank,’ he said in a new deep voice.
I looked down at the ground. Deep inside me gates were closing, one by one, locking up a vital area I couldn’t afford to lose all at once, sealing my love in private darkness. When it was done I lifted my head and faced him.”
Conroy returns, again, to New York, where he struggles through high school, retreating from his family in silence or rage, picking up girls he meets in the balconies of movie theaters, and dreaming of becoming a writer. After graduation he runs off to Paris, where he befriends a young artist who shows him a sketch, an object that he recognizes instantly:
“In a single moment I understood distortion in art. The drawing was highly complex, much more elaborate than the simple bar and catch I had watched interacting countless times on the Metro doors. What he had drawn was the process, the way the bar approaches the catch, slides up the angled metal, and drops into the locked position. He had captured movement in a static drawing.”
Which, of course, is what Conroy has done with Stop-Time; captured not only the story of one boy’s life, but the process of growing up, the complex movement of consciousness as it evolves, moment by moment, its boundaries vague, its resilience uncertain.
The memoir ends on a note of hope: in Paris he receives an acceptance letter from Haverford College, and he finally escapes. Nearly forty years after the publication of Stop-Time, we know that in spite of his troubled childhood Conroy made a good name for himself. His memoir was immediately recognized as a modern classic in autobiography, and bought him a ticket into New York’s literary elite. In recent interviews he’s admitted that his early success (he was thirty-one when Stop-Time was published) led to some of the usual problems: drinking, adultery, and creative block. With four other books under his belt, Conroy is not the most prolific of writers, but he was able to endure. This year he will retire after eighteen years as director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the country’s oldest and most prestigious writers’ program.
One wonders if Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure will likewise remain in print for forty years. Of course, as William Grimes pointed out earlier, titles predict nothing. Certainly Stop-Time lacks an all-important hook. But Callgirl will survive should it meet more than the reader’s immediate curiosity. Why else do we read memoir? For the story, yes, but there are other reasons. For information. For insight on how others live. How we might do the same or choose otherwise. And for the same reason that some write memoir: to feel less alone. In Stop-Time Conroy provides the reader with an understanding of the most elusive subjects: change, growth, and consciousness. In episodes of memory he illustrates the process of life itself, allowing us into one boy’s gradual understanding of himself and his place in the world. We come closer to knowing another person, recognizing in the deceptively small moments that Conroy chooses how we ourselves have become adults.
