Tom Grimes - Mentor: A Memoir

Table of Contents

Praise for Mentor

Its astonishing how much insight, passion, pain, joy, self-doubt, and sheer love Tom Grimes has managed to pack into this tightly made memoir of his relationship with the writer Frank Conroy. Not only does Mentor offer an honest and compelling account of the struggles of a writer at the onset of his career, but this immaculately composed memoir also draws an enduring and eerily lifelike portrait of Frank Conroy. For me, it was as if Conroy had somehow risen from the dead before my eyes, with all his impish zest and stern earnestness and voluble wisdom. Mentor is a beautiful, beautiful booka monument both to Frank Conroy and to the writers terrifying quest for artistic excellence.

TIM OBRIEN, author of The Things They Carried

Generation to generation, writers have mentored one another, on the page, in classrooms, across caf tables and lifetimes. Tom Grimess graceful, moving account of one such relationship is not only a primer on the joys and dangers of writing but also a considered love letter to the mentor who, in becoming Grimess literary father, understood and supported his work, and so verified the spiritual surrender to meaning, sense, clarity that radiates at the heart of the writing life. Frank Conroy entered the contemporary canon with his lucid, clarified prose, but he also mentored dozens of American writers, fostering an exacting refuge that today exists in his image. Tom Grimes has written a beautiful book, as muscular, honest, and lasting as the gift he received. Mentor belongs on the shelf of every writer, every teacher, every reader.

JAY NEANNE PHILLIPS, author of Lark & Termite

Mentor is a fine and unique achievement. Its moving as the record of a first-rate writers early career. But its uniqueness lies in its treatment of something quite ineffable, the way in which a major artist can nourish the talents and maintain the confidence of a younger one. Frank Conroy was a wild, wildly talented, phenomenal artist. Tom Grimes has served his memory superbly.

ROBERT STONE, author of Dog Soldiers

I cant think of anyone in American letters other than Frank Conroy whose teaching of writing matched the power of his brilliant prose. His dictums still echo with me, twenty years after being in his workshop. Frank could be dogmatic, brilliant, erratic, and inspired in the space of two hours. Intensely personal, moving, powerful, and insightful, Mentor is a must read for people who write and for every reader who has wondered about the mysterious alchemy that produces a writer.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE, author of Cutting for Stone

Mentor is a touching memoir about one of those rare encounters in life where the deep connection between two human beings transcends time and death. It is about artists and their arts, fathers and sons, families and friends, and, above all, love that allows each generation of artists to dream and create on the shoulders of its mentors.

YIYUNLI, author of The Vagrants

Tom Grimes has written a most affecting book. Part memoir and part homage to his mentor, Frank Conroy, it is also an extremely candid meditation on the writing life, both its joys and its pains. Anyone who has ever been on either side of the mentor-student relationship will catch glimpses of himself in this remarkable memoir.

SCOTT ANDERSON , author of Triage

Mentor is a tender, tough, and appropriately bewildered look into the heart of the Iowa Writers Workshopindeed, into what it means to be a writer of ambition altogether. It is also a magnificent double portrait of two fiction writers, rendered in fine, piercing, fond, and ruthless proseand, above all, a love letter to a teacher.

ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

For the Conroys Maggie, Dan, Will, and Tim

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I was living in Key West and working as a waiter the first time I saw Frank Conroy. Each January, a literary seminar brought two dozen famous writers to the island. Panels featuring them took place in a large auditorium at the community college. On opening day at nine oclock in the morning, the years keynote speaker addressed everyone in attendance. Given that my restaurant shift ended sometime after midnight and I invariably closed the After Deck bar several hours later, 9:00 AM had a middle-of-the-night feel to me. The bars wooden planks, white tables, and white chairs were suspended several feet above the Atlantics shallow inlet and overlooked what, as a young writer, I knew to be Sam Lawrences house. As an editor, hed published Kurt Vonnegut, Tim OBrien, and Thomas McGuane, idols to me at the time. Occasionally, Id spot a cocktail party under way on his deck and wonder who was there sipping a scotch and if, someday, I might be one of them.

When my alarm rang at eight thirty, I rose, splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, then biked across the island from the clapboard house where I lived to the hall where Frank Conroy was scheduled to speak. I took a seat in the dim balcony, far from the stage. Id been writing for more than a decade, and during the past year my first stories had found homes in nationally respected literary journals. Nevertheless, the chasm between the podium and myself seemed unbridgeable. It was as if the writers who would occupy the stages empty chairs had pierced a literary dimension in space-time and had returned simply to pass along wisdom, be applauded, and collect an honorarium. I feared that I would never join their ranks. Id grown up in a bookless house, raised by a father whod quit school after the eighth grade and mocked the novels I toted to the mediocre junior college in New York that had granted me admission. And although Id managed two successful businesses in Manhattanone of which sold expensive stationery, the other housewares and antiquesbefore my wife, Jody, and I moved to Key West two years earlier, I felt condemned to lead a waiters life, not a writers. That my station would climb no higher seemed apparent. Each winter, during high season, town was packed with tourists, and the jobs relentless, exhausting labor made composing an aesthetically coherent sentence, one with the rhythm, tempo, and music of a distinctive voice, as impossible for me as it was impossible for a physicist to snatch an electron from space while it orbited the nucleus of an atom. Clearly, I needed to change my life, but I didnt know what life would replace the one Id created. Like a novelist who never outlines a book, Id never plotted my future. Instead, I trusted my intuition. Sometimes the results were good; other times, disastrous. Only one constant existed: I wrote. Writing was my center of gravity. If I quit, Id implode. All my notebooks would become worthless. All my unfinished drafts, orphaned. The million words Id written, however, insisted that I not give up. And since I couldnt allow my doubt to overwhelm my work, at times I needed to glimpse the life Id envisioned for myself. So I went to hear Frank Conroy speak.

I also went because, when Id recently mentioned applying to law school, Jody stunned me by suggesting that I apply to writing programs instead. In New York, wed lived four blocks from NYU and ten subway stops from Columbia University, each of which had notable creative writing programs, but never once had we discussed submitting my work to either of them. Nor had I ever had an impulse to join a writers group. I had no writer friends. I pursued my work in a vacuum. What existed were books, a typewriter, notepads, pencils, erasers, and I. Plus, the rejection letters I plucked out of our narrow metal mailbox, which I dreaded and revered for its power either to obliterate my expectations or, rarely, deliver word of my infinitesimal success. Beyond these monkish concerns, a palpable literary world didnt exist for me. But, with several stories in print and no other prospects, I decided to take Jodys advice, although I still half believed that creative writing programs had nothing to teach anyone and was suddenly terrified of being rejected. I selected four programs: Iowa because it was Iowa; Syracuse because Raymond Carver had taught there, and it was in New York; Boston University because I could graduate in a year; and the University of Florida at Gainesville because it was near Key West and so second rate that it would probably accept me without hesitation. I assembled an application that included the beginning of a novelnot the slim, semiautobiographical novel Id written in my midtwenties, but a new, more ambitious one. I dropped four copies off at the Key West post office and then did what most young writers doI waited.