Frank Conroy Spoke Frankly, and He Spoke the Truth
Remembering the great writer and his honesty during Mental Health Awareness Month.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
The Wall Street Journal
May 18, 2005
By Michael Judge
Like so many other writers and believers in what the poet James Wright called the “pure clear word,” I will never forget Frank Conroy, the memoirist, novelist and longtime director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who died of cancer last month at the age of 69. Not because of the wondrous rhythms, humor and truths of Stop-Time, his brilliant memoir and literary debut, first published in 1967, a year after my birth, or any instruction he gave while I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I was in the poetry workshop; Frank taught something called “fiction”).
I’ll always remember Frank because he destroyed me on the pool table night after night at Dave’s Fox Head, the roadside bar where I spent most of my nights—and money—in graduate school. (“The long shots are the hard shots, and the hard shots are the side shots!” he used to say with a devilish grin.) And because he was brave and kind enough to talk to a roomful of Iowans about the myths surrounding creativity and mental illness.
One evening in the early ’90s, at the request of the local Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Frank, the poet Jorie Graham and the then-director of the U. of I. School of Art and Art History, Wallace Tomasini, spoke to a gathering of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, of people suffering from mental illness. The AMI folks were concerned that the arts community, and society in general, was romanticizing illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. You know the argument: If Vincent Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath had been treated with today’s medicines, their art would have suffered, or never come into being.
The AMI members’ fear was that this kind of reasoning might lead to various forms of mental illness going undiagnosed and untreated in talented young students, and that the fledgling artists and writers themselves might even believe depression or mania or other thought disorders were somehow a prerequisite to being a true artist—like the jazz artists who once thought heroin and a needle were the way to tap into the genius of Charlie Parker.
I came in late and sat near the back of the conference room in Mercy Hospital, where the meeting took place. I suppose I didn’t want Frank, my eight-ball idol, to see me in this setting. Having two older brothers who suffered from mental illness, I suppose I was afraid to hear what he might say. I hadn’t read Stop-Time then, and I was unaware of the candid and touching way it dealt with the debilitating neuroses of Frank’s father, who was in and out of institutions from the time Frank was just a boy:
“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.)”
That night, Jorie, as always, was full of grace and understanding. She explained to the group that the instructors at the Writers’ Workshop understood that depression and mania were illnesses, not the romantic calling card of the truly gifted. She said she had learned to look for signs of exhaustion or depression in her students, and when she saw them, encouraged her students to get plenty of rest, eat proper meals, and stay off the nicotine and booze. “Sometimes I’ll even make them a home-cooked meal,” she said, her voice heavy with tenderness.
But it was Frank who spoke the most eloquently and freely on the subject. It’s more than a decade later, and I still hear his words as if he were speaking to me now: “The artist creates despite these conditions, not because of them.” He spoke of his father’s problems and of other members of his family who suffered from, among other things, depression. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t recognize some of these tendencies in myself,” he said bluntly, but with the same gentle assurance that made him such a fine teacher.
For an Iowa kid in his 20s with dreams of being the next W.B. Yeats, this was the right medicine at the right time. Already familiar with Yeats’s choice—“perfection of the life, or of the work”—I didn’t want to choose. I didn’t want to follow Plath and Poe into that darkness. I knew firsthand the ravages of mental illness, and there was absolutely nothing romantic about it. Yes, the gifted mind is often plagued with doubts, insecurities and emotional frailties. But chronic depression, mania and schizophrenia are another thing altogether. Imagine the poetry Plath would have produced if she had lived as long as Whitman, or how American letters would have benefited if John Berryman had survived his bout with depression for another 20 years.
Frank told a lovely story that night about driving the poet Robert Lowell, a mentor and friend, to the hospital after one of his all too frequent breakdowns. As I remember it, Lowell handed Frank the keys to his cherished sports car, explaining that he was too sick to navigate the road. As they drove off, Frank commented that the car—alas, the make and model have escaped me—handled wonderfully and was a joy to drive. “Yes,” said Lowell. “It’s as if it has the ability to repair the road it rides on.”
Looking back on it now, I think Frank and that car had a lot in common.
To learn more about Frank Conroy and his work, visit Narrative Magazine. For more information about Mental Health Awareness Month visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.
Frank Conroy Spoke Frankly, and He Spoke the Truth
Thanks, Mike, for this wonderful memory. I sure miss his wisdom.
Hi Mike, I'm a friend of Charlotte's in Fairfield. Thank you for this heartfelt tribute to Frank Conroy (I am a huge fan of Body and Soul and will now read his memoir too). I also appreciated how you distinguished between mental illness and creativity. So beautifully written, as always.