Frank Conroy (1936 – 2005), author of the classic memoir Stop-Time (which has the strangeness of true art about it), as well as novels and essays, was director 
of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He sat down for an interview with Lacy Crawford of Narrative magazine before his death. Some excerpts:
“The power and almost obscene wealth of parts of America resemble nothing so much as the Roman Empire. I don’t understand why people aren’t completely scandalized by the degrading of humanity through films and television over the last twenty years, a degradation of the soul. I’m not religious, but I insist on being able to use some of the concepts generally scorned in a secular society. The soul and spirituality are important parts of life. A lot of artists are trying to reclaim some of the language and territory so scorned. Life is a mystery, but you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream of America, everybody watching a rerun on TV. The country is in danger, but I don’t think that serious literature is in danger. Not yet. The spiritual emptiness of society is very deep and unsettling, so people are looking for something better.”
“I don’t believe in the natural writer. I believe in the natural reader who gradually begins to write. You can’t write independent of literature, so you read, you read, you read, you read, you read, and then you begin to write. A lot of it is mysterious. I see writing from many super-bright people, IQs of 165, and I have to say, smarts doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere with writing. High intellect may affect what you write about, but finally what makes writing stand out is not about intellect. I’ve known three people whom I would call astrally intelligent—and all three of them tried to write, and they couldn’t.
“Good narrative puts the reader and writer in a position of equality. The text forms a bridge between two imaginations. A challenging narrative must nonetheless be welcoming to the reader. A good narrative has drive. But I don’t care for theory, and we don’t spend any time here on theory. Talking about writing is one thing, and writing is another. On the page you have to teach the reader how to read you. I once had a student who couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag. And then she wrote an amazing story, and The Atlantic published it, and I said, What happened? And she said, Back then, it was all in my head. I knew instantly what she meant, because it’s not supposed to be in your head; it’s supposed to open between you and the reader.”
“[Self pity in a memoir] puts the reader in a position of being asked to sympathize with the ill fortune of another person, to be the witness rather than the co-creator, which is what I want out of the reader, someone whose energy is pouring in. I’ll tell you what I think motivated the writing [of Stop-Time]. Rather than, Oh, what a tough time I’ve had, one of the engines that drove the book—beside the fact that I wanted to be a writer—was anger. I wrote the book to try to get even, in a way, to extricate myself, Hey, fuck you guys! I wasn’t aware of it then, but in retrospect I see it was definitely there.”
“To write Stop-Time, I had to go well past any imaginative boundaries I’d set for myself. And there was the feeling that every writer has described: you don’t feel like you’re doing it—it’s passing through you in some way. Also, I was able to write the book because I’d read so much. Before I got to college, I read everything. I read the Russians, the Brits, the French, the Americans. I was years into college before I was assigned a book I hadn’t already read. In the beginning I read in order to escape my circumstances. I absorbed so many of the conventions and the rules and the rhythms of good prose. When I read [George] Orwell, I couldn’t believe it, it was so beautiful.”
“I didn’t remember everything about the past when I started the book, and I had a lot of chronology mixed up, and a lot of stuff was just repressed. The act of concentrating on the writing and trying to write perfect sentences opens closed doors.”
“In the culture at the time, everything was drugs, and beatniks, the whole beginning of the revolution. And there I was with a sort of semiclassical book, and they didn’t know whether it was fiction or nonfiction. Just before the book was published, the editor called me up and said, Should we call this fiction or nonfiction? And off the top of my head, I said, Everything in the book actually happened, so I’d call it nonfiction. Which they did. It was nominated for the National Book Award under the Belles Lettres category, and it didn’t win. About five years later, I spoke to one of the judges, who told me that the fiction prize winner that year, Thornton Wilder, was the compromise candidate because the judges couldn’t agree on the other books. Then, this judge told me, Do you realize that if your book had been listed as fiction, you would have won? I think what caused a certain amount of confusion both at the retail level in the bookstores and among the critics was that, when the first chapters were published in The New Yorker in 1965, it was almost unheard of to use fictional techniques to write about real situations. My name stayed the same, but I changed every other name.”
“I still write in longhand. I couldn’t compose on the typewriter, so I would write in longhand, and then, as I typed it up, that was a draft, and then there would be another draft and another draft … I think I typed the book by hand at least seven times. And each time, I was editing, and correcting, and changing little stuff. But again, I just had faith in it. Nobody can hold a whole book in his head. It’s impossible. You can’t do it. So you—Marilynne [Robinson] and I talk about this a lot—you jump in the pool, and then you learn how to swim. You don’t really know a lot about what’s going to happen. You just can’t! If you do, then you’re a hack.”
“Writing is a funny business. At its higher levels, there’s so much involved that we don’t understand, and can’t explain. One reason so many writers are anxious, drink so much, and fuck up their lives is that they hate not being able to control the writing completely. They’ve always got a big bet on the table, and the roulette wheel is spinning and spinning, and they can’t control it, and they’re afraid. You realize how miraculous and mysterious the act of writing is. You’ve been reading and listening to the voices of many hundreds of writers, and they succeeded, so perhaps you can. But you have fears, everybody has fears. Look at Joyce at the end, on his deathbed, saying, Doesn’t anybody understand?”
Nice post Richard. I like that Conroy believed the writer starts as a natural reader. I’ve had the reading part nailed since I was a kid!
I also liked, ‘Good narrative puts the reader and the writer in a position of equality.’ The key as a writer is figuring out how to connect with the reader. Good stuff.
Thanks, Beth. I admire his memoir and have always found what he had to say interesting. When I came across that interview I had to rob from it, so I’d have what I found most meaningful handily extracted. Glad that you found it interesting.
I loved this set of quotes, and below is my favorite paragraph. One of the things I dislike in memoir is self-pity. But one of the common motives for writing memoir is revenge. Clearly, Conroy started with revenge, apparently avoided self-pity and no doubt found higher ground somewhere. I have added his memoir to the 100 memoir club:
“[Self pity in a memoir] puts the reader in a position of being asked to sympathize with the ill fortune of another person, to be the witness rather than the co-creator, which is what I want out of the reader, someone whose energy is pouring in. I’ll tell you what I think motivated the writing [of Stop-Time]. Rather than, Oh, what a tough time I’ve had, one of the engines that drove the book—beside the fact that I wanted to be a writer—was anger. I wrote the book to try to get even, in a way, to extricate myself, Hey, fuck you guys! I wasn’t aware of it then, but in retrospect I see it was definitely there.”
Stop-Time does deserve to be on your list, Shirley. And he’s not self pitying, though he had grounds, given his strange, chaotic and unloved youth.
Stop-Time was the first creative-nonfiction memoir I ever read. It was also my intro to Frank Conroy. The first paragraph of Stop-Time bowls me over at the level of the sentence in the same way the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms bowls me over.
You sent me to the book and you’re right—what great rhythm and tone in that first paragraph, which I remember reading a couple of times, though didn’t see then the strange affinity for Arms that you note. Thanks, Todd.
[…] Frank Conroy on mystery & memoir […]
Thanks for posting this, Richard. I might never have come across it otherwise. I just read Stop-Time last year, mainly because it appeared on so many “top memoir” lists right after Frank McCourt died. Reading this interview reminded me how boldly Stop-Time is put together–abrupt switches in tense and point of view, a single chapter left out of chronological order, and Conroy’s willingness to linger on such simple subject matter (one entire chapter is devoted to him mastering the yo-yo). But it really is an impressive work that doesn’t so much break the rules as disregard them. I loved it.
You’ve pulled the best quotes from the interview. I couldn’t help notice that he keeps reminding Lacy that everything in Stop-Time really happened. Did this interview take place after the James Frey business or is that just self-conscious bluster do you think?
Thanks, Tim. I am pretty sure the interview was after Frey. But I think one of the reasons the book got so much ink was because it was so unusual, and everyone presumed it was a novel, and he was remembering that issue.
Richard, hi. I’m happy to see that you’ve spread word about Frank’s teaching. I’ve written a memoir about my long friendship with him. More of what Frank had to say as a teacher, and as a writer, is included. You can find info about it, if you’d like to, at the website link above.
All best,
Tom G
Tom, Thanks for the comment and for the heads-up about your book Mentor: A Memoir. I will read it!
[…] (not for him) and his admiration of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a previous post, “Frank Conroy on mystery & memoir,” I excerpted his interview with Narrative Magazine. Possibly related posts: (automatically […]