Frank Conroy (post 5): Tom Grimes, writer and friend of Director, Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1987-2005), says “Frank inhabited several personalities”

“Several incarnations of Frank existed. The pool playing, hard-drinking, cigarette smoking was quintessential Frank. Jazz musician Frank protected and supported this Frank, as well as the literary Frank, for many years. Literary Frank was solitary. Teaching Frank focused solely on the text. He was devoted to teaching, and if, at times, he came across as heartless in class, that was a function of him wanting everyone in the class to learn something from the story being discussed. But his impersonal exterior dissolved if he worked closely with someone -- at least, it did in my case. With Jayne Anne Phillips, too, who was Frank’s first truly serious, and incredibly diligent, student. Whenever I spoke to Frank one on one about my novel, he was talking to me, not to the words on the page. So, Frank inhabited several personalities, although most were known, even to him, as Frank Conroy. He wrote a brief essay about this, called ‘Me and Conroy,’ which begins, ‘He needs me more than I need him, but you’d never know it from the way he treats me. Contempt is perhaps too strong a word. It’s something icier, more distant, more perfectly disinterested. He uses me as if I could easily be replaced, which is certainly not true. Who else would put up with him the way I have?’ Ultimately, you have the Frank who is a conflation of his public and private personae. Elsewhere in the essay he writes, ‘For my entire adult life he has simply popped up whenever it pleased him, used me, put me through a million changes and split without warning, leaving me exhausted and enervated. He takes me, and my love, totally for granted, and if I had any brains I’d tell him to fuck off. But of course it’s far too late for that. He is my fate, for better or worse’ ” (1).

1. JC Hallman. “An Interview with Tom Grimes” (2010). http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016444.php