“Me and Conroy”: Frank Conroy (post 6) either pretends he has multiple personality (why would he?) or publishes essay by alternate personality.

In a previous post, Tom Grimes, a friend and student of Conroy at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in describing Conroy as having several personalities, mentioned the following essay, “Me and Conroy,” which, since it is very brief, is quoted in its entirety:

“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. Not easily, anyway. Who else would put up with him the way I have? (For instance, this is the fourth version of this manuscript, and it’s only a tiny bit better than the first. A lot of time for a very small gain, in other words, and no complaints will be heard.) Who else would ask nothing of him—I mean nothing, not once, ever—simply for the experience of his company? What makes it worse is I think he knows all this and finds it banal. Yes! He does! I felt it just now as my hand wrote the word.

       Should I mention the matter of the cigarettes? I think I should. After smoking a pack a day for forty years, I stopped five months ago. Quitting was difficult, to say the least, but the support of my family and friends helped. I’m on the verge of a big change here, which is to say seeing myself as a nonsmoker, accepting myself as a nonsmoker. Everybody respects this except him. My abstinence irritates him for some reason, and when I try to write he tempts me with images of the red and gold Dunhill package, which he knows I used to smoke on special occasions. ‘Is this not a special occasion?’ he seems to be saying, ‘with the clipboard across your knees and your pen in your hand? Is this not as special as it’s ever going to get?’ Arrogant bastard.

       You see, there’s nothing fancy about it. The situation resembles the story line of a thousand execrable country-western songs more than it does any delicate Borgesian aperçu. I’ve laid my life on the line, and if that isn’t love I don’t know what love is. 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.

       I just wish he’d talk to me directly sometimes. You know, stop whatever he’s doing and look me in the eye and tell me something that would help me get rid of this idea of myself as some feckless brokenhearted jukebox cowboy crying in my beer. I mean, would the sky fall? Would the stars freeze in their courses? God damn it, he owes me. Don’t you think?” (1).

1. Frank Conroy. “Me and Conroy” (1995), pp. 121-122, in Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.