Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(4)
Iowa City, along its river, is a beautiful town. There are brick-lined streets in a neighborhood called Goosetown, once Czech, where geese were kept in the deep backyards. Ample old houses remain and huge trees. Downtown there are wide streets, restaurants, shops, and a wonderful bookstore, Prairie Lights, but the chief business is really the University of Iowa, within which, small but renowned, lies its jewel, the Writers’ Workshop. Originally established in 1936, the workshop is the preeminent writing school in the country, although it is almost universally believed that writing cannot be taught, and in fact it is not really taught there; it is practiced. Kurt Vonnegut, one in the long list of famous writers who have been on the workshop’s faculty, liked to say he couldn’t teach people to write but, like an old golf pro, he could go around with them and perhaps take a few strokes off their game.
There have been numerous old pros at Iowa over the years, many of them former students, and if you were lucky enough to have studied there, you might have sat across from John Cheever or Philip Roth, John Irving, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams or others discussing or demolishing what you or a classmate had written. Afterward you might drink with them at the Old Mill or the Foxhead, tirelessly continuing the talk. You may not have been learning to write, but you were certainly learning something.
Frank Conroy, tall, unflappable, and urbane, was head of the workshop for eighteen years, from 1987 until a few months ago, and his stamp is firmly on it. He came to Iowa from the directorship of the literary program at the National Endowment for the Arts and a few teaching jobs before that, and more remotely from the literary scene in New York, the bar at Elaine’s, innumerable parties, jazz joints, where he began as a brash outsider but made friends and eventually a name for himself with the publication of Stop-Time, a startlingly fresh, enduring memoir of youth, in 1967.
Admission to the two-year program at the Writers’ Workshop is made on the basis of an example of submitted writing. As director, to guarantee the quality of students, which translated ultimately into the reputation of the school, Conroy read every submission and made final decisions himself. It was the way the great cities of Europe were built, not by committee but by royal decree. The faculty was assembled the same way. There were permanent members, Frank being one of them, but others were there by invitation for a year or two. The workshop ran like a clock, due also to a chief administrator, Connie Brothers, who looked after all the details Frank could treat somewhat offhandedly and who acted as a kind of foster mother for the students. Between them was the power.
In a dark wooden booth at the Foxhead one night, the air blue with cigarette smoke and the clatter of pool balls, Frank confided to me that he had just gotten an advance for the novel he was then writing, $250,000. Suddenly I could see that he was no ordinary academic. We sat drinking with Joseph Brodsky another night, the jukebox playing and a bell at the bar being rung every time someone ordered a local beer called Dubuque Star. Brodsky had come to Iowa City to read. He was not the only Nobel laureate to do so. Derek Walcott came and Seamus Heaney, who read to a crowd that overflowed onto half the stage. While it did not rival Stockholm, the invitation to Iowa City was a distinction. Almost every week someone of interest arrived to read, and there were dinners with them beforehand.
The dinners at Frank’s house were best, seven or eight people, often including a visitor, martinis made in a silver shaker that had belonged to Frank’s father. The talk was usually about writing. Objectivity came up more than once and the existence of truth, or God’s truth, as Frank called it. No one could know that, the complete truth. It was too vast and complex. “All we know is what we think we know,” he said; there was really no such thing as truth or fact. He told me he had written that his mother and stepfather had gone to Cuba to buy a piano or something—actually it was for her to have an abortion. But what he wrote was what he thought was true. “For me, it was true,” he said.
“Who is the Dostoyevsky in American writing today?” Jorie Graham wanted to know.
Various names were brought up. Mailer, Frank proposed—among other things, he was Frank’s friend. There was argument; voices became louder and louder. The next day I called to apologize for becoming excited. Maggie Conroy answered.
“Oh, who can imagine anyone getting excited about Norman Mailer,” she said soothingly.
She had aplomb. She had been an actress and had grown up partly in South America. Her face was filled with even temperament and intelligence. Marguerite, Frank sometimes called her, suggesting her authority. They had no secrets from each other, even things in the past. “When we first got started,” he said, “we just sat down and told each other everything. It took weeks. Everything.”
“And after that we had nothing to talk about,” she added wryly.
I taught twice at the Writers’ Workshop, the last time in 1989, but Frank and I became good friends and stayed in touch. Then a letter came, very brief. It looked like it was all over, he said. Colon cancer had been diagnosed. There were four stages and he had the worst, stage four.
That was two years ago. He underwent surgery and the rest of it. The workshop began to look for a new director, someone who could fill Frank’s shoes and deal equally well with those below and above, the deans, presidents, donors. Eventually Frank was told that his condition seemed stabilized and, though he was not cured, he might go on for a number of years. That didn’t happen. There came the point when he was told that nothing further could be done. He decided to let nature take its course.