158
ROBERT COLES
Now he has had to take cover, and I was the cop who told him
how. A gifted, sensitive youth, he does not have a good "prognosis."
His past, all his early sorrows and later confusions, are pressing on him
with a vengeance. I suppose I could go back, read his various themes or
papers, and find in them the "signs," the foreboding evidence that all
was not and would not be well. We're good at that, looking back at a
life and making sense of it. We're good at "explaining" things, at
making statements about what happened or what
is.
We're not falsely
modest either. Here, for example, is how a psychoanalyst comes to terms
with the issue of creativity: "The problem is not one of organic inferiority
per se, but rather one of body image formation, permanently distorted
self-representation, cathectic imbalance, irreversible ego impairment and
ego restitution."
So, you see, it's not so mysterious after all. One man's "irreversible
ego impairment" contrasts with another's "ego restitution." Writers like
Frank Conroy may have had a bad time of it, but they don't go under.
They swim, or rather, they "restitute." Now I don't know why you
restitute and I go mad with megalomania and have to enter a hospital,
or become a psychiatrist, or an astronaut in love with the wild blue
yonder or President of the United States. But "we don't have all the
answers," as I hear it put occasionally at clinical staff conferences.
Unfortunately Gertrude Stein never got around to asking psychiatrists
to
ask
themselves what
questions
they have (or should have) in mind.
All of this comes to my mind as I think about Frank Conroy's
autobiography,
Stop-time,
an unnerving, beautifully wrought book whose
influence becomes at times hypnotic. The author summons his childhood
so insistently, so shrewdly, so provocatively that the reader has no choice
but
to
submit. A novelist takes advantage of an agreed-upon tradition
that provides the writer and his audience with
th~
common ground of
the mind's willingness to read and
imagine.
The ordinary biographer (or
the "great man" who writes his own biography) calls upon something
else. We all recognize glory; and if we can't achieve it, we can at least
learn of (and immerse ourselves in) its rise and fall. But what of the
"ordinary" man, who has only his own unspectacular story to tell? He
refuses us the free reign of fantasy. He gives us no example to follow,
no clues about how to win, about onetime or seeming losers somehow
come out on top. All we have, in this instance, is Frank Conroy. He
is
upon us because he is a writer, but he appears to have very little con–
sideration for us. Who is he, after all, and why should we care what
happened
to
him when he was a small boy?
As a writer, of course, Frank Conroy's task is to make us care. He
