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ROBERT COLES
seems ready to cave in. He is someone about to give up - perhaps
fatally so. For a moment things appear blurred, confused and danger–
ous; but recovery comes quickly and soon the wayward youth is back in
a comfortable New York apartment. His mother is in Europe, his step–
father is hopelessly caught up
in
an affair with a mad-woman. He is left
with the consolations of comfortable privacy and a chance to forge
his
own way, his own world.
It
is,
of course, foolish to speculate about what might have become
of Frank Conroy had he not been left a substantial and carefully con–
trolled income by his father. He himself comes to the end of
his
story
on a distinctly hopeful note: "My trustee had paid my tuition and
agreed to an allowance of a hundred dollars a month. I was rich and
I was free."
He had been admitted to Haverford College, and somehow knew
even then that his future was not as bleak and foundering as his parents'
lives were.
If
they had done nothing else they had provided him
with
an example
not
to follow - no mean gift for an otherwise capable and
determined young man. Had there been no Haverford for him, no trip
to
Paris, no Jaguar to drive, might he have become one more drifter,
one more sad or desperate man whose struggles lead to nothing remotely
like the book
Stop-time?
To be sure the rich produce more than their fair share of tormented
souls, but Frank Conroy's book is among other things an additional
reminder - if any is needed - that money, "plain old" money, crass
and vulgar money helps a lot and can even be called redemptive now
and then. When a brilliant and sensitive young man is moody and on
the run it is handy to have the range of possibilities and opportunities
that a steady income enables. In fact one feels that all along the loneli–
ness and confusion of Frank Conroy's early life were no match for
what he could see and do as an intelligent person whose parents could
give him, in place of love, a certain easy and ironic confidence that
luck is a real thing and that fate is generous if not kind. He quite
obviously knows aU
this
because he avoids self-pity, demonstrates
his
capacity for humor, and in general emerges as a man who has had
his
troubles but is well on his way to making them much less significant
than
his
power and competence as a writer.
Robert
Coles
