Craft Essay: "Stop Time" by Frank Conroy

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

Memoir has become an especially arresting literary form that often blends fact and fiction in a morally restraint free literary exploration. One easily can but think about such authors like Mary Karr in her book "The Liar's Club" in which, Mary Karr puts a courageous countenance on her childhood, but she hardly dismisses its damaging facets. When one is talking about Mary Carr one cannot forget her other book "Cherry", which sees Karr arising from the interior world of a screwed-up family into a world that gives her escape.  It is here that Frank Conroy is similar in his approach to his memoir “Stop-Time” when he says:

He (his father) combed his hair with urine and otherwise played it out like the Southern gentleman he was.  He had a tendency to take off his trousers and throw then out the window. (I harbor some secret admiration for this.) (pg. 11)

          

  “Stop-Time” is puzzling, because within his story there is an impression of no time at all.  We know from the author’s text that he was born in 1936. Therefore we can figure out that he grew up in the 1940s. He distinctly describes his physical surroundings. But, Conroy doesn’t inject many beneficial references that would place the reader in one specific time frame.  It doesn’t burden the story, but it makes it burdensome to locate oneself in the story, which may be the point. Conceivably Conroy, through his memoir, is transmitting his voice in advance to animate the distress, notably conscious of himself as a moment of being live itself in a world of dead things. Conroy himself alludes to this extraordinary animated distress when he says: “One the same night occurred the only preternatural phenomenon in my experience” (pg.23).

            Conroy doesn’t expound on his inner turmoil as a child, but I think he is obviously less inspired in recounting a particular period in American life than in exposing the manifold warnings of the absolute madness which materializes everywhere. This danger of the psychosomatic collapse informs the entire book, from his father’s insanity to that of his sister, the twisted cruelty of their tenant, the instability of his stepfather, the of a wealthy woman which he has an affair with, the psychological delicacy of a beautiful girl in a Danish school, and the disturbing scenes inside the institution for the retarded, which his parents were wardens.

He writes about the time he snuck into his parents’ room through a skylight, and he lands on his head.  He writes, “The pain was barely noticeable.  No more than, fifteen years later, a woman’s teeth in my arm” (pg.157).  He bounds easily from pleased sneak-thievery to sexual innuendo, while making no sense within the setting of the scene.  One example of this can be seen when he says:

“The atmosphere was heavy with the perfume of the nineteen-thirties –– spurious agrarianism, group singing of proletarian chants from all countries, sexual freedom (I was necking at the age of nine), sentimentalism, naiveté” (pg. 13).

If one were to exaggerate the association and compare his pleasure in defeating the locked door to his later sexual exploration, he generates no further reference to anything remotely sexual in the next paragraph.  So, I question if his statement, “the pain was barely noticeable,” is a furious yet contemplative dismissing of the enormous emotional turmoil he suffered as a child.  I realize this is a stretch, but still, I wonder, particularly since this memoir is praised as being almost free of self-pity. This lack of self-pity can be seen in the text:

“Words, after all, are the tools they use to break us down.  I resist them because I know more about words than they do.  Every educated man should know about words… they spew out their poison and their vomit I see it for what it is. Filth! Nothing more or less than that!  And we are surrounded by it” (pg. 152).

Then there is Kathryn Harrison in her book "The Kiss" in which she transforms her life into an ambition towards art. The murkiest passages thinkable in a young woman’s life are uncovered, which turns out to be an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when she was twenty and is reunited with the father whose absence had haunted her youth.  When speaking of murkiness one is drawn to Conroy’s text, and the writing, which is so expressive, making even the most humdrum details fascinating. One example would be:

I sit up cautiously.  My body freezes.  Rising before me over the foot of the bed is a bright, glowing, cherry-red circle in the darkness, a floating globe pulsating with energy, wavering in the air like the incandescent heart of some dissected monster, dripping sparks and blood … I see the red circle.  I keep quite still, and the circle doesn’t move. (pg. 50).

We cannot forget about, Frank McCourt's Irish ramblings.  Frank McCourt's memoir “Angela's Ashes”, where the relationship between tone, syntax, and point of view unite to produce a compelling balance of humor and pathos. This is achieved through the viewpoint of little Frank McCourt.  Human nature to tries to make a calamity appear to be better than it is in order to go on with our lives. Frank's distress is to make his circumstances as a poor, Catholic, Irish boy more bearable, is established through the positive tone, powerful syntax and childlike point of view he takes as author. This can be seen when Conroy in “Stop-Time” says:

“Step by step I begin to understand.  My body grows calmer and it’s as if a series of veils were being whisked away from my eyes.  I see clearly that the circle is only the red-hot bottom of the stove–– a glowing bowl, its surface rippling with color…” ( pg. 50)

But thirty or so years before Harrison, Carr and McCourt candid, sometimes titillating, self confessions, Frank Conroy wrote a book titled "Stop-Time," a memoir that surpasses all of them in the beauty of its prose and the poignant and deep sensitivity of its feeling.

        “Stop-Time” has quite a few interesting aspects that Conroy tests in the construction of his essay. In most non-fiction stories it is difficult to create a plot where the narrative is driven full-circle to the beginning without pushing the confines of “non-fiction”. Conroy is able to do this while maintaining the development of time in his childhood, which then makes his statements clear, intact, and (I assume) truthful. This is accomplished in the very beginning when he carefully chose his beginning scene.

"Stop-Time" tells the story of Frank Conroy's first eighteen years of life, a life marked by the ordinary rather than the lurid or unseemly. But the ordinariness of the life is elevated by the dreamlike, sensitive, asynchronous wonder of Conroy's writing. As Conroy relates in the first chapter of his narrative, in a passage that gives you a feeling for his writing style and for the narrative to follow:

"My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies."

"Stop-Time" is a stunning example of how great writing can elevate even the most ordinary of lives. The facts of Conroy's memoir are not remarkable. He grew up in relatively poor circumstances, his father died of cancer when he was 12 and lived most of his life apart from Conroy's mother, he spent his time primarily between New York and Florida, and he was a bright boy who performed miserably in school. But while the broad outlines of his life are seemingly unremarkable, Conroy possesses the great gift of the writer: he can focus on the mote of dust floating in the sunlight and take the reader into a world of dreams and memories that are startlingly real, a world that the reader can feel and identify from his or her own recollections of growing up.

Conroy can lie down in a kennel with his family's dogs and dream that he, too, is a dog running through a field. He can relate the fear of being left alone in a cold cabin in the middle of winter while his mother and her boyfriend work the third shift at a state mental institution. He can recall a trip to the carnival with his best friend and how he was cheated and more by a seedy carnie hawker. He can precisely detail learning all the tricks you can do with a yo-yo, and learn them well. And he can recall the tumescent longings of early adolescence, of sneaking and peeking with his cousin and, as he got older, of experiencing, too. It is all related with a feeling, with a literary sense, that would be called "perfect pitch" if it were music.

"Stop-Time" is a remarkably written memoir that not only should be read, but also studied, as a stunning example of how the literary imagination can give vibrant life to the mundane. One example would be when Conroy is describing fog:

“Ten miles south of London at four in the morning the fog starts.  Long, wispy tendrils float above the road, horizontal ghosts vanishing at the touch of the car’s powerful beams” (pg. 178).

            It seems then a bit ironic that Conroy uses language in the way he does in describing the paranormal activity going on in this passage because basic language is an unfairly neglected aspect of paranormal research.  Take the word 'ghosts', for instance. A dictionary definition would say something like “an apparition of a person no longer living”. Some dictionaries might add “spirit” to the definition. And what about “haunting”? This would typically be defined as 'disturbances or activity attributed to a “ghost”.  While these definitions are commonly accepted, they are not useful in the scientific approach one uses in paranormal research. The problem is that they do not in harmony with witness reports. A classic “haunting” usually involves odd sounds, sights and smells from unknown causes. Sightings of actual apparitions are much rare than general 'haunting' activity. There is often no direct evidence to connect these reported disturbances with 'ghosts' at all!

And yet, Conroy uses this approach to try to use the right language in describing the paranormal. However, if someone were investigating a haunting, many people would immediately think of “ghosts” and even “spirits”. Because the language used is dictated by ancient cultural and beliefs.  Is Conroy then in this specific instance using, to his advantage, the word ghost so we are thinking of some paranormal being or is Conroy speaking about his own past that he has already describe I the previous one hundred seventy eight pages.  Or is Conroy using the word ghost is a metaphorical way, or is it used as a synonym? I think it could be any of these.  Each person comes to a text with their own way of thinking about things, how they process things, their own life experiences, and their own views on the paranormal.  For if one were conservative in their thinking that person may not buy into this idea of paranormal activity and thus conclude that Conroy uses using the word ghost poetically.

       Another example of this paranormal thinking and writing can be seen when Conroy in chapter four “White Days and Red Nights” says:

“Zooming into the room was a flash of chrome-man, a monstrous human machine blurred with speed, bearing down on me like a homicidal hot-rodder. A man in a wheelchair, but what kind of man?  His body was tiny, like a child’s, his head impossibly huge…” (pg. 57)

One believes that Conroy could be speaking about paranormal activity again, but when one reads further we realize he is not.  As Conroy states:

“Flailing at the wheels of his chair like a berserk rowboat enthusiast, he backed me into a corner and threw his hands into my face. ‘ See my pretty ‘racelet?’ he said in a high voice” (pg. 57).

        Is the Conroy’s attempt to speak politically correct about those who are a person with a psychiatric history?  We as the reader know that both of Frank’s parents work in an environment that deals with those who are a person with a psychiatric history.  But is Conroy in the group of concerned citizens that feels that the arts community, and society in general, was romanticizing illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. We all know the argument: If Vincent Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath had been treated with today's medicines, their art would have suffered, or never come into being.  Did Conroy, as others in this time-frame, fear that this kind of reasoning might lead to various forms of mental illness going undiagnosed and untreated in talented young students, and that the fledgling artists and writers themselves might even believe depression or mania or other thought disorders were somehow a prerequisite to being a true artist -- like the jazz artists who once thought heroin and a needle were the way to tap into the genius of Charlie Parker.

            The artist creates despite these conditions, not because of them.  Many people are familiar with Yeats's choice -- "perfection of the life, or of the work" -- many don't want to choose and many don't want to follow Plath and Poe into darkness. So many people, myself included (having a Grandmother who suffers from Bi-polar), know firsthand the ravages of mental illness, and there is absolutely nothing romantic about it. Yes, the gifted mind can often be plagued with doubts, insecurities and emotional frailties. But chronic depression, mania and schizophrenia are another thing altogether. Imagine the poetry Plath would have produced if she had lived as long as Walt Whitman, or how American letters would have benefited if John Berryman had survived his bout with depression for another 20 years.

          

  If we’re truly a writer, we can't give up. It's impossible. The writing life chooses you–– you don't choose it!  Without being conscious of it, so many have created a life that allows them to be a writer above all else, even if they failed according their own aspirations and standards. We seek to achieve chiseled prose and a cadence that coincides with the average human breath.   We seek to be as Conroy puts it, “The girls working with bowed heads, their pens scratching like the whispers of a crowd” (pg. 138).  I imagine that most people, who arrive at writing as a hobby, and then as a craft, and then as a career, begin the journey from a place of buzzing, appreciative idealization. They are, as Saul Bellow put it, readers who are "moved to emulation."  Conroy speaks about the art of writing:

“I don’t believe in the natural writer. I believe in the natural reader who gradually begins to write. You can’t write independent of literature, so you read, you read, you read, you read, you read, and then you begin to write. A lot of it is mysterious” (Gilbert).

I believe it is in reading that we begin to learn how to write.  We develop our favorite writers.  We pick those authors we want to achieve to be like.  We have our favorite books we return to over and over again.  Being on Enders for the first time last December I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. So many were talking about authors and books I had never heard of.  I walked away with many things swimming in my head.  The biggest, though was to expand what I read and why I read it.  I also think that these craft essay’s also help me to understand why writers would use a specific word, or phrase and overall tone when describing something.  Seeing how others have approached themes that are similar to yours is probably the biggest lesson I have learned so far in my having been at Fairfield.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Richard. Frank Conroy on Mystery and Memoir. 23 March 2010. 27 April 2014 <richardgilbert.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/frank-conroy-on-mystery-memoir>.