Abbreviations by Other Names

In “The View from Founders” (Haverford, Winter 2006), President Tom Tritton (of whom I am a huge fan) humorously writes of the Haverford secret code of cryptic shorthand. In his taxonomy of the various verbal shortenings, Tom promiscuously interchanges the terms “abbreviation,” “non-acronymic,” and “acronym” for letter clusters such as HC, ILC, and AAEC. The large-print teaser for the feature begins “My favorite namesake, of course, is HC. Nobody here will mistake this abbreviation for anything other than Haverford College.”

In the interest of scientific accuracy (which I know Tom passionately supports), I am writing to clarify the use of such linguistic terms as they apply to Haverford argot.

* An abbreviation is a cluster of random letters, followed by a period, that, unlike the next three categories, generate the sounding of the entire word: Mrs. co., etc. I find no abbreviations in Tom's article.

* An initialism is a series of letters standing for words that are sounded as individual letters: HC, ILC, AAEC.

* An acronym is a series of letters standing for words and sounded as if they made up a word. Examples include NAFTA (“North American Free Trade Agreement”) and ZIP (“Zone Improvement Program”) code. I find no examples in Tom's article that I can be sure are acronyms.

* A clipping occurs when the front or back part of a word is sheared away. The resulting word is pronounced as it is spelled: the Coop, the Doug.

Richard Lederer ’59
San Diego

More Memories of Conroy

In fact, “Spring for Alison” [Winter 2006 issue] was not Frank Conroy’s first published short story. Two years earlier, 1956, the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Revue published his story, “The Checker Game.” And before that, who knows? A student of Conroy’s talent might have published stories in his freshman year and in high school.

The mid-fifties were heady days for the literary arts at Haverford. In addition to Conroy, the 1956 edition of the Revue included work by Anthony (Tony) Amsterdam, Stephen Chodorov, Mather Feick, Michael Roloff, and Steven Sieverts, among others. Conroy also dabbled in poetry; a short poem of his, published in that issue, follows:

Poem

The moons cold light flows clean
and hard and white
upon the softness of the earth
below,
where green limbs dark
with swollen sun fruit wait in sleep
and deep in streams
the fish lie gleaming.

Allen C. Fischer ’59
Brooklyn, N.Y.

John Lombardi’s remembrance of Frank [Winter 2006] is lovely, but I must disagree with one point; actually, I’m disagreeing with Frank, because it’s from his Lucy Crawford conversation where, apparently, he said that he never planned a career as a writer. It's the only thing Frank ever wanted. In the spring of 1956, my senior year, I took a writing workshop with Gerhard Freidrich with two fellow students, Frank and Tony Amsterdam. Frank’s writing was internal and intense and he worked at it constantly, Tony’s already shot through with that blazing intellect which has informed his entire life. It was in that spring, rather than in 1958, that I believe the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Revue published a story of Frank’s. I seem to remember that it was about a young black man named Maurice who worked in the dining car of a railroad, and at the end of the story threw himself off the train. My late and painfully missed friend, Jack Gelber, knew Frank in his early Elaine’s years in New York, and once said that the only thing Frank ever wanted to be was a writer. I once saw Frank in Nantucket, when he was living there. He was still trying his hand at fishing for scallops, but he was also playing piano at a place called The Rose. We sat there one night after his second set and talked about writing, and he said that even though he had sort of put it aside for a while, he couldn’t really keep it out of his life, that he was in fact jotting down thoughts. To be able to spend your life doing what you’ve always wished to do is a blessing. As Frank himself proved to be for so many young writers wanting only to be reassured that they have the right to want only to write.

George Malko ’56
New York City
A Tragic Man Despite Himself: The Complete Short Plays of Anton Chekhov (Green Integer, 2005), a new translation by Malko, is the first time all of the short dramatic works have been collected, including six never before done in English. It can be ordered at www.greeninteger.com.

Reading John Lombardi’s eulogy of Frank Conroy, once my oldest friend, in the Alumni Magazine, makes me want to introduce a number of emendations.

First, it ought to be said that Frank’s becoming a teacher of writing and music, makes the best of sense—he had been a wonderful, patient and encouraging teacher-critic even as a freshman; far superior to, say, Professor Ashmead, whose sardonicism, fine marker as that was in its limited respect, coming from a father figure to those with father problems, failed to be leavened by articulated understanding and responsiveness to whatever subtext of these troubled texts confronted him, above and beyond their literary merits and hints of talent—something I also detected in Professor Satherswaite, another Haverford teacher’s take on all our fumblings in the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Revue’s 1958 edition. [This was] . . . a Haverford habit that requires its own self-understanding, However, at the time, Frank did not, to my recollection, ever shame a student to the point of his or her fainting in class, as he was known [to do later] at Iowa [the Writers’ Workshop, which he directed].

Now the sorely-needed emendations.
1) I was the Haverford editor of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Revue during the 1957-8 year that “Alison,” not Frank’s first story, was published. It was a single issue, compared to the usual two, that we (Paula Dunaway, my BM counterpart) got out that year, and not only for the claimed lack of financing—I’d returned from Europe with mononucleosis. Perhaps there was also a lack of material—Frank had been the editor the year prior and edited two fine fat issues with Pollockish covers by an abstract impressionist painter friend from New York. Our cover, by Betsy Nelson [BM ’58], a close friend of Paula’s, was of a severely discombobulated Icarus, fit subject for Professor Satherswaite’s derisive review of the entire issue. The 1957-8 editorship awaited me, was handed over by Frank. [He] also picked me up (on my return from Europe) to crawl around on the floor of his mother’s place on East 86th Street for a few weeks prior to the start of our senior year. His warm, blowzy Danish mother and I got along fine, and Frank and I had spent our freshman summer there, too, first working as Good Humor entrepreneurs at what we figured out was .28 cents per hour, at a public swimming pool on the Lower East Side; then [I] as an undertipped lemon juice squeezer at the Bronx Botanical Garden, while Frank went to Rehoboth to be with other buddies.(Meanwhile I read all of Conrad and James, until the late James provided a glimpse into such coldness that I shied and put them off towards the unyielding end.) I also spent Christmases at Frank’s mother’s place on East 86th, a rent-controlled building between Fifth and Park, a not insignificant factor for Frank’s aspirations, but scarcely for me. Since my unhappy childhood in castles, I longed for nothing as much as to go among the village people.

It was at one of these Christmases that I realized how competitive Frank was. Inadvertently I’d beaten him at a game that consisted of seeking to quickly hammer as many little staves as possible into holes in a wooden board. He just couldn’t get over it, had to keep trying to win at least once. How obnoxious this need to win at any cost could become is detailed in one fine, particularly self-critical story, some of them mini-novels, collected in his second book, Midair (1985). Frank’s sister was there, his half sister, India, his mother’s sister. Frank introduced me to pool at a hall farther east on 86th Street, and it would have been the farthest from mind to imagine that about 20 years later I might become one of the stellar players of bar pool in Tribeca.

All this to be able to say that “Alison” cannot be Frank’s first published story—the H/BM Revue began to publish stories of his, and mine, in our sophomore year . . . there is always that long lag before a piece will appear in a bi-annual. I myself find nothing seriously wrong with “Alison” for its time, except its opening, which stammers unimaginatively, naturalistically, in the wrong way I would say. And who might prior editors have been who took a liking to our so different things? (Ashmead once informed me, who occasionally writes poetry, that [my poems] were excellent warmed-over Mallarme, when I had barely heard the name.) . . . That’s me in the photo of Frank playing chess, watching him, amazed at what a Mignon I used to be, thus retrospectively understanding why the girls liked me, and also some older men, who then very politely, as I was then, had to be told that interesting as I found their minds, their bodies not; just the opposite in the case of the girls . . . sometimes.

2) As to Frank saying, in the quoted interview, quite astonishingly, that it was ages between assigned books that he found one he had not already read: I well recall that neither he nor I had read most of the introductory titles of Humanities 101-2, I think it was called, including Sartre, Lawrence, Forster, Malraux, etc., all of which left deep impressions. More likely I was the better read of the two of us, aside our mutual childhood reading compulsions and omniverousness of everything that appeared on the then (50s) so much more classily-stocked drug store paperback racks. And so I am puzzled why Frank would need to boast on a matter such as this; as though he had been a know-it-all-boy-genius , who could do it all on his own! It’s an unfortunate reprise of the ‘I could have gone to Harvard’ [theme] we find in Stop-Time (1967), and an aspect of the competitiveness, but also characteristic of the drive of many a success story. But here, at a time when he appears to have thought he had reached some kind of pinnacle and needed to re-dress the past—there is [an] unnecessary defensive stylization going on in that interview, which I find odd and uncharacteristic of the man I knew, when I knew him at his best, and which perhaps only Dubuque and Haverford both buy whole cloth. So far, so near.

3) Somewhat more importantly—on the matter of Frank’s not caring whether he would be a writer or not planning on being one—it must be one of the major hoots to come this hoot owl’s way in some time: Frank was the first person at Haverford I, with all these intervening years, recall actually meeting—I think prior and beyond roommates, deans, hated dietician, etc., etc.,—and it was in front of Barclay Hall, in fall, 1954 . . . He was a gaunt, acned, freckled, six foot teen-ager, who however had an instant something and so made a lasting impression, as did few others at Haverford; and in some ways Frank and I never stopped talking once the conversation had begun and for the reason of some affinity, that then discovered many transactional affinities in music and literature, and the occasional woman. I instantly asked him what he wanted to be. In certain terms, he said: ‘I am going to be a writer,’ a matter, at least professionally, in that respect, I felt some uncertainty about, as I do still, though Body and Soul tells us he was less certain than he let on, no matter that we all, including his first wife, were attracted by the fact that at least one of us seemed to be certain of something!

We not only had John Ashmead as a writing and English professor, but also someone who taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr (her claim being that she wrote for the Reader’s Digest did not impress the snobs though the Digest’s financial terms ought to have). However, Frank referring to the substantial Ashmead in his anything but luminous essay collection Dogs Bark but the Caravan Moves On (2002)—‘let me call him Professor Cypher’, actually deserves a whipping.

At the beginning of sophomore year, Frank and I and Jamie Johnston (Frank’s roommate during freshman year), all decided we wanted to learn classical Greek—who knows why? Was it I who had at least a hint of the benefits that can accrue a writer who has a grounding in Latin and Greek? In the event, the Haverford Greek professor, a Mr. Post, was well gone, and after two sessions of his melodiously intoning ‘Thallasus, Thallasus’ (the sea) but nothing else, we departed the scene with amazing alacrity for the creative writing course at Bryn Mawr. The advantages of this course of action were several. We were asked to write a story a week (productivity), read our stories aloud (response, sense of community), and we discussed the assigned reading (developing differentiating tastes); the rest of the pleasures that French House at BM afforded being left to the imagination, tea and cookies. I recall two young Bryn Mawr women who attended that class, Barbara Taze, because I dated her, as did forever hound dog Jamie (though later on in New York, Frank turned out to be the most libidinously inclined, albeit with ‘discretion’. All of which only became clear [upon ] one day living among a decadent Mexican Indian tribe in the Copper River region, where the men had nothing better to do than steal each other’s women, and the women . . . well, you only found vestiges of whatever anthropological scheme once sought to regulate these Darwinian impulses . . . And someone whose name I believe was Dee McNab Brown, who later became an editor in New York, said that I had to be queer for liking Faulkner’s A “Rose for Emily”! No, I am not particularly queer, but my kind of European childhood and the past of my disintegrated families ensures a certain necrophilia, no doubt one reason I took to Faulkner (one great advantage that Haverford afforded an obsessive).

Paula Dunaway was not in the writing class. Someone sufficiently complicated and motivated who might have been, but wasn’t either, was Renata Adler, who didn’t seem excessively talented at the time. I forget many others. Connie Horton, BM ’58 , was a talented poet, but not in the writing class, I don’t think . . . We had a “snap, crackle and pop” school of poets from Bryn Mawr, no doubt all supporters of the arts now courtesy of the successful men they married; a Marianne Moore is one-in-a-century. Perhaps Renata, in all her oddity, is too. As was Mary McCarthy at Vassar in whose and Edmund Wilson’s bed Renata was so glad to have slept she nearly married their son . . .

Frank as a junior studied with Elizabeth Bowen, who taught at Bryn Mawr that year, as did Paula Dunaway, who looks utterly enchanting sitting at Ms. Bowen’s feet in a photo that appeared in the NYTimes on the occasion of its recent obit of Bowen—which is how I think Paula came to be the Bryn Mawr editor in 1958. Ms. Bowen persuaded her publisher, Alfred Knopf, to sign Frank to a famous $100 book deal, the cheapest way of tying up a possible major leaguer that a publisher ever devised.

4) As to Frank being a “hipster,” I don’t think Mr. Lombardi and David Halberstam, in these instances, who use the term, know whereof they speak. Certainly the terminally boring Halberstam doesn’t. There is something forever square about most regular NY Times reporters so I’ve found over the years. I don’t know why McGrath in his Times obituary of Frank quoted Halberstam, the laziness of journalists I suppose, of not taking that extra step that a novelist would take. Halberstam did not show up at Elaine’s until 1967-8, on his return from Poland. Frank and I and a lot of people were part of the woodwork by then. People fled the Big Table as David’s heaviness was about to descend and doom us, and David, no matter his Vietnam days, and his many admirable and astute journalistic accomplishments, couldn’t tell a hipster from an old woman with a broken hip! If anyone was a hipster at Elaine’s, it was the song lyricst Jerry Leiber, who wrote “Houndog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Poison Ivy,” “Is That All There Is”—all the Coasters’ songs, etc., for his mother had a deli at the border between the Jewish and black ghettos in Baltimore, and because as a teenager in L.A., he started hanging out, not just with the coolest of West Coast jazz musicians, but, appalling the cool crowd, the R&B musicians of those days . . . And living an entirely black life before taking the Tin Pan Alley route to self-stylization. Frank had real cool and a high I.Q., and having grown up in New York and survived Stuyvesant High, was hip to a fair number of the shoals and eddies of the City that the overtly country bred such as myself had the long road of pain to learn (though you would never have guessed that Frank had any kind of cool from some of his behavior at Elaine’s). For me, Elaine’s was yet another home away from home, where I could be fed at midnight, with the occasional huge wet good night kiss from Mama. But Elaine’s, in one of its many respects, was [also] your standard stupid American Moosehead Banging testing ground for quite a few of the challenged male egos of the writers who went there. And to run with Norman Mailer was to run with the asses . . . What may appear exotic from a Haverford or Iowa perspective, on the close inspection of intimate acquaintance, is as so much in American life: within millimeters of the glamour courses the poison.

Frank and I saw a great deal of each other once I returned to New York in 1961, after two years at Stanford and nine months working adventurously in the interior of Alaska. We had also spent part of the summer of 1959 on a ranch in Arizona and traveling, with Frank’s first wife, Patricia Ferguson, BM ’57, to Malibu to visit Jamie Johnston, who’d left Haverford for the New School after his sophomore year, and who would marry Hilda Emos, BM ’57 or ’58 (shouldn’t Haverford-Bryn Mawr have some kind of mascot symbolizing the progeny of all these unions?) Then we went on to a Louisiana bayou plantation to visit Avis Fleming, BM ’58, who married Paul Hodge, H ’58, I think, then back to
NYC, without stopping once, spooky Mississippi, all the while playing chess while driving, pretty even as the score went. We also spent time at a place that Frank’s mother had near Roxbury falls in Connecticut, and there was a ricochet romance with the girl from next door to Frank’s house on 86th Street, who’d left BM prematurely and as I would find out later, had been his lover during his engagement to his wife.

The world was expected of Frank’s talent, but the first book he completed, in the early ’60s, to fulfill his Knopf contract, came as a letdown, something about a priest is all I recall . . . Frank started to write Stop-Time at about the time of the birth of his first son, and I read the chapters as Frank wrote them in a cubbyhole of an office on Park Place, opposite City Hall. As I was doing work for Partisan Review, I showed one chapter to Richard Poirier, who was only too happy to publish it. Frank was getting chapters published all over the place—Paris Review, New Yorker, Esquire— and he could not have been prouder . . .Frank, most importantly, was able to live as a writer, and at some leisure, because he had inherited a small annuity, and because his wife had a far greater annuity from her grandfather, a detail that Frank uses in Body and Soul . . . Patti Ferguson, whose depth and responsiveness no where in his work finds appreciation.

Absent that financial security, Frank wanting to be a writer might have entailed taking on all kinds of drudge work, or in his instance becoming a professional jazz musician, instead of playing one day a week, as he then did at Casey’s or Bradley’s in The Village, if he was even paid for those delightful Monday evening gigs; if, as a writer, it would have meant developing the versatility of a Joseph Heller, who wrote ad copy for many years while working on Catch 22, or Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman, the latter a good friend, both of whom worked the lowest rungs of grub street as they became pros, so many there of course remaining grubs all their lives, though Wilfred Sheed, also a good friend, via Frank, was proud to be “a hack.” [He too was present during one of those makers, the Kennedy assassination, at Frank and Patti’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.] But what hack! In that sense, Frank, to some extent, remained an amateur, and also child of “the Fifties”, as I then learned to appreciate this amazing American way of organizing its memoryless history.

As Stop-Time was composed I saw a good deal of Frank, not only in Brooklyn or the cubby hole, but at a bar to which he had introduced me on my return from a reprieve of my junior year abroad, in December 1964, the now-famous Elaine’s. I well recall his confession to me one evening that he was fast becoming the most famous unpublished writer of books in New York, and my failing to say that he shouldn’t let it get to his head. But this groundswell and the positive reception that Stop-Time enjoyed—and to the extent that, not having a second book in the oven, Frank nonetheless lived and acted within the kind of company that latches on to the hottest new thing as though he was more accomplished than in fact he was—this building headiness not only led to a somewhat earlier completion of Stop-Time, I think, than the book deserved, but to his being dumped overboard, to the sharks, if your yen is to sail the company of icy millionaires like Michael Nichols; and Frank’s heady, infused acting out crashed to an abrupt end when his wife finally showed him the door and exile to Nantucket: thus the 18-year interim between books, recounted with requisite honesty and laconicism in some of the stories he then published in Midair. The subject of living purely “in style” is addressed very nicely in that story about the three Lord Fauntleroys, and honestly, I think I can say since I was on the observant sidelines of a tight knit circle that my weaknesses along that line didn’t leave that requisite time to break into—for me to have affairs “with discretion,” or live out a purely imaginary existence; not to mention the financing of such living “in style” via unfulfilled screenplay advances. I gained unexpected insight in such matters as an agent working out of the Lantz-Donadio offices in the Steinway Building on 57th Street, where mother Candida was Frank’s agent.

I far prefer the mini-novels of Midair to Stop-Time. Frank had become a real writer at that point, though some of the slighter things in the collection might have been left out. Their inclusion may have been the doing of Sam Lawrence, its publisher, to “bulk” the book out. The response to the important things in Midair smacks of the usual preference to eat the same parfait that you loved once [Stop-Time] at the same Mom and Pop shop. I have followed this kind of phenomenon for years in my position as an expert on Handke, who has molted at least half a dozen times, with the in-between molting stage sometimes being the most interesting. And so, to those who know how to weigh the laconic . . . it contains rich obliquenesses for the attentive interested reader. Mini-novels. Condensation. It is all there, and there is no need to treat of all these matters in the whatever platitudinous ways of the journalisms of the age. “A long stretch of uninterrupted time is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”—Walter Benjamin, On the Fairy Tale, Leskov.

Tide and Tide tells us that Frank first went to Nantucket in the summer of 1956, not just in his middle age, with Patricia Ferguson, Jamie Johnston, Hilda Enos, Connie Horton, and some other Haverford/Bryn Mawr couples, while I spent the summer in Fort Belvoir with my parents whom I had not seen for years. I myself visited Nantucket twice, once in the ’60s while Patty and Frank had a house there, and I found their living rug, their retriever, to be a surrogate for something else I ought to have hugged; the second time in 1974, with a French-American woman as cool, hip, passionate yet faithful and faithless as they come, and which I spent more time hugging than talking to Frank about the serious matter that we might have talked about.

That time, in 1974, was also the second-to-last time that Frank and I physically met, the last being in D.C. in the spring of 1986 prior to my going back to the West Coast. It was clear that Frank no longer wanted to resume the old closeness; he had never come to see me while I was the co-publisher of a firm in New York and he retrenched contact with most other old New York friends while making a new life for himself and taking stock of what had gone wrong during the years 1958 to 1971. I left a message for him prior to a Body and Soul reading he gave in L.A., where, among some other matters, I was engaged in intensive study of psychoanalysis, but have no idea whether he ever received it. In D.C., with me in full hunting and riding shape, as I had done in Billy the Kid country for the year before, I encountered [him again]—I had been warned by the one other then still living of the three Lord Fauntleroys—but could have never imagined the huge bowl of jello within which the once gaunt and lanky now reposed. I considered whether someone who was autistically fussy, helplessly hypersensitive to the gruesome food Haverford has inflicted on us might have a wife who’d found the way to his heart via his stomach. But no, Maggie claims to be a lousy cook, and the explanation for the jelly bowl was that Frank had diabetes, telling of which ailment, might have averted misunderstandings, but he merely stated that he realized that physically he was in bad shape.

If someone who thinks the world of Stop-Time, and taught at Iowa prior to Frank’s time there hadn’t asked me about Frank’s buddies appearing in his work I might never have gone back to Body and Soul, which disappointed direly on publication. Never has this ex-publisher seen such piles of hard covers on the sale desks. As to the buddies, they are folded into one who bears the name “Ivan,” but this Ivan is not the Ivan Morris who bears a different name in the Lord Fauntleroy story in Midair. It occurs to me that B & S is ultimately the perfect American movie fantasy, the fantasized life that could not be lived out: Boy gets girl, but girl has mended her ways, become studious and tame; yet boy doesn’t need to marry her! As this would interfere with his concert career. Boy is the ultimate success story, hard work pays; obstacles, including a brief bout of depression, can be overcome. At its end there is the perfect homosexual union with the father—the father and son and holy ghost being the syn- and dissynchronicity of the music of the spheres, and a melding of races and colors into a certain sheen: Claude, as the major character is called, is nonetheless allowed to remain oblivious except of its displaced transfigured musical acting out . . . actually quite a sly book, too. Perhaps even all the talkiness, instead really narrating is a form of throwing sand in our eyes, but it sure tries your patience. What I found extraordinary was Frank’s getting beyond the autobiographical and writing better when his imagination, not just his observational powers, deepened, which of course it doesn’t often enough; for this must be one of the more lumbering spruce gooses as it keeps scraping the runway before it is finally airborne to honk victoriously toward the end. At that end, the jazz convinces on the immediate sensate level, and must be one of the few moments in fiction where anyone brings off the convincing, felt and feelable representation of swinging . . . in unison . . . but that is the way that realism, when it gets lucky, goes. It is of course most unfortunate that Frank’s optimistic assessment during our college days that cancer would be curable during his lifetime has not come to pass.

Michael Roloff ’58
Seattle

John Lombardi replies:

Mr. Malko’s and Mr. Roloff’s letters re Frank Conroy, while differing immensely in spirit and character, agree that he really did plan a career as a writer, and was not at all casual about his ambition, as he seemed to claim in his interview with Lacy Crawford in NarrativeMagazine.com. From the evidence, however, Conroy’s notion of good writing had more to do with capturing spontaneous truth in startling ways that were more akin to acute musical composition, than to the laser warfare that passes today for conventional careerism. As I tried to suggest in my piece on him, an intensely true story — whatever its length — was infinitely more important to Conroy than a career arc. He was a craftsman, first. That’s all — I think — that he meant to say.

And now, briefly, in consequence of Mr. Roloff’s operatically-sustained long note, two emendations of my own: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a professor. I am infallibly hip, having written “St. Boss,” a cover treatise on the subject in Esquire magazine in 1988, (when it was still hip); and having brought the late Hunter Thompson to Rolling Stone in 1970, where he published the first of his gonzo pieces, “Freak Power in the Rockies.”

—J.L.