Seasons of a Boy
LEVINE, RICHARD M
Seasons of a Boy STOP-TIME By Frank Conroy V ikinx. 304 pp. 55.V.V Reviewed by RICHARD M. LEVINE Glance at the bookshelf of anv reasonably literate 12-year-old American boy and you will see...
...Conroy recalls staging a revolution against the staff ("Can there be anything as sweet for a chdd as victory over adults...
...He passed the entrance examination and attended Stuyvesant High School in New York...
...the class hero, a physical marvel named Sammy ("An undescended testicle, which we knew nothing about...
...We bought two lots...
...Recent months have shown us a curious mirror image of this tradition: autobiographical accounts of boyhood written for adults by young men whose special virtue is that they cannot yet afford to recollect in tranquility and so are able to map out their terrain with all the humps in place...
...Cannon-ball...
...The point isn't the destination, of course, but the trip itself...
...Even a little booze in the old days but my wife made me stop...
...He is in Paris the year alter graduating from high school and an artist-friend shows him a drawing of the lock on the Metro door: "The drawing was highly complex, much more elaborate than the simple bar and catch I had watched interacting countless times...
...smoking packs of Luckies ("Loose Sweaters Mean Floppy 7"its...
...Movement in stasis...
...D. H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature...
...For Frank Conroy summer was always associated with Florida, where as a child he moved with his parents to a makeshift workers' community outside Fort Lauderdale called Chula Vista, "beautiful view": "The view in all directions was exactly the same...
...A fingernail was huge, one hair a complete and engrossing entity, the cement under my head like a close-up of the surface of the moon...
...Doom' Doom...
...Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America...
...Cat's Cradle...
...and quon-set huts, and the years slipped by...
...55.V.V Reviewed by RICHARD M. LEVINE Glance at the bookshelf of anv reasonably literate 12-year-old American boy and you will see manv of the great and near great works our literature has produced...
...They lived in trailers, lean-tos...
...history and biography BERNARD BAILYN/The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution/Belknap Press of Harvard University Press H. W. BRAGDON/Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years/ Harvard University Press LOUIS J. HALLE/The Cold War as History/Harper and Row ROGER HILSMAN/To Move a Nation/Doubleday GEORGE F. KENNAN/Memoirs: 1925-1950/ Atlantic-Little, Brown NATHAN SILVER/Lost New York/Houghton Mifflin Co...
...Winter was school...
...Since this genre of memoir is generally the province of venerable men of letters writing with blankets over their laps, these books have encountered the kind of adult censorship usually reserved for liquor and sex: "If you write your autobiography now...
...showed the kids their tricks and organized a contest...
...The residents seemed to take on the features of the landscape: "These people breathed failure, moving from town to town in an endless cycle of disillusionment...
...Within it my body was so large as to be meaningless—the way the sky is large outside—an immense thing so vastly out of scale it could be forgotten...
...It fascinated mc because I could see my progress in clearlv defined stages, ami because the intimacy ol it...
...brutality happens easily...
...bikes, running, nakedness, freedom—these were the important things...
...science, philosophy and religion T. DOBZHANSKY/The Biology of Ultimate Concern/ New American Library JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH/The New Industrial State/ Houghton Mifflin Co...
...and Ramos took him aside to demonstrate the ultimate trick?the Universe...
...Ramos and Ricardo, "two Oriental gentlemen in natty blue suits...
...nothing surprises me any more...
...He rode with some amusing characters, like the fat truck driver who picked him up outside Jersey City: " 'I've carried everything in my time,' he said...
...Slop-lime would be high on the chart...
...Round the World...
...We live, it seems, in a ritual-poor society, where a boy passes into adulthood with no more than a shudder and a deep gulp...
...My hands are frozen in the middle of a deaf-and-dumb sentence, holding the whole airy, tenuous statement aloft for everyone to see...
...He won the contest with a perfectly executed Cannonball ("There it is, brief and magic, right before your eyes...
...Though one wonders what some Polynesian Margaret Mead would have made out of the College Board examination Frank Conroy took: boys alone in a big hall monitored by an adult, the breaking of the seal, the special pencils, the admonition not to think "unduly"' over difficult problems...
...In a chapter entitled "The Coldness of Public Places" Conroy conveys the schoolday rhythm of confinement and freedom...
...But to a young boy born in New York City...
...ride through London ami the 3:00 p.m...
...Freedom in boys' books means escape from the adult world, Huck Finn's "sivilization...
...necking at the age of nine...
...Paradoxically the smallness of everything gave me the sensation of great space, I suppose because in some way I became as small as the things I contemplated: a flake of silica, a sand burr, a detail in the grain of a wall-board...
...1 just drive along and work on the old voice.' He threw back his head and began to sing...
...He gets drunk and plays the piano at a club, "an elaborate ritualized introduction" to the wild ride home at 3:00 a.m...
...Holden Caufield said, "but I read a lot...
...Huck Finn...
...Backwards Round the World...
...Oh Boy...
...I'm starting a new life . . .' \1> acceptance into a good college meant I could destroy my past...
...He had become something of a "problem" child, the bad dream of the PTA...
...Eating Spaghetti...
...the wing—the passage from childhood to adulthood—and raise a true story to the level of literature...
...Doom...
...the mass pummeling of a classmate after a mock trial...
...But one of them, Willie Morris' North Toward Home, is very fine indeed, and another, Frank Conroy's Stop-time, is the best account of growing up in America 1 have read since Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City...
...His mother's cries of "Fra-ank" hovering in the air, the boy lay for hours in his dog Flossie's box: "It was a microcosmic world, closed on all sides...
...Walking the Dog...
...Special Black Beauty Prize Yo-Yo with Diamonds...
...Yes sir...
...The boy went through paperbacks by the rackful...
...A black motorcycle cap was jammed onto the back of his head...
...ALINE B. WERTH/The Deserted House/ by Lydia Chukovskaya/E...
...Florida was a very different place—life without father, the Territory Ahead Huck Finn always dreamed of lighting out to...
...From Melville and Twain to Hemingway and Salinger, ours is a literature of boys' books, where illustrated rather than annotated editions confer the mark of the true classic...
...I'm quite illiterate...
...what will be left to do when you grow up...
...School meant constant disapproval, threats of expulsion, meaningless exercises in class, the interminable wait for the 3:00 bell...
...Frank Conroy is 32 years old and Stop-time is as different from A Walker in lite City as coming of age in the '50s from coming of age in the '30s...
...measures the distance—and the loss —between this drive in a Jaguar and boyhood bike-riding through backwoods Florida...
...Pretty good eh...
...Is sivilization worth a try1 A kind of answer can be inferred from the book's short prologue and epilogue...
...Slop-lime measures the distance between this 3:00 a.m...
...How about that, kid...
...Frank Conroy knew both extremes: the progressive educator out of Dewey and the McChoakumchild out of Dickens...
...Frank Conroy had been Tom Sawyer rather than Huck Finn all along, with Aunt Polly waiting patiently in the background...
...If books, like metals, had a measurable specific gravity...
...A boy's life swings on the wide seasonal pendulum Henry Adams described so simply in his Education: "Summer was the multiplicity of nature...
...Winner receive grand prize.' " Ramos announced...
...Frank practiced lor weeks alone in the woods, graduating to more and more difficult feats: Sleeping...
...the almost spooky closeness 1 began to feel with the instrument in my hand, seemed to ensure that nothing irrelevant would interfere...
...Dismal, to say the least...
...I learned almost nothing from beating up Ligget...
...Books were reality...
...Some of the book's best writing is in these brief sketches of the road...
...We shouted in joy and fear, sending our voices ahead to animate the bleakness, supremely conscious of ourselves as pinpoints of life in a world of dead things, impurities that sand, coral, water, and dead mules were only tolerating...
...Boys are known to be particularly sensitive to the dark...
...Someday I'll go on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour...
...What he had drawn was the process, the way the bar approaches the catch, slides up the angled metal and drops into the locket position...
...Conroy alludes to his method in the book's title—stop-time is the measured rest between two musical notes—and turns to the visual arts for a further elaboration in a closing chapter...
...when even a boy had a public as well as a private life...
...His book has none of the tea and Socialism charm, the rustle of homely incidents mingled with the rumble of great events, that distinguishes Kazin's book...
...On a trip back to Florida he found his childhood friend, Tobey, changed: "His slender body had thickened and his face was swollen with acne...
...The delicious smell of gasoline, the cars coming and going, the free air hose, the half-heard voices buzzing in the background—these List of leading nominees National Book Awards 1968 On Wednesday, March 6th, the six winners of the 1968 National Book Awards will be announced in a presentation ceremony at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, in New York...
...I'll win in a breeze.' " At home, a boy always caught with his hand in the cooky jar, young Conroy escaped into "inner space...
...I made it...
...Meanwhile, these are among the books by American authors published in the United States in 1967 which the judges regard as among the most distinguished: fiction NORMAN MAILER/Why Are We in Viet Nam?/ G. P. Putnam's Sons JOYCE CAROL OATES/A Garden of Earthly Delights/ Vanguard CHAIM POTOK/The Chosen/Simon & Schuster WILLIAM STYRON/The Confessions of Nat Turner/ Random House THORNTON WILDER/The Eighth Day/Harper and Row arts and letters R. P. BLACKMUR/A Primer of Ignorance/Harcourt, Brace & World FRANK CONROY/Stop-Time/Viking Press LEONARD MEYERS/Music, The Arts and Ideas/ University of Chicago Press M. L. ROSENTHAL/The New Poets/ Oxford University Press WILLIAM TROY/Selected Essays/ Rutgers University Press STANLEY WEINTRAUB/Beardsley/George Braziller, Inc...
...A teacher, wrote Henry Adams, is "a man employed to tell lies to little boys...
...George Platz the Singing Truck Driver...
...Places that were once mysterious, self-contained little worlds have only a functional importance for an adult: "Today nothing happens in a gas station...
...Reading was another escape from what the author calls "the attenuated agonies of growing up...
...tilling me with a sense of well-being...
...One could live without words and without people...
...He had captured movement in a static drawing...
...Without resorting to the easy comfort stations of the Freudian branch of Travelers Aid, the author gives us a sure feeling for the private world of a sensitive adolescent...
...Here space and time have a greater relativity than even Einstein ever knew...
...things hung musically in the air...
...JONATHAN KOZOL/Death at an Early Age/ Houghton Mifflin Co...
...1 was . . . finally free, in one small area at least, of the paralyzing sloppiness of life in gencra...
...Standing before a coin-operated milk machine, Frank Conroy thought: "Put a quarter in the slot and the milk would come out...
...Boys' books can get away without deep vision-ot without good eyesight...
...The Nation...
...Driving down the turnpike, "The flat green Jersey meadows slipped by outside, wiped every few seconds by the dark blur of a telephone pole...
...Frank Conroy graduated from high school, spent an uneventful Year in Europe and came back to attend Haverford College, at which point the narrative, like American boyhood itself, ends in a mood of forced jubilation, one of the few false notes in the hook: "I wandered through the neighborhood with a great secret locked in my heart...
...The area's deso-lateness was a boon: The boy played in an abandoned quarry, ransacked a deserted Army camp...
...To us he had only one ball...
...I hadn't made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end...
...That thev speak in accents of terror as well as light-hearted adventure should come as no surprise...
...Fifty to 60 miles an hour through the deserted streets of South London, without lights, accelerating on every turn, "my brain finally clean and white, washed out by the danger and the roar of the wind, I barreled into the countryside . . . and the speed opened up to 90 and 100...
...Like most boys...
...I've won...
...Loop the Loop...
...He knew only that, compared with what he saw around him, it was a good trade: "I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible...
...He decided to run away to Florida and hitchhiked as far as Virginia before returning courtesy of Travelers Aid...
...SUZANNE LANGER/Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling/ Johns Hopkins Press LEWIS MUMFORD/The Myth of the Machine/ Harcourt, Brace & World poetry ROBERT BLY/The Light Around the Body/ Harper and Row DENISE LEVERTOV/Sorrow Dance/New Directions W. S. MERWIN/Uce/Atheneum KENNETH REXROTH/The Collected Shorter Poems/ New Directions LOUIS ZUKOFSKY/"A"M2/Doubleday-Paris Review Editions translation ELAINE GOTTLIEB and JOSEPH SINGER/The Manor/ by Isaac Bashevis Singer/Farrar, Straus & Giroux RICHMOND LATTIMORE/The Odyssey of Homer/ Harper and Row DOUGLASS PARKER/Aristophanes: The Congresswomen/ University of Michigan Press BARBARA SHELBY/Mother and Son/by Gilberto Freyre/ Alfred A. Knopf, Inc...
...For a moment I was speechless...
...A whole chapter is devoted to yo-yoing...
...He helped build a house, rode the bumper cars at a nearby fair, found a dead mule...
...Pineapples, horsemeat, paper clips, bathtubs, you name it...
...The woods, Tobev...
...Nick Adams and Holden Caufield first speak to their peers, and arc either reread or only dimlv remembered by adults...
...Freemont boarding school, where the headmaster was called "Teddy," was one long free-play period...
...bell at Stuyvesant...
...P. Dutton & Co...
...Ismael...
...The vo-vo represented my first organized attempt to control the outside world...
...But at thirteen, sitting with my back against the wall, it was a marvelous place to be...
...winter was school...
...At a gas station in Delaware, "The heavy trucks went by like ships, gleaming with lights, their flat exhausts splitting the air, each one followed by a dancing kite-tail of roadside trash...
...Ten years after the narrative ends Conroy is married and living near London, writing during the day and driving into the city at night...
...And not only the author, but the people around him—his mother and stepfather, his sister Allison, friends, teachers, boarders at the Conroy home-re captured with a beautiful, finished precision in the midst of the most ordinary circumstances, like fine portraits hanging on the walls of a cafeteria...
...understanding little and remembering nothing...
...Flat, sandy land, underbrush, and stunted pine trees...
...What connects the two autobiographies, besides the beauty of their prose, is an ability to distort experience so as to catch a fleeting and hall-conscious movement op...
...A book with so much meaningful detail, one which so ncarh approximates the weight and texture of an actual life, is certainly a rarity...
...Book Avrards are admimste'Cd b/ the National Book Committee, a non profit edir> anona1 association The awards consist ot six $1,000 prizes donated by the American Book Publ,sher\ Cjuncir the American Booksellers Association, the association ol American University Presses, the BcnA Manufacturers' Institute, and the Naticna Translation Center...
...in a big Jaguar...
...Pickpocket...
...No tomtoms, subincision rites or—Norman Mailer aside—big game hunts mark the event...
...If Frank Conroy at 32 cannot yet extract any final meanings from his life, he at least masterfully conveys the sense of having lived it...
...No questions, no ramifications, just the milk...
Vol. 51 • February 1968 • No. 5
