Mentor: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagination had surprised me, and so I made a decision. If baseball was to be my subject, then baseball would be the lens through which I examined America. Baseball would be my great white whale. And as I was writing the novel’s initial pages, I discovered a passage in John Cheever’s diaries that summed up my task. At least, I believed it did. And so, at all times, I kept it tucked in my notebook, and I reread it often, to assuage my doubts and to remind me of what I’d set out to accomplish.
     
    Cheever had written: “I think that the task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting out the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.”
     
    Now, at my desk, I waited. Several hours later I wrote my first sentence in Iowa City. From there, I continued. Calm, euphoric, terrified.
     

    I met Connie in her small office. Or maybe the office only felt small because it was filled with hundreds of books written by graduates, dozens of the most recent ones stacked on her desk. Once I sat down she said, “So, tell me everything.” I tried to compress the details of my life into a coherent narrative. And when I left her office an hour later she said, as if she’d adopted me, “See you, sweetie.”
     
    But I still hadn’t met Frank. I’d seen him, along with everyone else in the program, the day preceding our first class. We’d gathered in a large classroom, many of us sitting lotus style on the floor, or with our knees pulled to our chest, once all the seats were taken. Frank stood at a podium and introduced himself. Then he introduced the faculty, some of whom had attended the meeting, and some whom hadn’t. Finally, he mentioned the year’s visiting writers, concluding with “And Norman Mailer is coming,” his voice rising to convey our good fortune, although Mailer’s strongest work, which I admired, was a decade old and younger students considered him a relic. If Frank had promised Raymond Carver, a buzz would have engulfed the room. But Carver had died a year earlier, in 1988.
     
    In any case, I was electrified by hope. And I’d anticipated a grand setting for the workshop. Green, freshly clipped lawns, ivy-covered walls. Instead, the English-Philosophy Building was a square brick structure with few windows surrounded by a busy road, the muddy Iowa River, a parking lot, and a set of train tracks. EPB’s halls were dim and boxcar straight, its tile floors scuff marked, its plaster ceiling low. Light fixtures were scarce. Room 457, which sounded like a torture cell out of Orwell’s 1984 , would be where Frank held his workshop. I reached it by climbing four flights of thick metal stairs. Six or seven students loitered outside its doors. Feeling out of my depth, and by nature prone to solitude, I wandered past them. Fifty feet away, a short hallway intersected with the main one and I slid into it. A bulletin board had been nailed to one wall and I scanned the papers tacked to it. They announced fiction competitions, calls for manuscripts, and fellowship application deadlines. While I was studying the notices, a door opened, brightening the hallway. I looked to my left and saw Frank appear in its archway, holding a set of keys. He glanced up. His iciness toward would-be writers was less intense than it had been in Key West, but still noticeable. He paused to look at me. Connie must have described me to him because a moment later he said, “Are you Tom?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Come on in here.” Once we were in his office, he said, “Close the door.” He sat behind a wide desk. Manuscripts were everywhere. An Oxford American Dictionary was propped open on a stand