Late Work by Joan Frank

Author:Joan Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Whatever You May Do

I had a brilliant uncle—the late, distinguished professor Joseph Frank (not the Dostoevsky scholar), my father’s brother—who’d secured a doctoral degree and was teaching college French by the age of nineteen. My dear dad, no slouch himself as a Columbia grad who also became a college teacher, claimed that Joe had forgotten more than he, my dad, would ever know. Joe spoke several languages fluently, had read everything, had traveled everywhere, and had served for a period in some diplomatic capacity to Eleanor Roosevelt. (A big glossy photo buried in my family’s stashed boxes shows the two beaming together as he steadies before her a document she is signing.) I dimly recall, through conversations with now-dead family members, that Joe had later worked for Voice of America. Then, somehow, he’d been ejected from that heroic organization. A sympathetic friend later found him a position teaching at an elite, progressive prep school in Colorado. I visited Joe there when I was in high school—too young and self-immersed to have the wits or courage to ask him (or my father) about his past. Joe died in the middle of heart surgery shortly after my visit. He had summoned my father to be with him, sensing he would not make it. My father, bereft, wrote an impassioned encomium listing his beloved older brother’s astounding achievements. “Wild with grief,” my poor dad was. I, his clueless, self-immersed daughter, felt sad for him—confused, intimidated—and vaguely ashamed of the complexity and power of what I sensed I could not yet understand. I still can’t imagine how I’d have framed what I wanted to ask Joe. But I’ve never forgotten my dear dad one day repeating something Joe had told him privately—presumably in anguish and despair:

Whatever you may do—never write down that which you do not wish the whole world to know.

I’d already understood, wordlessly, that my handsome, wise, gentle, kind, lonely uncle, who perished at only fifty-three (though, alas, appearing far older) was gay. But in those days one never dared speak of that. Jobs, families, paychecks, reputations depended on silence and discretion. Yet it didn’t require much imagination to connect the dots. I believe Joe was fired from Voice of America, or perhaps from a similar distinguished position, when someone intercepted a love letter from him to another man.

Having told that sad story: I still believe the letter form will always serve as a conduit for secrets. That’s its magnetism: the kernel of its lure. Each configuration—who’s writing whom, when, where—stands for itself while comprising a larger pattern. Each carries its sets of conditions and risks, the variousness of personalities making choices inside those contexts. Each contains options for selective censorship, spin, camouflage, embellishment. But each also contains, as shown by my late uncle’s case, potential seeds of self-destruction. A writer selects tools for offering her secrets in letters just as she might in making fiction or essays: tone, diction, focus, selective payout. She will tend, I think, to be aware of the stakes.

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