An Interview With Jack Conroy

AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK CONROY Jack Convoy Jack Conroy, novelist and editor, was born in 1899. He was editor of The Rebel Poet, The Anvil, and The New Anvil. Perhaps his best known work is The Disinherited, originally published in 1933. This interview was conducted for the American Audio Prose Library. An Interview With Jack Conroy / Robert Thompson Interviewer: Do you remember how old you were when you first decided to write? Conroy: I was very young. My mother had ambitions to be a writer. We subscribed to that famous magazine called Comfort that sold for a quarter a year. It published excerpts from the so-called chambermaid novels. Interviewer: That sounds a little risque. Was it? Conroy: No, not a bit. They were very, very moral. But they had romance in them. The lord of the manor would be riding through the fields and a romance would develop, but she'd realize that she couldn't expect to marry above her state. Mother's taste in literature ran towards that sort of thing. She wrote, and I somehow got the ambition to write, too. I began writing poetry, a most romantic sort of poetry. I think what knocked the romance out of me, or began to, was the E. Haldeman Julius little bluebooks. Interviewer: What were they? Conroy: They sold for a nickel apiece, and had the classics in them undertantalizingnames. DeMaupassant's "The TallowBall"—Haldeman Julius labeled it A French Prostitute's Sacrifice. A much more appealing title which would inspire some guy to buy one and then he'd be disappointed by the content. But nevertheless he'd think, "Why hell, now that I've got it, why not read it?" He did a lot to acquaint me with the classics. He also had manuals on writing, very sage advice. H.L. Mencken, too, knocked a lot of the romance out of me. A great gentleman was H.L. Mencken. Despite his jeering at the wood tick and Bible belt, he was naturally a very tender and gentle heart. He did more than anybody else towards getting me started. Interviewer: How did you first happen to meet Mencken? Conroy: I never did meet him. He wrote to me and asked me to write something for him. He was always inviting me to come to Baltimore and drink beer with him, but I never got there. The Missouri Review · 249 Interviewer: Where did he first see your work? Conroy: In The New Masses, I believe. He was a bitter foe of the Soviet Union, but he published some radical writers: Mike Gold, myself, Albert Halper, and the others. He published them without any censorship, too. Interviewer: Even though American Mercury printed almost one-third of The Disinherited, it was turned down by thirteen publishers. Was the resistance political? Conroy: No. It was the structure. It was very episodic, you know, and publishers have never been very fond of short stories. Thirteen publishers did reject it, including Covici-Friede. Max Lieber was my agent then, and I said. "Well, William March has had out a collection of related short stories called Company K, and it's been pretty successful." I said, "Why don't you mention that to some of the publishers." So he did, to Covici, and Covici said, "If he'll sort of connect it, thread a story through it, make it at least have a semblance of continuity, we'll publish it." So that's what I did. I rewrote some of it; I revised here and there, and the final result was The Disinherited. It's still episodic. It's an example of the picaresque novel. Interviewer: Jack, do you think that the politics of The Disinherited is what has kept it out of the Academy? Sort of a McCarthyism among English departments? Conroy: I don't consider it as being too political. Do you? Interviewer: I don't know. I think that there is a slant in the Academy towards the belles lettres, towards art for art's sake. I don't know how conscious it is, but I wanted your opinion. Conroy: Well, it certainly did arouse some McCarthyites, and often librarians. The...