Ghost

In early 1998, along with Tom Lux, Jonathan Galassi, and Bill Wadsworth, I served on a panel that was distributing money to independent poetry presses on behalf of the Academy of American Poets. One of the applications we reviewed was from Oberlin College Press, for a subvention to defray part of the cost of publishing Ill Lit, Franz's first volume of selected poems. David Young, the press's editor (and of course far more than that), who cared for Franz well and deeply and with patience for over forty years, said in the application that the money would be that much more useful because Franz had been going through a terrible patch of mental anguish and suffering, which had made putting the volume together tortuous and resource-draining. The subvention was granted without much discussion. It was, as I remember, considered a no-brainer. After Ill Lit came out, at the end of that year, I wrote a review for The New Yorker, where I was working then. The magazine didn't, ultimately, publish the review, but Franz got wind of it through Tom Lux and called me asking for a copy, which I mailed him. He was happy with it, and he sent me the manuscript of the book he had recently finished, The Beforelife, which I read and in turn sent, along with my unpublished review, to Deborah Garrison, who had just left The New Yorker to become the poetry editor at Knopf. She recognized the book's distinction, bought it, and launched Franz on his journey of celebrity and notoriety.

I tell this story because it is the only one of any significance I have to tell about Franz, which is strange. It's strange because there were forceful reasons for its being otherwise: we were practicing poets of almost the same age who had been in college, at Oberlin, together (where he was a highly visible, and I was a secret, writer of poetry); our circles in the literary world had overlapped for years; I had pretty much the same opinion of his work as he himself had; and most important I had done him a serious favor, of the kind that should naturally have led to closeness. In one of the e-mails in which Kaveh Akbar encouraged me to contribute to this memorial, he said that he knew Franz and I were good friends. Through no fault of Kaveh's, the phrase "good friends" has been agitating me since I read it, and it has been agitating me in exactly the way Franz did was when he was alive. (It's surprising to be agitated all over again a full year after his death. "The [insert profanity of choice here] won't stay in his grave," as he might put it.)

Was I his good friend? No, I wasn't. Why wasn't I his good friend when I should have been? The answer is complicated. My early communications with him made it pretty clear to me that Franz had a talent for paranoia and rage. But I also understood in those early exchanges, extending over a year, that a) he wasn't going to burn me the way he burned others, at least not to my face (gratitude—however inconsistently applied—was also a part of his makeup); and b) he had commensurate to his talent for rage a childlike enthusiasm for other people (and creatures) and a talent for love (the evidence, like the evidence he claims for God, is everywhere, but crucially for a reader in the underlying cheerfulness of his seemingly dark poems), which tended to make me think kindly of him. I was put off by his antics over the years—who wasn't?—and all too aware of how easily (and unjustly) he would go to the scorched-earth (the nuclear, even) option in dealing with the world when he felt that the world was disrespecting him. But, again, I understood. I've known and made friends with more than a few mentally ill people (I use the general term "mentally ill" because I'm confused about specific diagnoses and categories of affliction). I...