Nelson, crouching over the book, wrote: “For Stuart and Jennie. The best in the West (as well as the South, North and East). Because he’s the boy with the golden wife—and she’s the girl with the golden guy.”
For there was indeed now a Jennie, a golden girl with whose short life mine was now linked in a more responsible relationship than I had ever imagined I would assume—a decisive part in the unimaginable future building before me.
We were all on our way now, but Jack Conroy was the last to leave. He had waited until the very end to say, “Papa, it was a fine party. I’m proud of you and your efforts for Nelson.” They were all gone now, the columnists, the celebrities, the crowd that stretched in a file of twos almost to the corner drug store. Only Jack Conroy, a huge and gentle man with his “Hello, Papa,” the extended hand, and the tiny stare in the blue, grey-flecked eyes, always waiting, wondering how you are going to accept his greeting.
This is the wild, humorous, tender man who gave Tennessee Williams his first important break, who first published Richard Wright, who wrote a bestseller[bestseller] thirty years ago that is highly regarded by the few who remember it, and who is rated as the second most popular American author in all of Russia, one below Melville and one above Poe.[[1]] His only material reward: a purported fortune in rubles which he has no intention of ever collecting.
When Jack edited Midland Humor, a discerning anthology published in 1947, he was late to his own party at the Seven Stairs. When he arrived, I was shaken, as I always am, by his look of, “Will I be scolded? Will I be forgiven?”
He can be the most jocular of men, and the most understanding. One afternoon over coffee at the Seven Stairs he reported at hilarious lengths on the drinking prowess of his friend, Burl Ives, who was then doubling between a cabaret engagement at the Blackstone Hotel and the vaudeville show at the Chicago Theater. I was in the depth of my psychiatric period and suggested that help might be in order.
“He doesn’t seem unhappy about it,” said Jack, innocently.
Today Conroy, one of the most talented men in American letters, quietly stands and looks. When he talks, he stares directly at you, or turns his head entirely away and speaks to empty space.
I think he is the most honest man I have ever met: in his intent, in his appraisal of others and their writing, and in his own bereavement. As the gait grows slower, the shyness becomes more pronounced and the gaze extends away farther and farther.
He has been called the Samuel Johnson of the Chicago South Side. The designation fits in many ways—the large physical build, the forceful expression and comprehensive knowledge, the long toil in the compilation of reference works—and in some ways not at all. He has been many things, at times even a wandering player, and his physiognomy suggests a somewhat more cerebral William Bendix.