GEOFFREY CLARK
Author, Friend, Mentor, In Loving Memory
Red Hen Press has published three of Geoff's books. You can find them here: https://redhen.org/book_author/geoffrey-clark/
I really miss hearing from Geoff. We swapped letters, the old-fashioned ones written by hand, some of them easily six to ten pages long, for a couple of decades.
No matter where I was, I knew that Geoff was likely at his home in Warren, Rhode Island, near to the Atlantic Ocean, walking distance in fact, and near to his garden, his books, and his lovely, intelligent and supportive wife, Pam.
I suspect all who knew Geoff miss him. He was not only kind, creative, diligent in his work and intelligent, but intensely thoughtful and sensitive.
I first met Geoff when I was a student at what's now Roger Williams University. At the time, it was Roger Williams College. Geoff, Robert McRoberts, and Martha Christina were running a program there in the English Department with a focus on contemporary fiction and poetry, both the reading and writing of it. It was under their tutelage, and specifically Geoff's passion for fine and what he called "committed writing," and his sense of humor, that I was able to sit still long enough to attend at two different periods in my life, at last finishing course work there for a diploma in 1984.
Geoff had many favorite writers, and an acute sense of how to read and respect their work. One was his mentor Richard Yates, who Geoff brought to Roger Williams on two occasions when I was a student there. It was such a pleasure to meet Mr. Yates in a small group session, perhaps half a dozen of us starry-eyed students present to ask him questions about, for example, the story he'd read publicly on campus the night before, Oh Joseph I'm So Tired, a heartbreaking narrative that captures the hopelessness and yearning and angst that so many people felt during the years of the Second World War.
Yates, a former soldier in that war, had been a professor at the University of Iowa when Geoff was a student there with the likes of fellow student Jonathan Penner, and many others who went on to establish fine literary careers. Geoff befriended, praised and supported the work of writers and editors such as DeWitt Henry, Jack Smith and Dennis Must, and published as the Fiction Editor of Ampersand Press, books by Peter Matthiessen, Larry Moffi, R.V. Cassill, and James W. Hall.
Working with Bob and Martha, they brought to the RWC campus writers such as Susan Dodd, Charles Simic, George Garrett, Maria Flook, Lucien Stryk, Tess Gallagher, Richard Hugo, David Ray, and Raymond Carver, many of them when quite early in their careers. When these writers were on campus, they were accessible, they gave at least one reading, and in some cases two, and in other cases in advance of their arrival, they read a small sample of work by us student writers and gave generously of their time in one-to-one sessions to critique and discuss it.
With Geoff, however, and what has stayed with me as part of my own ethos, it was the study of great literature that came first, and what followed from that, naturally, but was always second to it, was one's own stabs at forgng readable fiction or poetry. For Geoff, it was always about "doing the work," not about accolades or acclaim. Geoff steered me away from reading only Kerouac and other Beats, and introduced me to their influencers such as Thomas Wolfe, who I stuggled with for a time, and then to the earlier prose of Truman Capote, the stories of Flannery O'Connor (onwhich I wrote a pair of essays for Geoff, and still relish reading today), and Andre Dubus, the novels of Flaubert and the stories of Chekov, the novels of John DosPassos, (I read all of the USA Trilogy for him and wrote a convuluted long-winded essay on it that poor Geoff had to suffer through and grade), the poetry of E.E. Cummings and his novel The Enormous Room, which I also wrote an essay on, the shorts stories of John Cheever, (I went on to teach some Cheever while employed at a university in Russia), William Faulkner, and lesser known contemporary talents such as William Price Fox, and John Gardner, among many others.
Here are two links to Geoff's interview with Richard Yates, published in Ploughshares magazine in 2011:
https://www.pshares.org/authors/geoffrey-clark
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40349860
I remember asking Richard Yates during his visit to RWC about James Joyce, and Mr. Yates, ever distinguished in his blazer, though looking ravaged by his alcoholism (an affliction both he and Geoff had suffered from) smacked his lips together and said something to the effect that Finnegan's Wake was the work of a genius who'd lost his mind, and that he supposed the stories in Dubliners were worth reading again, though during his last reading of them he'd found them to be "a bit dry."
I could not have agreed more, and found it easy to connect Yates's early novel A Good School to Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. When I shared this revelatory tidbit to Geoff, he in his sanguine way, smiled to show that he was pleased I'd made such a connection and then remarked, "Yeah, I think so. Yeah, could be."
When Geoff brought Peter Matthiessen to the campus, I asked Mr. Matthiessen, who I admired to the point of idol worship, having just binged on three of his novels, which authors I absolutely had to read. How Geoff smiled and nodded as he heard Peter reply to me, "Joseph Conrad, and everything you can by Dostoevsky."
Yes, literature first. Fame, approbation, self-promotion, Geoff had no interest in it. The Zen approach, cultivating one's garden as Voltaire, which Geoff introduced me to, wrote about in Candide. Geoff prided himself on his study of Zen and Eastern principles, particularly the writings of Krishnamurti, and D.T. Suzuki both of whom whose work Geoff suggested I read when I was going through my own bouts of depression, anxiety, and excessive drug use. We talked about the practice of writing as it related to the discipline required for meditation, along with dietary restraints, exercise and healthy approaches to living that had assisted his recovery from alcoholism.
"But even with all that, he's salt of the earth, really," one of Geoff's friends, Joseph Faria remarked to me after he and Geoff had given a public reading in Warren together. But such quality salt is what I remember thinking and I may have even said this to Joe.
Geoff was honest and perceptive in his praise or disdain for certain writers. He and I both enjoyed the fiction of James Jones, whose largely forgotten now, particularly The Pistol, and his story collection, The Ice Cream Headache, though Geoff would often say that I shouldn't try to write like Jones, especially in his larger more ambitious novels because he had a tendency in them to be a "hammy writer" and very few could get away with that any longer due to the more post-modern aesthetic that he thought was something like an infection in the literary landscape. Geoff was also a student and keen admirer of the work of William Styron.
He knew Styron's novels inside and out, as well as the work of I.B. Singer, whom he'd studied under, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novels and stories he knew inside and out and could quote from with ease. Like him, I favored Tender Is The Night, there was a despair and a soulfulness in it, but we both thought it half a great book, and that Gatsby was the more complete novel, an intricate masterpiece, more deftly rendered but lacking, somehow, the emotive power of the first half of Tender. Each work of literature Geoff introduced me to changed me in different ways. If Flannery O'Connor could write such tales about such freaks in the county and neighborhood, so candidly and with such precision of detail and without the self-aware posturing of a Hemingway, then so could I. But I'd have to work on it, day in and day out, and, as Geoff would say, "for the long haul."
We talked about authors all the time during my student days, and I think it brough him much pleasure when I'd spend hours, no exaggeration, in his office with him, sometimes joined by other students, and until early evening on some occasions we'd talk not only authors but musicians, landscapes, hobbies, obsessions, religion, family, emotions, violence, drugs and alcohol, the writing process, the meaning and purpose of literature, the value of reading philosophers, and spiritual guidebooks such as the Christian bible as well as the Tao Te Ching.
I could come to him with any problem I was having, and in those days they were legion. Yet he answered my questions with patience and a reserved sense of decorum and wisdom. He spoke to me often about his life growing up in the Midwest, specifically in northern Michigan, which is the setting of so much of his fiction. I remember when his first book of stories, What The Moon Said, a collection that features three of Geoff's stories -- Boozing, Summer Lightning, and Because My Love Is There -- that have resonated with me for the past thirty years. Geoff was always stressing resonance in any work of fiction.
Does the story make a difference in the reader's life? Will the reader remember it? What kind of cerebral depth does it possess? This was his problem, for example, with one of my favorite writers, Harry Crews. Geoff viewed Crews' work as sometimes too cartoonish and lacking enough of a cerebral element to keep him engaged. He was also a big fan of Norman Mailer, who I admired of course, liking his book The Fight, though I struggled with his other works, finding them labored. I liked Aldous Huxley, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and Doris Lessing, particularly The Golden Notebook, but Geoff dismissed all of them, hadn't find them interesting or worth his time.
These are just a few examples of how we didn't always agree, and our tastes were markedly different, but it didn't matter. This is as it should be in a mentorship, and Geoff would be the first to commend me for thinking for myself and determining my own aesthetic sense of what I believed quality literature might be. "These are personal choices," he would say. "There is no one way."
Here is a link to a Publishers Weekly review of Geoff's book, All The Way Home: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781888105186
He read sublimely that night in 1983 from his first book, not only to us students, but to faculty and guests who lived in the community and had come to show their support. Most people who met Geoff tended to like him immediately. After the reading, the college feted him and Pam with a wine and cheese gathering, an honor that he and Pam, who was always supportive and at his side, richly deserved. They were a genuinely humble couple and I think, perhaps, felt uncomfortable with all the attention.
I wrote letters to him from all over the map, easily a handful of different states in the US during the 80s and 90s, and later from the former USSR, and from China, Europe, and the UK. He always wrote back to me, keeping me in the loop, updating, telling me about progress he was making on various stories or novel projects, what he was reading, how his health was. He battled some serious health issues, and survived a long bout with cancer. During the last few years before Pam died, he was sending me chapters and revised versions of a book titled Undine, which he finished and sent me a copy of, though he didn't publish it. He talked to me during one visit about naming me his literary executor, managing his literary affairs after his death and all that entailed, and how he was going to put me in his will, but I didn't trust of think much would come of such talk. I thought he was lonely and that he was simply being kind to me in his dotage. He liked helping me out over the years, and one winter, knowing I needed the extra money, paid me to scrape, sand and paint one side of his house. I still have my copy of Undine, though I'm not sure what to do with it.
It was a thrill to introduce him and Pam to my wife, Angelica, during our first years of marriage in the late 90s when were living in Massachusetts, and later in the early 2000s when we lived in Rhode Island, and later still when we lived in Virginia. His words of support, his letters, his friendship kept me going through some lean times, and I think after he retired he really enjoyed that I popped in on him during a time when I was driving from Virginia to New England on a regular basis to visit my ailing mother, and later to keep my father company and take him on road trips. These visits to Geoff allowed him to share with me his home, and to sit with him in his office room where he'd pull out a few books and drop them on my lap and we'd talk about the authors, whether it was Nathaniel West, or Celine. He'd take me on nature walks to enjoy a view of the ocean that was part of his daily life. We'd talk about how my paint job was holding up and his routine and some of the other issues he was having with maintaining his house.
I was in Turkey and unable to leave that country when I learned first online that Pam had died, and that in the wake of this Geoff had gotten sick and was suffering from dementia. He died not long after, pretty much alone, though Bob McRoberts didn't live too far away and he along with his wife and other friends really extended themselvem as much as Covid would allow, to help out. Due to Covid, money issues, and other restrictions related to my job in Turkey, I wasn't able to visit him or my father, who also died at around the same time, during his final days, or to attend his funeral. I regret all of this, of course.
Geoff read and evaluated even the weakest examples of my prose and that of all authors severely and wasn't shy about stating where and why it was weak and needed improvement, and where it was nearing what he called, quoting William Styron, "the white heat" authors want to palpitate and exude from thier sentences. But he never judged me, the wild-eyed impetuous young man who asked too many questions in class. He was tolerant, patient, a first-rate listener and deep thinker, and he'd take his time to make suggestions to me regarding resolutions to whatever problem I was facing or situation I was in and needed advice about. Less a father figure, and more of a big brother is what he became for me with time, and I think he liked and accepted this role, perhaps even viewed me, at times, as a protege. At least, I like to think so.
Author & Former English Professor at Roger Williams, Geoffrey D. Clark Dies
Saturday, January 15, 2022
Geoffrey D. Clark was born in northern Michigan on October 11, 1940.
His parents, Ryll Spaur Clark and George Clark, predeceased him. Geoffrey married Pamela Blumlo. She predeceased him on November 15, 2019.
Geoff was an English professor at Roger Williams University and Pam had taught middle school science in Middletown, Rhode Island. They lived on Touisset Point in Warren, RI.
Geoffrey had resided at the Warren Skilled Nursing Facility in Warren for the last few years of his life. He suffered from Alzheimer's.
Geoffrey was the author of several books. He included a memoir at the end of his book "Rabbit Fever'', which is a collection of stories published in 2000. Geoff described how his mother had "languished bedridden and near-mindless" for ten years. He wrote, "It's just as horrible as everyone says, helplessly watching someone you love fade degree-by-degree into the gray semi-death of Alzheimer's."
Geoffrey is survived by his sister-in-law, Joy (John) Warren, nieces Emily Diegel and Renae Wright, and nephew Benjamin (Jennifer) Warren; great-nieces Magdalena Wright, Natalie Diegel, and Emma Warren; great-nephews Rene Wright and Logan Warren.
The family would like to give special thanks of appreciation to the caregivers at the Warren Center. They'd also like to give thanks to special friends Robert and Michelle McRoberts, Abby Cabral, and Barbara (David) O'Leary. Their friendship and compassion were especially meaningful during these last few years of challenging times.
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