A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy
THE
GREAT
CONROY
A Conversation with Pat Conroy
MARY ELLEN THOMPSON
BEAUFORT LIFESTYLE, OCTOBER 6, 2015
We think of Pat Conroy as not only a writer, but really, one of the greatest of Southern writers. And he is. Which of us has not read at least one of his books? But the true greatness of Pat Conroy extends so very far beyond the reach of his words. As bedazzling as the rich complexity of the use of language in his novels is, the stories he intersperses in his nonfiction books and blog are the ones that give you the sense of the man, his humanity that has risen over the wounds of his childhood. The amazing boundlessness of his empathy, courage, and arcs of friendships are the finest tributes imaginable to the legions of people with whose lives he has intersected.
Reading a Pat Conroy novel is like being lashed to a mast, and sailing into a story that surrounds you like a blanket of fog. Your primary senses are dulled to anything but the rhetoric and where it will take you; yet in the vast distance you can still sense shrapnel shooting by as the stars of his language explode around you.
Talking with Pat is like facing an immense buffet and trying to choose just what will fit on your plate. We talked about food, exercise, books, and some of the characters he’s met along the way. So, come and join us, sit down, eavesdrop on our conversation.
Since food is a legendary affection for Pat, I wondered if his decision to spend time at the gym and get in better shape affected the way he now cooks, and if his cookbook was actually just a masquerade for a book of short stories.
Pat said, “We all know what we should eat, what’s healthy; I wrote that cookbook for people who were trying to speed up the dying process. If there was a just and merciful God, a dry martini would have one calorie and a bean sprout would have three thousand.
“In the cookbook are the stories I’d written but not published, I wrote and rewrote them. I loved writing it—no one died, no one was beaten.”
We discussed the particular nature of inflicting pain that personal trainers have; Pat agreed, “I’m working out five times a week and something new always hurts; Mina finds ways to torture me.”
In his cookbook, Pat comments about his aversion to cilantro, which is a feeling I share. I wondered how he felt about tilapia, which I think became popular on menus at about the same time.
Pat’s take? “People look at me like I’m crazy when I say I don’t like cilantro; they tell me to try it fresh, or dried, or just out of the garden. I’ve tried it all those ways; it tastes like soap and I just don’t like it. Tilapia? I can’t even figure out what tilapia is.”
I love the stories Pat tells in the cookbook about the times he unwittingly met some very famous chefs. My favorite was the night Nan Talese was taking him out to dinner to celebrate the launch of The Prince of Tides. She didn’t realize that the restaurant didn’t take credit cards and tried to give the owner/chef her gold bracelets to hold while she went back to the hotel for money, and he wouldn’t even consider it. Years later, Pat saw him on television and realized it was Emeril Lagasse.
Pat laughed at the memory. “Nan was wearing an armful of bracelets that were worth a small fortune. I wished I’d had the money to give to him and I could have kept the bracelets! I told her she should have published his first cookbook, but she still thinks he was a dreadful man that night.”
Since a conversation with Pat can round more corners than a NASCAR race, it doesn’t seem strange that we came to the matter of snakes. He wrote, “My mother, who was no stranger to wildlife, collected poisonous snakes and once told me that a copperhead I caught her for Mother’s Day when she was pregnant with my brother Jim was the most thoughtful present she had ever received.” I wondered if that seemed out of the ordinary to him.
Pat shook his head. “Not to us, she was the only mother we ever had. I like snakes; I know many people don’t, my wife is terrified of them. Mom would get all of us kids banging pots and pans while she went to the other side of the woods and waited for us to scare the snakes out. She would pick them up, she’d pick up a rattlesnake. We all talked about it later and thought it was because she came from a town in Alabama that was rife with snake-handling fundamentalists.”
If you’ve read any of Conroy, you know that his mother’s favorite book of all time was Gone with the Wind, and her great love of the book had a profound influence on his life. He was invited by Margaret Mitchell’s heirs to write a sequel, but the negotiations and conditions imposed proved too overwhelming and stringent. Because that book had such an impact on him, I wanted to know if he was disappointed that he didn’t get to write the sequel. Did he have a strategy for Rhett?
With a sigh, Pat replied, “I couldn’t deal with what they wanted. I wanted to write it because I wanted to dedicate it to my mother. I had some good ideas; it would have been the autobiography of Rhett Butler. I had a plan for Rhett—he was from Charleston, he would have gone to The Citadel.”
“Pat,” I asked, “in Why I Write, you say, ‘My well-used dictionaries and thesauri sing out to me when I write, and all English words are the plainsong of my many-tongued, long-winded ancestors who spoke before me.’ I was tickled to see you used ‘meretricious’ twice in Beach Music; are you still a thesaurus user, or after your keeping long lists of words, is your vocabulary now sufficient unto itself?”
Pat handed me one of the brown, well-worn, leather-bound journals that tie with a string of rawhide, and on the left-hand pages were penned, in brown ink, lists of unusual words written in beautiful, and very tiny, script.
He told me, “Sure I still use it, and I keep notebooks. I make a list down the side of the page so the words can inspire me. Language fires me up.”
When friends heard I was going to write this story, they asked if I could incorporate some of their questions, and Pat was gracious enough to field them:
SUSAN: I’d ask him how he finds the courage to be so raw and revealing in his writing.
PAT: “It was an accident at first, I didn’t realize how many people would be hurt.
“When I wrote The Boo, it was the The Citadel, they banned the book. The Water Is Wide hurt the city of Beaufort. The Great Santini hurt my entire family. But if I didn’t tell the truth the way I saw it, I wasn’t worth anything as a writer.”
CINDY: If you hadn’t found literature, what do you think would have become of your life?
PAT: “I loved teaching. One of the two years I’ve never written about were the two years I taught at Beaufort High School. I don’t think I was a very good teacher, but I loved teaching. I think I would have gotten good at it, but after Daufuskie no one would hire me to teach, so it was a good thing that I liked writing.”
PIERCE: Ask him how he came up with the off-the-wall idea of putting a tiger in The Prince of Tides.
PAT: “Happy the Tiger was in a cage at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina; I went there to get gas so I could see him. If you bought gas, you got a free car wash and while the car was being washed, you got to throw a chicken neck to the tiger. He was mean as hell, he probably didn’t like being in a cage outside in the hot South Carolina sun. They eventually built the zoo in Columbia so that tiger had a place to go.
“I was living in Rome, the story was in trouble, it had rapists and murderers and I didn’t know what to do with them. I was out to dinner one night when I saw a woman in the restaurant and half of her arm was missing. So I asked her what happened. She had seen a man abusing a tiger at the zoo and wanted to help so she stepped in, and the tiger ripped her arm off. I thought to myself, well, I have a tiger in a barn back there, so that’s how he came into the story.”
STEVE: How do you know when the end of a story has come, and have any of your characters wanted a sequel?
PAT: “I can feel it coming. In my stories people have been through hell and back; it’s time to let them go off into their fictional world.
“When I wrote The Great Santini, I planned to have Ben Me
ELIZABETH: How do you know where to start a book?
PAT: “Usually I don’t. Usually it is fizzling around and it starts with the prologue. When I’m finished with the prologue, I can begin in earnest on the novel.
“In The Great Santini it was—why did I hate my father? In The Lords of Discipline—why I hated the plebe system. In The Prince of Tides—why did my sister go crazy?”
After our lovely afternoon I just hugged Pat Conroy, I wanted to thank him with all my heart for all he’s done for literature and the truest art of storytelling. Not only are his books exquisite in their mastery, but they have followed the course of his amazing life. I’m hard-pressed to choose between the great descriptive language in his novels, and the stories themselves in the collections. If you’ve missed reading any of them, get yourselves to the “Pat Conroy at 70” festival, say hello to Pat, buy several of the author’s many books, and get them signed!
A Letter to My Grandson on Sportsmanship and Basketball
When I was younger I tried to play basketball, really for Dad, but was just no good at it. I always felt bad that Dad didn’t have a kid who shared his passion. In the past few years, my son Jack has really shown promise and has that same obsession Dad had. I don’t know what it is like to care that much in a sport, and thought Dad could relate. I asked him for his help and he wrote Jack this letter. I love that they had that connection. One of the things that breaks my heart on a regular basis is the knowledge that Dad will not see him play.
—Megan Conroy
Dear Jack, Beloved Grandson,
Let me tell you about refs and big men and fouls. No one related to you knows the subject so well. First, you must know that I write you as a Citadel point guard who was always the smallest man on the court every college game I played. No one ever worked referees like I did. I made them love me. Often, when I was called for a foul in a game, even when I didn’t think I’d committed one, I often said, “Good call, Ref.” I know that’s never occurred to you in your life and it has rarely occurred to any of you big guys. We little guys have to figure out how to survive. During a practice game, the great Citadel center Dick Martini once stuffed the ball down my throat and sent me flying into the stands. He stood over me in triumph and said, “Hey, stump, don’t ever come in here when us big trees are around.” I stole the ball from him the next three times down the court when Martini tried to dribble. “Hey, tree,” I yelled at him, “don’t try to dribble when us little stumps are around, caveman.” It’s the little guys who are getting you into foul trouble.
Here is my advice. First, a basketball player is cool whenever he or she takes the court. Our team depends on us having clear heads and perfect control of our emotions. We are passionate about the game and it is a fiery, wonderful game, but we never lose our heads even in the midst of the most fierce competition. The great big men are the coolest cats on the planet. Here is what they do, not to foul out. They work on their footwork all the time and they have powers of anticipation and an instinct for moving to the right place at the right time. Learn to dance. Dance every dance at the school prom with your girlfriend, your sisters, or your mother. Learn to be a ballerina on the court. When the big man learns to move, it is the death song for point guards like me. Also, don’t try to block every shot. If I saw a big man doing that, I would drive the basket right at them every time. When the big man tries to swat the ball, he goes off balance and then the point guard or the savvy forward eats him alive. Go straight up. Don’t lean in. Don’t swat. Get in the way. The block will come from your position and height. The ball will come up toward your hand because you’re the biggest cat in the litter.
Now we come to the most important thing…attitude, demeanor, your presence on the court. Basketball is a sport of inordinate nobility and you owe it your deepest respect. Your character as a man and a player will be judged by how you comport yourself on the court in victory or defeat. By being gifted in a sport, you become a role model for everyone around you, your teammates, your family, your school, and your community. In sports, you will feel everything…elation, despair, wonder, failure. Sports can teach you everything you need to know about yourself. Carry yourself with immense pride. Sportsmanship is one measure of manhood that you can trust with absolute certainty. Your grandfather the Great Santini was the best basketball player the Conroys ever produced, and I could not carry his jockstrap, as he reminded me after every game I ever played. Don Conroy was also the dirtiest basketball player I ever saw and I didn’t want to be a thing like him. But I could leave the game on the court. I wanted my opponents to respect me and my teammates to love me, and they did. I won every sportsmanship trophy on every team I was ever on. I had your same competitive temperament, but I learned to control it. I learned to use it to my advantage. I wish to hell I was a big man like you and I envy the skills Megan tells me you have, because I was never a natural athlete. But I learned how to use my speed and I could dribble like few people on earth and I could take it to the hoop. I loved basketball more than anything on earth. But I had it under my command. I mastered the part of it I could, but first I had to master the passion and the fury that is the natural condition of the Conroy and the Gigueire males. Work hard on moving fast, going straight up, and sweeping the goddamn boards. Make peace with yourself and our glorious game. I love you with my heart.
Great love…
Pat Conroy Talks About the South, His Mother, and The Prince of Tides
FROM A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION CONVENTION, 1985
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’ ” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t grow up in that traditional South. The Marine Corps moved us almost every year of my childhood, and always to Southern towns close to swamps and the sea. I always came as a visitor; I never spent a single day in a hometown. The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement. I grew up in twenty versions of the South and was part of none of them. At an early age I began to collect the stories that give the native-born a sense of rootedness and place.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children. When he returned home from work my sister would yell, “Godzilla’s home,” and the seven children would melt into the secret places of whatever house we happened to be living in at the time. He was no match for my mother’s byzantine and remarkable powers of intrigue. Neither were her children. It took me thirty years to realize that I had grown up in my mother’s house and not my father’s. Like him, I had missed the power source.
In 1984, when I was in the middle of writing The Prince of Tides, I drove down to spend two weeks with my mother in a hospital in Augusta, Georgia. She was receiving chemotherapy treatments for the leukemia that would kill her. My mother’s favorite character in a book was Scarlett O’Hara and her favorite actress was Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara. I grew up thinking that my mother was every bit as pretty as Vivien Leigh and that Scarlett on her best day wouldn’t have been a match for my mother. But chemotherapy is not kind to beauty.
One moon-filled night I stayed in my mother’s room, to help her through the terrible hours, and she wanted to talk about The Prince of Tides. “I’m in your new book, aren’t I, Pat?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Liar,” she said. “When you wrote The Great Santini you weren’t good enough to write about me. I was far more powerful than your father ever was. You just didn’t see it.”
“I s
“I’d like to ask you a favor in the new book, Pat. Don’t write about me like this. Make me beautiful. Make me beautiful again.”
I knelt beside my mother’s bed and said in a voice that I barely recognized, “I’ll make you so beautiful, Mama. You made me a writer and I’m going to lift you out of this bed and set you singing and dancing across the pages of my book forever.”
“And after you write about my death,” my mother said with a smile, “I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role in the movie.”
My mother was like a whole civilization of women wrapped up in a single comely package. She was complicated, maddening, irreplaceable. I will never be good enough to write about her. In part, The Prince of Tides is a love letter to the dark side of my mother.
I don’t think you’d like the portrait, Mama, but wherever you are, I made you beautiful.
Pat Conroy Speaks to Meredith Maran
I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction. Through the years, I’ve met many writers who tell me with great pride that they consider autobiographical fiction as occupying a lower house in the literary canon. They make sure I know that their imaginations soar into realms and fragments completely invented by them. No man or woman in their pantheon of family or acquaintances has ever taken a curtain call in their own well-wrought and shapely books. Only rarely have I drifted far from the bed where I was conceived.