My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

  “I don’t know, Mr. Hara.”

  “Yes. They invent fork. Because they hate Japanese people.”

  There would be other friends from the Grand Hôtel des Balcons; there would be Bill Koon playing his guitar and singing “Amanda” and his pretty girlfriend, Cindy, returning from the market with aromatic cheeses, duck pâté glazed with pepper, and bottles of red table wine; and Cathy Goldsmith, a woman from Toronto, who befriended the old chess players in the Luxembourg Gardens and each week brought me a fresh rose to bring me luck in my writing; and Margie Waller, a beautiful Fulbright scholar, who was finishing a book on Petrarch and writing an odd, brilliant paper comparing Rebel Without a Cause to Star Wars; and a stolid couple from the Yukon who described the migration of caribou near their cabin and the wolf packs that moved in concordance with the herds. There were friends for a day and friends for a week and we would meet at breakfast. I learned to carry a copy of the International Herald Tribune with me to breakfast as the testimonial emblem of my heritage. We exchanged information about Paris, about good cheap restaurants, about English-language bookstores and the best places to exchange currency. Because we were strangers who would know one another on this planet for a very short time, we could trade those essential secrets of our lives that defined us in absolute terms. Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives. The men and women I met at the Grand Hôtel des Balcons traveled to change themselves, to trust their bright impulse with the hope they would receive the gift of the sublime, life-changing encounter somewhere on the road. There is no voyage without a spiritual, even religious impulse. Each of us had met by accident, our lives touched briefly, fragilely—then we continued on our own private journeys, and those intense encounters left a fragrant pollen on the sills and eaves of memory. I could feel it; it was mine. And those faces—pale, ethereal, glowing dimly—are the coinage, the inexhaustible treasury, the winged golden bullion of the voyage. Those faces, those friends are the consecrated talismans of my leaving home and living in the city of Paris.

  Then there is the memory of food, of meals eaten with Jonathan and Susan Galassi, the wonderful cheap restaurants we discovered by accident and design on the Left Bank. There was Le Trumilou on the Seine, with its raw paintings, overlit dining room, its duck with prune sauce you could order for fifteen francs, its Sundays when the men from southern France sang folk songs from home and commanded silence from all the rest of us. There were Le Procope, Au Cochon de Lait, and Vagenende. Some Frenchmen bring their dogs to the restaurants with them, and often there was the sound of invisible dogs breaking discarded bones under a table. In the Café du Luxembourg, the proprietress owned a German shepherd who would lie against my feet as we ate dinner. There were memories of snails afloat in butter and garlic and parsley, oysters with the taste of Atlantic tides, mustards from Dijon, the flesh of sole flashing on a fork and lemon halves wrapped in gauze, sweetbreads swimming in thick cream flavored with paprika, prawns, and scallops, chicken breasts poached in Burgundy, marinated herring, rabbit pâté, and wines, splendid wines and cheap ones, wines of princes and wines of clochards, wines from Saint-Émilion and Brouilly and Bordeaux, from grapes ripened on hillsides the length and breadth of France. In Paris, it is a spiritual duty to grow fat.

  In our finest meal, at Dodin-Bouffant, our one grandly extravagant Parisian meal, the waiter allowed us to taste a small portion of every dessert on the cart. There was the deep resonant taste of crème brûlée, small artillery explosions of flavor on the palate, all the black harmony of chocolate on the tongue, then the espresso, sharp and fierce, to wash it down. All the meals would be long and the conversations would continue over Armagnac, through nighttime walks in the rain, three of us under one umbrella, Jonathan and Susan in love, all of us in love, as we walked back to their hotel stepping carefully over the glistening cobblestones. Conversation with the Galassis was a splendid, unrecapturable thing; they were full-bodied, exhilarating, evanescent, and my mind would be blazing and overstimulated as I walked back to my hotel. When Jonathan and Susan left Paris for Rome, I did not think I could stand it. But we made plans to meet in Rome sometime in June. By then, I would have finished The Lords of Discipline. By then, my life in Paris would be over.

  Also when I remember Paris, as I conjure the shimmering fragments of that river-praised, light-gifted city, it is not the walks through rain I remember most vividly, or the meals or the wine or the conversations. It is not even the writing, the creating of a world on paper, the hard labor of stillness or the quiet struggle to find the unassailably correct word, the startling and definitive image.

  What I remember most is the explosions. I remember blood and shattered glass, fire and burning and death in the rain. I remember what I dream about, the nightmares I brought home to America, nightmares that passed unchallenged through customs, that evoked no official response. In the first explosion, I had no part to play except as a witness, as a helpless recorder of grief and desolation. In the second, fate refused to allow me the simple role of evangelist and storyteller, and handed me a major part, a lead role in a grisly dance of fire.

  The first explosion occurred on March 26. I did not record the time. I was writing in the hotel, listening to the accordion music next door, and looking up a word in a new dictionary when there was a tremendous explosion somewhere near my hotel. I stepped out onto the balcony and saw the tuxedoed waiters from La Méditerranée sprinting in the direction of the Luxembourg Gardens. Racing downstairs, I joined the crowd that moved toward the rue de Vaugirard, where the traffic had stalled and people were screaming. There was smoke issuing from a small restaurant, Le Café Foyer, and broken glass everywhere. I passed by a pretty young woman lying on a bench with her brown leather boots primly crossed. A team of paramedics was ministering to her. Her hair was black, and she was wearing designer jeans. One of her eyes was gone, and one of her ears blown off. The blue lights of police cars flowered in the mist. The explanation for the blast was simple. Le Café Foyer was a Jewish restaurant frequented by Jewish students from the Sorbonne. The Egyptian-Israeli pact had been signed at Camp David in 1978, and the explosion was simply a form of protest, an editorial of blood. A girl’s ear blown off. Dead kids drinking coffee. Because of history and treaties, real estate and culture, I was watching a girl on a bench with her boots crossed prettily, putting her hand up to the wound where her eye used to be. But history was meaningless to her now, and Le Monde listed her among the dead in the next day’s paper. When I could not write for the next several days, I tried to understand my relationship to the dying girl on the bench. Did I have a responsibility to her? Of all the things I saw that day, it is always the boots I see in the nightmares—polished, serious boots. It is one of the few things I know about her life. She took excellent, almost obsessive care of her boots. I know one other thing about her. She did not hear me when I shouted to her, “I’m so sorry.” Nor did it occur to me to say it in French.

  I finished The Lords of Discipline on May 18 at 12:30 p.m. It would take two weeks for Mike to complete typing the manuscript, and I had time to explore the Paris I had not seen, to entertain friends from Atlanta, to write letters, to work on my journal, and to buy souvenirs for my friends and three daughters. One of the souvenirs led me directly into the path of the second explosion.

  My daughter Melissa, an incurable jock who beat up on other little girls in the DeKalb County soccer league, requested a simple gift from Paris: a soccer ball with the word “France” printed on it. On my last day in Paris I went searching for that soccer ball and finally found one in the sports section at the Galeries Lafayette. I checked my mail for a final time at the American Express office and left my Atlanta address in case any mail arrived after I left. I was leaving for Rome early the next morning and this was my day to bid farewell to a city that had been good to me. I walked through the Tuileries, past the Louvre, crossed the Seine, cut behind the Académie Française, and
began walking up the rue de Seine. I had made this same walk twenty or thirty times since my arrival; I loved the small art galleries along both sides of the street and had visited most of them. I walked slowly, grateful that I had come to this city and had learned some things that would prove useful to me as a writer and a man. The final pages of the manuscript arrived, and I was taking the 960 pages to Jonathan in Rome. I had worked very hard and was feeling good about myself. I was halfway down the rue de Seine, moving dreamily, with no more words to write, emptied out, when there was an explosion ten feet in front of me. A wall of flame burst out of a small jewelry shop and climbed the wall of the shop directly across the street. I felt the heat of that enormous tongue of fire in my eyes, and my first thought was of terrorists. The second was of flight, and I pivoted back around toward the river and had taken the first step of what was going to be a very fast sprint when I heard a man screaming. I turned toward that scream, toward the last afternoon in Paris, toward my own small, insubstantial part in the history of the city, toward the dazzlement of human fate, and I saw a man on fire. The top of his head, his hair, his back, his arms and shoulders, his shirt were all on fire.

  I have always wanted to be a man of courage. It has bothered me somewhat, but not much, that cowardice is a more frequent guest in my modest house of character. I like cowardice and enjoy the companionship and bonhomie of other cowards. I have seen quite enough of machismo in my life and consider myself one of its casualties. I prefer my friends to be cowards of the cringing, knock-kneed, fall-on-their-knees-and-beg variety, and they appreciate that same trembling quality in me. So it was with an absolute purity of terror that my first glance down the street confirmed the truth of what I already feared … I was the only one on the rue de Seine in any position to help.

  I dropped the soccer ball in the middle of the street and chased after the man, who was beating at the flames with his hands, screaming and moving in a lurid, agonized dance across that narrow market street. He burst suddenly into the doorway of a store across the street with me right behind him, with me having absolutely no idea of what to do, with me praying for a single moment of valor. I tried to extinguish the flames with stinging, ineffectual slaps. Other people joined me and there was a shrill, immense pandemonium loose in that store as the smell of burning flesh entered our nostrils. Then I saw the curtains and I tell you those curtains came down from those windows, came down from those walls, came down from on high as I leaped on top of the burning man, covering his entire body as I took him to the floor rolling, rolling, rolling with this stranger in my arms. Feeling the wild beat of his heart, his muffled cries, his awesome panic, gripping him beneath the torn shrouds and rolling with him toward the door, I felt the most remarkable, grotesque intimacy. Then ten people must have landed on us. The rolling stopped and their weight hurt. Then we rose and I do not remember rising, but I remember people prying my arms from around the man swathed in ruined drapery. He was screaming and pushed me away when he saw it was me who was holding him, who was hurting him. We had extinguished the fire but there were puffed, terrible wounds where the fire had been. He pushed me again, then broke out of that circle of strangers and ran back into his burning store. He entered his store and tried to save his most valuable merchandise. I went after him, lifted him up from behind, hurt him once more, and carried him back to the street. He was in complete shock. He was one of two people in shock on the rue de Seine. He sat down on the curb and began moaning. His head and arms were wickedly burned, the gendarmes and the ambulances were arriving, and a huge crowd had gathered. “Is he all right?” I kept asking the crowd. Always in emergencies, my puny facility with the French language abandoned me. I had a single round burn on my elbow and the hair on the back of my hands and arms had been singed. I staggered away from the man when the gendarmes surrounded him in a protective cordon, felt the old familiar signs of migraine coming on, went to retrieve Melissa’s soccer ball, and vomited in the middle of the rue de Seine.

  I left the city of Paris the next day without knowing the fate of the burning man. On the way to Rome, I retraced my steps on that final day. If I had done things differently, stopped off for an espresso at a favorite café, lingered over my mail at the American Express office—there is a structure to accident and experience amazing in its complexity. I had walked into one of those rare, elemental moments of definition when I would be a different human being from what I was ever meant to be. I was destined to meet the burning man on rue de Seine and my whole life had been leading up to that moment. Coming to fire, moving toward grievous pain—toward my own vomit—with mail from my friends and a gift for my child. It had begun in high school because of a French teacher who would kill herself and a writer who would send me Hemingway’s books about Paris. Then it was Proust, Balzac, Colette, Hugo, and a dozen others who put me on that street—those wonderful writers who would mark a young Southern boy with a passion for a city he knew only in words, in translation, a city he extravagantly loved and would one day write about. But none of those writers could tell me if the burning man had lived or died or what he meant to my life. In nightmares, I rolled and rolled again, felt the man’s heart beating furiously beneath my palm, smelled the scalded oils of his flesh, and saw the boots of the Jewish girl murdered at Le Café Foyer.

  I returned to Paris after The Lords of Discipline came out, and on the first day, I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, visited the Grand Hôtel des Balcons, then walked down to the rue de Seine. I walked through the marketplace toward the river. I passed the vegetable stands, walked past the fishmongers, butchers, wine shops advertising Beaujoulais nouveau, past the flower shops toward the small horlogerie at 32 Rue de Seine. There was a light in the window of the shop, and it was snowing.

  I looked in.

  I saw the burning man repairing a watch and he looked up and saw me.

  I nodded. He nodded back and had no idea of our connection with each other. He had healed perfectly. I wanted to tell him who I was but I did not know how to begin. I wanted to kiss the head I had once seen on fire. What a strong and handsome man he was. I was numb with gratitude.

  I talked about the burning man a lot. I am always trying to interpret the relationship between writing and life, between experience and art. Once I thought writing was a simple act, a matter of cataloging the most sacred items of God, the naming of things of darkness. But that definition was never good enough. It is not enough to name and catalog. But on my last day in Paris in 1979, I think, at last, I found the accurate figure of speech to describe the writing I wanted to do, found the relationship between life and art, and knew the things an artist must know. The burning man was my metaphor of art.

  As a writer, I would have to walk many strange avenues, staying loose and keeping my eyes open, memorizing the names of streets and the faces of strangers, listening to unknown tongues, exploring severe, tended gardens, being aware of the traffic and the besieged faces pressed against windows in dimly lit houses. It was all in the moving and seeing, in the patience of voyaging, in a spiritual opening up to every experience, to every moment that touches the most sensitive cells of the soul’s most private self. I could be a voyager in Atlanta as easily as in Paris, and if I was vigilant enough, if I paid attention to what I was doing and the books I wanted to write, I had discovered the duty and the central mystery of creation on the Rue de Seine on the Left Bank.

  The writer must reach back deeply into memory, into those frightening unmarked streets, must walk until exhausted, eyes open, bearing gifts, mind blazing with the dignity of language, blood burning, images beginning to form like jade in the bloodstream.…

  Until he turns that corner, reaches that street, arrives at that moment of pure divine inspiration, of ineffable chance, when there is an explosion—and he sees the burning man—then he can begin to write.

  The burning man is always alive.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A LOVE LETTER TO THOMAS WOLFE

  I have needed to write the American
novelist Thomas Wolfe a love letter since I first encountered him in Gene Norris’s English class at the end of 1961. Though I had no way of knowing it then, I had entered into the home territory of what would become my literary terrain. For three months I had been native to Beaufort, the year I believe I came alive to myself as a human being, the year I felt the fretful, uneasy awakening of something rising within me that I could distinguish as belonging to me and me alone. It marked the first time I could look into the mirror and see that something was in there staring back at me.

  Gene Norris gave me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel as a Christmas present that December. I think you are now ready for the many pleasures of Thomas Wolfe, he wrote in the book, the first ever inscribed to me. The book’s impact on me was so visceral that I mark the reading of Look Homeward, Angel as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature, and I consider myself a small-time aficionado of wonderful first and last pages. The book itself took full possession of me in a way no book has before or since. I read it from cover to cover three straight times, transfigured by the mesmerizing hold of the narrator’s voice as I took in and fed on the power of the long line. It was the first time I realized that breathing and the written word were intimately connected to each other. I stepped into the bracing streams of Thomas Wolfe and could already hear the waterfalls forming in the cliffs that lay invisible beyond me. I kept holding my breath as I read Look Homeward, Angel. The beauty of the language, shaped in sentences as pretty as blue herons, brought me to my knees with pleasure. I did not know that words could pour through me like honey through a burst hive or that gardens seeded in dark secrecy could bloom along the borders of my half-ruined boyhood because a writer could touch me in all the broken places with his art.