A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

by Pat Conroy

  I’ve lived in exciting times and I’d have it no other way. I was born during the disgraceful Jim Crow years of the South and was lucky enough to be raised by a Southern mountain woman who found the entire South evil. She and I watched the Old South crumble into dust around us, and we took enormous satisfaction in its fall. On the heels of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation came hurtling down the turnpike and opened up the writing world for women of all kinds. I followed closely the career of Anne Rivers Siddons, Josephine Humphreys, Donna Tartt, Diane Ackerman, Toni Morrison, Andrea Barrett, Alice Walker, Mary Hood, Doris Betts, Annie Dillard, Janis Owens, Louise Erdrich, Patricia Hampl, and dozens of others who both amazed me and filled me with pleasure. Recently, I’ve begun reading the eye-popping works of Barbara Kingsolver and discovering her as one of the great gifts of my sixty-eighth year. Joyce Carol Oates has written for so long and so well that her achievement has to be measured in miles, not feet. There has been no one like her in American letters. I once took a streetcar to the top of Nob Hill to get Lee Smith to sign the bagful of her books I’d collected over the years. Cassandra King, the woman I married in 1998, has published five novels since I first met her at a writers’ conference in Birmingham. Though women writers were still a rarity when I began my career, they now dominate at every level and American letters are richer for it.

  But, for me, Ann Patchett went to the top of the class when she published Bel Canto, a book that knocked my socks off and did the same with the reading public, who were as hungry for such a book as I was. I read it on Pawleys Island, one of the magical places on the South Carolina coast, after Doug Marlette finished it and raved about it. Reading half the night, I completed the book the following day. When Doug and I went swimming in the surf that night, we talked of nothing else. When literature works there is nothing like it in the world. Few books I’ve ever read worked as well as this one. Ann Patchett did that wondrous, walking-on-water kind of thing—she created a whole world that contained grand opera, the revolutionary spirit always alive and close to the surface in Latin America, a siege, a story of Shakespearean grandeur, unbearable tension that built up with the turning of every page, a savage denouement, love stories haunted by the approach of death, an ending that dissatisfied some critics, but that satisfied something in me—her passionate and grateful reader. I had literature all over my hands and face when I finished that book. I thought then and I think now it’s one of the best novels I ever read or ever hope to read in my life. High praise? Yes, but joyfully given.

  During my book tour I went to Nashville, Tennessee, a city that Ann Patchett has succeeded in making her own. She and her husband are vital members of the city and he is a splendid man, a doctor and Sewanee man, who knew my best friend at Beaufort High School, Bruce Harper, when they attended college together. I visited Ann Patchett’s independent bookstore that she opened with Karen Hayes, a former sales rep for Random House, and it is a gathering place for book lovers all over the South. The store, called Parnassus Books, is populated by bright young people who know the stock and can tell you all about their own favorite books published that season. Every independent bookstore in this country has a sacramental feel to it these days, of something that needs to be preserved at all costs. Ann herself cuts a heroic figure in the publishing world by stepping into the breach and putting her own money into the survival of this amazing store. I think the city of Nashville understands this—a city without an independent bookstore is not much of a city at all. It’s too much like a river without a current.

  Ann Patchett introduced me to a crowd in an auditorium, in one of the most beautifully restored public schools in the country. It’s right in the middle of downtown and reminded me of Sacred Heart, where I went to kindergarten in downtown Atlanta. I thought I’d get a chance to rave about her novels and books, but Ann conducted the interview and kept me talking about the subject at hand. She was bright and as lively and lovely as I’d imagined her to be. It was like being interviewed by Anna Karenina. In my earliest fantasies of being a writer, I never dreamed of such a night happening—to be questioned by a great novelist about a book I’d written. That belonged to the realm of impossibility when I started out, and she brought her own deep intelligence to the task of what was on my mind when I wrote this memoir about my family. I wish nights like that could linger more freshly in the memory, that they weren’t so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one’s leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don’t adhere. I never got to rave to Ann Patchett about her work, and that’s what I had come to Nashville to do. I had a ton of pleasurable things to tell Ann about State of Wonder and her new book of essays, but the time never seemed right. But I wanted her to know how essential her writing has been to my reading life. I can only hope that one day, she’ll read this.

  Great love…

  Conroy at Seventy—Happy Birthday to Me

  OCTOBER 22, 2015

  Hey, out there,

  I’ve always taken great pleasure in reading the biographies of other writers whose books have sustained and gladdened my heart. Yesterday, I finished The Last Love Song, a biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty. Whenever I encountered Ms. Didion’s prose it turned me into a grinning fool because of its strange perfection and her ability to make me see things in ways I never imagined. I once went to dinner with Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at Elaine’s. We were guests of my editor, Nan Talese, and her husband, Gay Talese. Elaine’s was a watering hole for writers and celebrities, and it was proof of their inferior palates that they chose that troubled restaurant to stem their hunger. I found myself in the men’s room with the huge actor Mr. T that night. When I looked over as I stood beside him peeing, I said, “Mine’s bigger,” and Mr. T screamed with laughter and I’ve loved Mr. T since that moment.

  From her writing, I thought that Joan Didion would prove elliptical and mysterious, and so she did. A beautiful woman, she took me in with a mermaid’s dark eyes, but they could turn into a cobra’s with the slight rise of an eyebrow. My instinct is to gush when I meet a writer I revere, but long experience has taught me it’s a dangerous thing to do. Greg did not warm to my presence and I felt him pulling back from me, an old gunfighter’s instinct I’ve long encountered in male writers, and, more frequently now, in women. I was worried that by praising his wife I would somehow diminish him, even though I talked about two of his novels that I’d really liked. I was also aware that Gay Talese might well have been the finest writer at the table that night. So I listened and took it all in and found myself delighted with the account of Joan Didion’s life that I bought the day it was published. The biography was a crash course in what had made me fall in love with Joan Didion’s style in the first place. It had always been a point of amazement to me that Ms. Didion could hide all essences of herself in the beauty of her immaculate sentences. Though I could never fall in love with her soul, I could always be captive to her style. She lacked the interior eye, but absorbed everything that took place in her sight and hearing. As I suspected, she offered Mr. Daugherty no help at all in the writing of his book about her life. He wrote a splendid book without her help, and it’s my theory he wouldn’t have learned that much about her if she had granted him full access. Some people are like that; so are some writers.

  I’m not like that. I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am, and I don’t believe I’ve even come close. But that knowledge grants me insight and causes me no despair. The journey has defined me, inspired me, and forced me to write on. I’ve tried to read the biography of every writer who has kept me awake at night, thrilled me with their talent to make a world I didn’t know existed, and taken me on a joyride into the land of fiction, which has provided some of the greatest pleasures I’ve ever had. Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of biographies and all of them told me something I needed to know and what to watch out for and the collisions I needed to avoid. The
y fed the writer in me, and all of them told me that the world was the only thing that counted, that what I produced and its quality was all that mattered. It was at the writing desk that I would be made or broken. In every biography of every writer, that was the secret to our kingdom of words. No other measurement counted for anything at all.

  I have some reckoning and summation entering into my own life. Two biographers have entered my life and it’s made me take notice of my own troubled, untidy passage through time. Katherine Clark, a novelist and writer from Birmingham, has recently completed an oral biography that she took from more than two hundred hours of interviews she recorded over the past several years. I lack all gifts of reticence or caution, and every time Katherine relates some outrageous or libelous quote from the book, I wince then swear I never said such a thing. “I have it on tape, Pat,” she says, winning each argument. She has captured me uncensored and the whole thing makes me think of root canals and colonoscopies.

  The next biographer teaches English and Women’s Studies at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and her name is Catherine Seltzer. She just published a book with the University of South Carolina Press called Understanding Pat Conroy. Catherine has undertaken the cheerless task of writing a conventional biography about me, and because my ego has swollen into elephantine dimensions in my dotage, I agreed to do it with one undebatable provision. Under no terms would I agree to cooperate with Dr. Seltzer on an “authorized biography.” Often writers make such demands on their biographers out of a desire to control their stories and what is written about them, their friends, and their family. I wouldn’t participate in an authorized biography for any reason, because I thought it would be a betrayal of everything I thought I stood for in life. I told Catherine that if she didn’t include the unexpurgated memories of my friends and enemies, ex-wives and girlfriends, hostile critics and others who have reason to renounce my career and life as a complete failure, her book would be worthless. The stories of when I acted like an asshole need to have equal weight with those rare moments of decency when I was of some credit to my species. There was to be no interference with her conclusions from me or my heirs. Catherine Seltzer agreed to all that. I required her to tell the life story I wasn’t aware I lived, or the one I was ashamed of living.

  This was all preamble to bring me to the subject of this letter. Much to my surprise, I’ll be turning seventy years old at the end of this month. When I was thirty I think I looked at people who were seventy as frail relics of time who had all seen ivory-billed woodpeckers and passenger pigeons in their childhoods. I remember going to Kitty Mancini’s fiftieth birthday party in Alexandria, Virginia, given by her children, Mike, Patty, and Sharon Mahoney, my three best friends from my grade school days, and I thought as I kissed that kindest of women that it was a shame she would be dead so soon. The same children gave Kitty a party on her ninetieth birthday in Richmond last year.

  But the subject of death is a frequent one among my friends these days. Terry Kay, the novelist, has announced his demise on a daily basis for the last twenty years. I’ve worried about my friend Anne Rivers Siddons’s health for the last five years. My wife, Cassandra, is a member of the Hemlock Society and hides potions in her closet I’m not to ask about on pain of divorce court. My irreplaceable friend Doug Marlette died in his fifties in a Mississippi car wreck. Jane Lefco, who took care of my finances, died of an embolism while still beautiful and young. My brother Tom killed himself at thirty-four. I lost eight classmates in the Vietnam War and four of them were boys I loved.

  So this number has deep resonance, and I’m taking it more seriously than I ever thought I would. It strikes a biblical chord in me. The town of Beaufort is throwing me a birthday party.

  There is a great central flaw in my character that I’ve gone out of my way to conceal. Though I find a perfect comfort zone in all forms of chaos, I’ve never shown a similar ease when I discover any intrusion of joy or, God forbid, happiness inviting me to a party at their house. In my own lifetime, I’ve found myself resolute in the face of terrible abuse, the suicide of family and friends, divorce courts, plebe systems, the death of my mother and father, betrayal by people I adored, breakdown, humiliation, and the list goes on and on. It seemed like the natural state of human affairs to me, but it gave me enough time and material to write the books I once dreamed as a boy of writing.

  Discord has been my theme. It has agitated me that I find myself approaching my seventieth birthday and have discovered within myself a joy I’d never once felt any capacity for having. To write it down strikes a chord of sappiness in me. But in my career, if I discovered something rising out of me, I took it as a point of honor to write it down. I’ve found myself studying my past of late, and though there has been a theme of discordance and tragedy in my work and life, I’ve been a supremely lucky man. But a happy one? This is a river without markers or navigational charts for me.

  The University of South Carolina is throwing a party for me. They are calling it, I say with a seventy-year-old sigh, “Pat Conroy at 70.” I know why I agreed to do it. It was a victory of human vanity over human modesty. Nothing else. I’ve tried to avoid moments like this in my life, and it was one of the first surprises I had as a writer that I was expected to give talks and presentations whenever a new book came out. Writers write because they don’t want to speak, but I was a young man when the media and celebrity culture took off around me. I discovered early that I don’t read well from my books, that my tone turns pretentious and Old Testament as soon as I begin reciting words I’ve written down alone at a desk. Frankly, I find myself near hysteria whenever I listen to my brother and sister writers read portions of their own noble work. This requires a courage I lack, and my dread of boring an audience is close to obsessional. Early on, I decided I would tell stories of my family, friends, and experiences I had as a young Southerner at field in play with the lions of the New York literary world. Later, Hollywood provided a rich vein of golden tales to choose from. My voice is an insufficient, reedy instrument and I still recoil when I hear it played back to me, the same way Sister Sebastian once played back the one sentence I had memorized for a Christmas pageant in sixth grade. But the subject is vanity and its squeaky little pal, humility. My parents did not cotton well to boasting, so I developed an aura of false modesty, so sincere and all-consuming that it still looms as both the phoniest and most insincere thing about me. My best friend, the abomination Bernie Schein, still believes it to be a bewildering, effective mask of supreme narcissism. Since Bernie’s the most self-inflating narcissist of our times, I must give great weight to his testimony. He has studied me up close for fifty years.

  But I agreed to the party and now the day is upon me. I had nothing to do with its planning, its execution, its invitation list, or anything else about it. It fills me with dread, an existential horror and a nightmare coming to pass. I understand my children are all coming and my vengeful brothers and sisters, except for the Conroy family poet, Carol Anne Conroy, who wouldn’t come unless I agreed to a second circumcision. The week will begin October 28, when Rob Warley and Jim Hare will be married in our backyard on Battery Creek. Then there’ll be a lot of panels and gatherings and friends making a joyful noise about my body and body of work. My wife, the quiet, untrustworthy woman I made vows to, has been a coconspirator in all this. But it will take place in Beaufort, the town that welcomed me home when I rode in following my father’s warplane in 1961. It was in Beaufort that I discovered myself, and it provided the stairway into a future that seemed impossible to dream of and terrified me by the force of its ambition. I was not born until I was fifteen years old. It happened here, in Beaufort, in sight of a river’s sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides, its modest, easy grandeur, where I once celebrated being sixteen; now I will turn seventy by its same scrupulous landscape and the place I will one day be buried—in great gratitude and an infinity of joy.

  Great love…

  On Pat Conroy’s F
acebook Page on the Day of His Passing

  MARCH 4, 2016

  We wish he could tell you once again “Hey, out there,” but we are the family, the friends, the readers, and we are filled with grief and sadness.

  Pat Conroy left this world Friday, March 4, 2016, at 7:42 p.m., surrounded by his family and friends in his Beaufort home overlooking the marshes he so loved.

  There are rare people whose very existence makes life bearable for the rest of us for reasons of grace, wisdom, and understanding. Pat was such a man. To say he will be missed is the grandest of understatements.