My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  “Do you have any books on freaks?” he asked.

  “We specialize in freaks here,” I answered. “You ever met the owner?”

  “Cliff, isn’t it?” the man said, looking at me sidelong. “I bought some books from him last time I was in Atlanta.”

  “First room on the right after the bathroom,” I said, pointing. “I know he bought a collection of circus books last week.”

  “Circus freaks?” the man asked.

  “I haven’t checked them out. He’s got a couple of books on the Elephant Man.”

  “I bet I own them,” the young man said. “I tried to buy the skeleton of the Elephant Man last year in England. They refused to do business with me. It upset me very much.”

  “Those uptight limey bastards,” I said. I then went back to reading O’Neill, thus missing any further opportunity to meet Michael Jackson. When Cliff told me who had just bought several hundred dollars’ worth of books from me, I remembered the man’s hauntedness, but also his innate sweetness. Michael Jackson was simply another celebrity who proved that fame could damage a human soul without even breaking a sweat.

  The most surprising daily visitor to the bookshop was my father, Don Conroy. If my father ever read a book for pleasure, he didn’t share that information with his oldest son. He never bought a single book from Cliff unless it was a volume of my sister Carol’s poetry or one of my books that he wanted to present to a new acquaintance. Compared to my well-read mother, Dad seemed illiterate and uninterested in the world of books. He found infinite hilarity in the fact that Carol and I were trying to make our livings by writing poetry and fiction. Though I can now see that my father suffered from a grievous psychic wound when my mother announced she was divorcing him, he displayed an awesome lack of insight into the role he might have played in my mother’s radical surgery to excise him from her life. For so long Dad had played the insufferable jerk and disgraceful father that he had to learn new steps after he retired on the parade ground of Parris Island. I had loathed everything about him since I was a baby and had no compelling reason to recover a lost father I never had in the first place. My lifelong anger at him could turn into an incendiary fury by simply watching him inhale good Atlanta air. Each day, I was writing deeper and deeper into the life of my family with The Great Santini, and the nature of my betrayal of my own wounded tribe was becoming clearer to me. My own marriage to Barbara fell apart as I entered the deviant country of breakdown that would come to feel like some eccentric home place in the coming years. I fell into the abyss of The Great Santini and lost myself.

  When The Great Santini was published in 1976, my entire family flipped out and went into a full fruitcake mode that lasted for many years. Grandma Conroy called me, pronounced me worse than Judas Iscariot, told me she would never speak to me again, and proved as good as her word. My father disappeared for three days and Uncle Willie called to tell me that he had gone somewhere to commit suicide and I had only myself to blame when they recovered his broken body at the foot of some ravine in North Georgia.

  It was at the Old New York Book Shop that my father made his reappearance after his nightmarish retreat into himself to encounter my remorseless view of him as a man. Since his arrival in Atlanta, Dad had visited the bookshop every day, dropping in to gossip with Cliff about the town’s writers. Cliff knew about my family’s anxiety about Dad’s withdrawal, so he followed Don into the sitting room for a cup of coffee. For his regular customers, Cliff had provided real coffee mugs with their names inscribed boldly on them. From a hook, Dad retrieved his cup that was embossed with the single word “Santini.”

  My father was agitated as he spoke to Cliff. “You see what that son of a bitch wrote about me?”

  “Yeah, Don, I did,” Cliff said.

  “Why does he hate my guts?” Dad said. “Why would he make up those lies about me? Did you see what he said about me on page two twenty-one? Who could write something like that about his own father?”

  “You didn’t finish the book, did you, Don?” Cliff asked. “You poor dope.”

  “Why’d I finish a book like that? It’s the worst book I’ve ever read.”

  “Hey, Don—it’s the only book you’ve ever read,” Cliff said. “But you’ve got to read the whole thing—then you’ll know what Pat’s really up to.”

  “He hates my guts; that’s what he’s up to.”

  “Listen to me, Colonel Dope. Pat wrote you a love letter. That’s what the whole book’s really about. He had to write it to find out how much he loves you.”

  “I wish he’d just written a letter or some shit like that,” Dad said. “Shut up about this love shit.”

  “Take it for what it is.”

  “Hey, my eyes are getting moist. Knock it off about the lovey-dovey stuff. I like my version better. The kid hates me.”

  “The book lends itself to different interpretations,” Cliff admitted.

  My father’s sensibilities remained hurt and raw for several years after the publication of my book, but Cliff had provided Dad with a line of reassurance that provided him with both a plausible explanation and an avenue of escape. For the rest of his life, people would ask him about his feelings about the book and my father developed a frame of literary references that extended from Cain and Abel, through Hamlet and King Lear, straight past the steppes of Russia with Leo Tolstoy, then backtracking to end his declamation with the nature of family tragedy as expressed in the fall of the House of Atreus. Where Dad picked up these reference points, I’ve no cotton-picking idea, but I’m dead certain that he never read a single line of any author he ponied up as providing either testimony or evidence in his defense. Later, he admitted that my sister Carol had contributed the House of Atreus, and he loved saying it out loud because it made him sound so goddamn smart. The biblical citations that would extend from Abraham to Isaac to a child’s ingratitude being sharper than a serpent’s tooth were pieced together from the religious educations of Father Jim and Sister Marge, the priest and the nun among my father’s siblings. But Dad found that he’d developed a small passion for the more arcane and ostentatious displays of literary allusions. When challenged by a regular at the bookstore once on what my novel had to do with Hamlet, my father puffed up with aggravated malice and told the poor bastard to go read Hamlet again and it wasn’t written into his job description that he had to explain the most profound intricacies of the Prince of Denmark to some poor illiterate “schmuck” in Cliff’s bookstore.

  Two months after the book’s publication, Dad pulled up to Cliff’s store and honked his horn until we emerged into the sunlight. Bobby Joe Harvey, my brother-in-law in Beaufort, had mailed Dad a bright red license plate that said, THE GREAT SANTINI. Bobby Joe had fixed it onto the front of Dad’s car and there it stayed for the rest of his life. It became a familiar sight to commuters moving up and down Peachtree Street during rush hour. When Cliff gave me a book party to celebrate the publication of The Great Santini, he interrupted me as I was signing copies of my book, then walked me back toward the couch in the coffee room. Dad was drinking a cup of coffee from the Santini cup and signing my books with goodwill and humor: I hope you enjoy my son’s latest work of fiction. He would underline the word “fiction” five or six times. That boy of mine sure has a vivid imagination. Ol’ lovable, likable Col. Don Conroy, USMC (Ret.), the Great Santini.

  The Old New York Book Shop and Cliff Graubart became famous in Atlanta circles for the book parties given for Atlanta writers in celebration of their newly published books. The tradition began when Cliff and I met a Newsweek writer named Vern Smith at a restaurant called the Mansion on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Vern was coming out with a novel about the primitive street life that had grown up around the drug trade in the ghettos of Detroit. Vern’s dialogue was pitch-perfect, and he got a review from the New York Times Book Review that his kids should have laminated on his tombstone. The idea of a book party pleased Vern a great deal and he proved suave, friendly, and knowledgeable as we scribbled down
a makeshift invitation list from all over the city. Because of Vern’s solid connections in the black community, that first party was fully integrated, and the conversation was animated and good-natured. Vern was charming and vivacious as he signed more than fifty copies of his novel on that historic night. The only criticism I heard about that party, or any of the parties Cliff gave over the years, was the ghastly cheapness of the champagne that Cliff served from the rare-book room. I could calm the protests and claim out loud that the champagne was not cheap; it was merely undrinkable.

  The parties always carried the aura of a debutante’s ball as a new book would glide into Atlanta society, joining the easy fellowship of the thirty thousand books that stood in reverent attendance on these opening nights. Anne Rivers Siddons published her first novel, Heartbreak Hotel, the following year, and Terry Kay blazed forth with The Year the Lights Came On. The years began to gallop by as Marshall Frady signed books and later Paul Darcy Boles, Ted Turner, Frank Smith, Terry McMillan, Pearl Cleage, Joe and Doug Cumming, Jim Townsend, and Bernie and Martha Schein—there were dozens, then scores, then a hundred or more. Stuart Woods got his start here. Charlie Smith traveled down from New York to sign his novel Caanan, taking advantage of the fact that he was a Georgia boy. Carl Hiaasen arrived for two book parties incognito to christen several novels he had ghostwritten. Cliff and I were in the bookstore when Howell Raines came in to tell us he had accepted a job as a reporter for the New York Times in the same year that he had the first and only double book party for the simultaneous publication of his novel Whiskey Man and his seminal book on the civil rights movement, My Soul Is Rested. Also in Atlanta, Wendell Rawls took the work that won him a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and turned it into a sledgehammer of a book called Cold Storage. Robert Steed, a lawyer at King & Spalding, published two books of hilarious essays. I would meet Griffin Bell studying books in the history section and Charles Kirbo and Jack Watson and other members of the Carter administration arguing politics as Ellis Hughes snapped the black-and-white photographs that would hang from the bookstore walls for the next twenty years. At times, Cliff and I would riffle through those expressive photos and encounter a whole country of strangers whose faces we knew but whose names have suffered a time-swept erasure for which there is no real cure. A pretty girl’s face would flare in the faded light of chemicals and the busyness of dark rooms, sting us with the memory of her freshness, then recede again outside our lives. There is some deep wisdom in anonymity, in a nonnegotiable refusal to announce yourself after the pure insult of finding yourself forgotten.

  The parties became social events; the gatherings assumed overtones that were provocative, even erotic. Flirtations could begin in the travel section and divorce be discussed within reach of Rilke or Saint-John Perse. Love affairs began near French literature and awkward rebuffed advances beneath the framed maps of colonial Georgia. I remember four pregnancies announced to applause, and a hundred telephone numbers exchanged, and two couples claimed they had made love in the attic. No writer ever read from a new book at those parties, because Cliff and I agreed that a writer reading from his or her own work was as boring as watching a race between snails. Atlanta children were conceived and born because their parents first caught each other’s eyes as they purchased the books of friends and neighbors in a charged atmosphere that was both safe and seductive. I met governors and United States senators and mayors of Atlanta and civil rights leaders as they ascended the shapely stairs that led to the front porch of the bookstore. With Chet Fuller I talked about gardening and with Rosemary Daniell about having sex on a lifeboat. With Jim Landon I talked about his mountain-climbing expedition into the Himalayas and with Susan Raines, her remarkable photographs. The conversations were bracing, and the voices always seemed engaged. The talk began with books again, to the way the language formed in tongues in Atlanta with a river sliding on its western edge, and a granite mountain on guard duty to the north, with forests of dogwoods, with a nervous skyline always urging upward and a fleet of airplanes flung like stars against the night as the years moved past us in their awesome patience and their far more awful speed. The parties stopped in the early nineties. Cliff married Cynthia Stevens and they started a family and the parties started averaging about one a week. Routine and exhaustion set in; then the city exploded with a growth that seemed without reason or surcease.

  In the year that Cosmopolitan magazine revealed that the Old New York Book Shop was the best and safest place for single men and women to meet one another, Cliff folded those book parties like linens and placed them on the shelves of time. In 1995, he gave one last party for me when Beach Music was published and my life was falling apart again. I considered it a great honor and a splendid act of friendship. Cliff and I noticed on the last night that no one who attended those legendary book parties in the early years could ever consider themselves youthful again. But by God, we were young in Atlanta once and managed to get a couple of things right.

  I should leave it here, but I can’t stop myself. Sometimes, when I return to Atlanta, I drive past the bookstore that Cliff closed many years ago and rented out to Einstein’s restaurant next door. The store is empty now, unfurnished and inconsolable. One day it will be torn down and a thirty-story skyscraper will take its place. It was once the home of thirty thousand books, a village of lost souls who once held citizenship in a princely city of ideas where the bright glimmer of the English language formed a great wall before the assembled forces of chaos. In this store, there was once a time you could ask yourself the most necessary questions, and with patience and a discriminating eye you could receive an answer from one of the greatest writers who ever lived. The Old New York Book Shop was the cathedral where I staked out my own house of worship and learning. Over the years, I took home thousands of books to refresh, replete, and sustain me, and sometimes, if I were lucky and alert, to knock my damn socks off. Now I look into its front windows and the store is bookless, soulless, and empty. It is a husk, a discarded snakeskin, an empty conch shell as mute as the sea. Though I come as a visitor, it is like visiting a beloved uncle with Alzheimer’s. I was lucky to find this store when I was a young man, and I think I stole the dream of fire from the pillar of God when I found the books I was born to read. But it is voiceless now, and sad beyond commentary.

  Over there to the left of the fireplace was the poetry section that I sorted through and pillaged on my endless voyage in search of that lucky strike where the words would drop down on me glittering, distilled, and perfect. From the poets I required an exquisite refinement where no hair was out of place—no cowlicks, no tangles, no mess. Standing off in that corner, I found the severe, humorless Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote symphonic, infinitely complex poems that were hymns to the earth. In the same spot I fell in love with and tried to memorize Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” which I found to be the most elegant prayer ever written, a hymn of God coughed up into his soft Welsh hand. I bought five hundred books of poetry from the Old New York Book Shop and stumbled around in complete surprise that poets wrote for the sheer, unapologetic joy they took in creation. I came as a thief to the poet’s ball. I envied the way they could make language smoke and burn and give off a bright light of sanctuary. The great ones could fill what was empty in me. In the vast repository of language, the poets never shout at you when you pass them by. Theirs is a seductive, meditative art. They hand you a file to cut your way out from any prison of misrule.

  On my writing desk, I always keep the poets close by, and I reach for them when those silver, mountain-born creeks go dry or when exhaustion rearranges the furniture of my fear-chambered heart. The poets force me back toward the writing life, where the trek takes you into the interior where the right word hides like an ivory-billed woodpecker in the branches of the highest pines.

  But I’m speaking of all the yesterdays that will not come again. The Old New York Book Shop has fallen asleep forever, locked up and desolate and wordless.

  I sit on the top step wat
ching the traffic on Juniper Street heading downtown. The drivers and their passengers do not have a clue what this place once represented in the history of ideas of this city. I’m not sure any of them would care. But if I close my eyes, simply close my eyes, I can bring it all back to rowdy, vivacious life. Once, the writers of a great city gathered here to celebrate the publication of our books. The lights shone bright and the doors were wide open and the cars would park all over the area. None of us were good enough to bring the English-speaking world to its knees. But we had a few things to say and we said them well. I turn to say good-bye to the Old New York Book Shop. But no farewells are necessary. The books I wanted followed me home. My God, the wonders I found there! Those same marvels cling to me and they will adhere and prevail as long as I can write a word, as long as I can dream a world from the silos of language inside me. So I bid a loving farewell to this wordless house. It was here I came as a young man and learned some things I needed to know. On its shelves, I found the old masters waiting for my arrival. When I die, my religion tells me I’ll go to heaven, and I hope someone got that story right. I’ll make a request that I get to live in the Old New York Book Shop on the night of a book party. I’ll sponsor that party and welcome the guests as they arrive. Then I’ll have the Atlanta writers gather around and I’ll introduce them to a blind poet who would sit atop Cliff’s desk. Through the mists and starlessness of time I’ll clap my hands and bring the house to silence. Damn, it was hard to get those Atlanta writers to shut their mouths. But this is my party and a slice of heaven I think I earned. Then the poet will open his mouth at the resurrected Old New York Book Shop and I’ll command him to sing his immortal words about the scrimmage of the gods, the terrible siege, and all the unbearable sadness of the fall of Troy.