My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  Each year I began my life all over again. I grew up knowing no one well, least of all myself, and I think it damaged me. I grew up not knowing if I was smart or stupid, handsome or ugly, interesting or insipid. I was too busy reacting to the changing landscapes and climates of my life to get any clear picture of myself. I was always leaving behind what I was just about ready to become. I could never catch up to the boy I might have been if I’d grown up in one place.

  In 1972 my book The Water Is Wide came out when I was living in Beaufort, South Carolina. It was not the most popular book in South Carolina during that season, but it was extremely popular at the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, where the marines and their wives looked to me as a living affirmation of the military way of life. I accepted an invitation to speak at the Marine Corps officers’ wives’ club with the deep sense that some circle was being closed. Years before my mother had been an officer in the same club and she’d produced the first racially integrated program in the club’s history. Neither of us knew that my speech would mark a turning point in both our lives.

  Instead of talking about my new book and my experiences teaching on Daufuskie Island, I spoke of some things I wanted to say about the Marine Corps family. I was the son of a fighter pilot, as were a lot of their kids, and I had some things to tell them. I was the first military brat who’d ever spoken to the club—I was a native son. I could hear the inheld breath of these women as I approached the taboo subject of the kind of husbands and fathers I thought marines made. For the first time in my life I was hanging the laundry of my childhood out to dry. I told those women of the corps that I’d met many good soldiers in my life, but precious few good fathers. I also told them of my unbounded admiration for my mother and other military wives I’d met during my career as a brat. But I told those women directly that they shouldn’t let their marines beat them or their children.

  I thought I was giving a speech, but something astonishing was unleashed in that room that day. Some of the women present that day hated me, but some liked me very much. The response was electric, passionate, immediate. Some of the women approached me in tears, others in rage. But that talk to the officers’ wives was the catalyst that first made me sit down and start writing the outline of The Great Santini.

  A year later, the day after my father’s retirement parade, my mother left my father after thirty-three years of marriage. Their divorce was ferocious and bitter, but it contained, miraculously, the seeds of my father’s redemption. Alone and without the corps, he realized that his children were his enemies and that all seven of us thought he hated our guts. The American soldier is not taught to love his enemy or anyone else. Love did not come easily to my father, but he started trying to learn the steps after my mother left him. It was way too late for her, but his kids were ready for it. We’d been waiting all our lives for our dad to love us.

  I had already begun the first chapters of The Great Santini. I wrote about a military brat who’d spent his whole life smiling and pretending that he was the happiest part of a perfect, indivisible American family. I had no experience in writing down the graffiti left along the margins of a boy’s ruined heart. Because I was born a male, I had never wept for the boy who’d once withstood the slaps and blows of one of the corps’ strongest aviators. I’d never wept for my brothers or sisters or my beautiful and loyal mother, yet I’d witnessed those brutal seasons of their fear and hurt and sadness. Because I was born to be a novelist, I remembered every scene, every beating, every drop of blood shed by my sweet and innocent family.

  As I wrote, the child of the military in me began to fall apart. For the one thing a military brat is not allowed to do is commit an act of treason. I learned the hard way that truth is a capital offense and so did my family. I created a boy named Ben Meecham and I gave him my story. His loneliness, his unbearable solitude almost killed me as I wrote about him. Everything about the boy hurt me, but I kept writing the book because I didn’t know how to stop. My marriage would fall apart and I’d spend several years trying to figure out how not to be crazy because the deep sadness of Ben Meecham and his family touched me with a pity I could not bear. His father could love him only with his fists, and I found myself inconsolable as I wrote this. I would stare at pictures of myself taken in high school and could not imagine why any father would want to hit that boy’s face. I wrote The Great Santini through tears, hating everything my father stood for and sickened by his behavior toward his family.

  But in the acknowledgment of this hatred, I also found myself composing a love song to my father and to the military way of life. Once when I read Look Homeward, Angel in high school, I’d lamented the fact that my father didn’t have an interesting, artistic profession like Thomas Wolfe’s stonecutter father. But in writing Santini, I realized that Thomas Wolfe’s father never landed jets on aircraft carriers at night, wiped out a battalion of North Korean regulars crossing the Naktong River, or flew to Cuba with his squadron with the mission to clear the Cuban skies of MiGs if the flag went up.

  In writing The Great Santini I had to consider the fact of my father’s heroism. His job was extraordinarily dangerous and I never knew it. He never once complained about the perils of his vocation. He was one of those men who make the men of other nations pause before attacking America. I learned that I would not want to be an enemy soldier or tank when Don Conroy passed overhead. My father had made orphans out of many boys and girls in Asia during those years I prayed for God to make an orphan out of me. His job was to kill people when his nation asked him to, pure and simple. And the loving of his kids was never written into his job description.

  When my mother left my father she found, to her great distress, that she was leaving the protective embrace of the corps she’d served for more than thirty years. She was shaken and disbelieving when a divorce court granted her five hundred dollars a month in child support but informed her she was not entitled to a dime of my dad’s retirement pay. The court affirmed that it was the colonel who had served his country so valiantly, not she. But she’d been an exemplary wife of a marine officer and it was a career she had carried with rare grace and distinction. Peg Conroy made the whole Marine Corps a better place to be, but her career had a value of nothing when judged in a court of law. My mother died thinking that the Marine Corps had not done right by her. She had always considered herself and her children to be part of the grand design of the military, part of the mission.

  There are no ceremonies to mark the end of our career as military brats, either. I imagined that all of us could meet on some impeccably manicured field, all the military brats, in a gathering so vast that it would be like the assembling of some vivid and undauntable army. We could come together on this parade ground at dusk, million-voiced and articulating our secret anthems of hurt and joy. We could praise one another in voices that understand both the magnificence and pain of our transient lives.

  At the end of our assembly, we could pass in review in a parade of unutterable beauty. As brats, we’ve watched a thousand parades on a thousand weekends. We’ve shined shoes and polished brass and gotten every bedroom we ever slept in ready for Saturday morning inspection. A parade would be a piece of cake for the military brats of the world.

  I would put all of our fathers in the reviewing stand, and require that they come in full dress uniform and in the prime of life. I want our fathers handsome and strong and feared by all the armies of the world the day they attend our parade.

  To the ancient beat of drums we could pass by those erect and silent rows of fathers. What a fearful word “father” is to so many of us, but not on this day, when the marchers keep perfect step and the command for “eyes right” roars through our disciplined ranks and we turn to face our fathers in that crowd of warriors.

  In this parade, these men would understand the nature and the value of their children’s sacrifice for the first time. Our fathers would stand at rigid attention. Then they would begin to salute us, one by one, and in that salute, that one
sign of recognition, of acknowledgment, they would thank us for the first time. They would be thanking their own children for their fortitude and courage and generosity and long suffering, for enduring a military childhood.

  But most of all the salute would be for something no military man in this country has ever acknowledged. The gathering of fighting men would be thanking their children, their fine and resourceful children, who were strangers in every town they entered, thanking them for their extraordinary service to their country, for the sacrifices they made over and over again to the United States of America, to its ideals of freedom, to its preservation, and to its everlasting honor.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A SOUTHERNER IN PARIS

  There are two women I would like to tell about my time in Paris and both of them are dead. It was the bright urgency of their high-spirited vitality, their heartfelt generous love of me as a boy, that led me to Paris in the first place.

  There is Mary Vella, the Madame, the singularly exotic and beautiful French teacher at Beaufort High School who spoke French breathlessly, with a singing Carolina accent, with a dreaming, unpreservable quality. When she spoke to her class about Paris—her hair a thick aureole, a black crown; her complexion white and flowery; her figure full and Rubenesque—it was a distribution of gardenias from the human voice. The French language was an enchanting thing when spoken by the most romantic, offbeat figure in our innocent lives in those innocent times. After basketball games with the sweat still streaming from my body, she would kiss me and whisper, “Très magnifique, monsieur.” She delivered her bouquets, her sweet compliments, in the French language alone. Often Madame Vella would declare sadly that I was retarded in foreign languages, a verdict supported by my lackluster performance in the classroom. But, she said, my redemption would be the English language, and she told me she wanted to read a novel of mine after I had lived for a while in the City of Light, after I had walked the streets of Paris and learned the lessons only Paris could teach a writer. Madame Vella was radiant and magical and I missed her desperate quality, the gauzy, surreal loneliness veiled in the conjugation of French verbs. I missed the essential moment when French became her retreat, her gilded hermitage, the moment when her own language betrayed her. Finally, no language was powerful or humane enough to save her, and Mary Vella, impulsive and theatrical to her final breath, ended her life on Ribaut Road in Beaufort, South Carolina, with a single pistol shot through her brain. Hundreds of the monsieurs and mademoiselles who had populated her classes over the years gathered at the cemetery for her burial. It was like the death of the French language in the Carolina Low Country. When I finished writing The Lords of Discipline in Paris, I wanted to send Madame Vella the manuscript and tell her I had been true to her passionate urgings and had gone to Paris to write. But hers is one of those silent voices I sometimes hear when I enter the city of memory—her voice, seductive, immemorial, and clear, ordering me toward Paris.

  The other woman is Ann Head, who was the lone writer in Beaufort when she taught me creative writing in 1963. She introduced me to French literature and led me to the journals of André Gide. With consummate grace, she criticized poems I wrote for her and never let me know that those poems were categorical, unimprovable violations of the very spirit of poetry. Once she confessed to me that she was not a good writer. I did not know what she meant then; I do now.

  When I was a freshman in college, she sent me a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast for my birthday and inscribed it, One day I hope to read what you think about Paris. This is the best book I’ve ever read about the romance of writing. She also told me to remember everything I could about my plebe year at The Citadel. She thought it would make a fine novel one day. She told me many things in her letters to me, things of extraordinary worth to a young writer, but she failed to tell me she would die of a brain hemorrhage years before I affirmed her generous belief in my gift.

  It was the end of winter when I went to live in Paris, but the winter was a stubborn, long-winded one, and the bitter weather held firm until the end of April. The sky was gray in Paris for most of the spring and it rained almost every day. The city glistened beneath a remorseless, shimmering, mother-of-pearl sky. The people took their winter seriously, and whenever the sun would break through the clouds, the Luxembourg gardens would fill up with Parisians who would turn their pale, light-starved faces up toward the sun, like lizards. But in Paris during the spring of 1979, you mostly had the memory of what sunlight was like.

  My task in Paris was to finish a novel—a novel I had partially written in Atlanta, in Charleston, and in two beach houses in South Carolina. It had become a habit of mine to write books in beautiful places, in rooms with exquisite views. Landscape and architecture affect the texture and quality of my prose; at least, that is the essential nature of my one grand superstition regarding the craft. For three years I had prepared myself for the final assault on this book. I had taken notes, conducted interviews, remembered hard, written down dialogues, filled journals, and prepared an extensive list of my weaknesses as a writer. Before I began to write in Paris, I reviewed these weaknesses: I was sentimental, often disastrously so; I was over-dramatic, showy with adjectives, safe with form, weak on verbs, overreliant on adverbs, confused banter with wit and dialogue, and could go on and on and on.… The flaws in my character were identical with the flaws in my prose, and I thought Paris would be good for both. When I stood on the Pont Neuf at the end of my first day in Paris and waved to a bargeman moving up the Seine against the current and watched the delicate silvering of the river at dusk, I felt there was no prose style Paris could not forgive.

  There was a more practical reason for my residence in Paris during that time. My editor, Jonathan Galassi, had taken a six-month leave of absence from Houghton Mifflin in order to translate the essays of Eugenio Montale. Jonathan is a brilliant, articulate New Englander who looked as though he were the only offspring of a sexual liaison between Phillips Exeter and Sarah Lawrence. His educational pedigree makes my own seem rather pallid and insubstantial. Boys from Beaufort High School and The Citadel avoid arguments with boys from Exeter and Harvard, with a bit of additional seasoning at Oxford. We try to wheedle them into fistfights instead. I had felt a moment of panic when I realized I had never heard of Montale, but lied with facility and claimed a long and intimate association with the Spanish poet. Jonathan informed me that Montale was Italian. Because I have an editor from Harvard, I go from one unbearable intellectual humiliation to another. But Jonathan encouraged me to come to Paris so we could write and work together. He and his wife, Susan, who was in Paris to write her dissertation on Picasso, helped me find a room on the top floor of the Grand Hôtel des Balcons in the sixth arrondissement. It was once the home of Hungarian lyric poet Endre Ady, whose epigram was engraved on the outside of the hotel: Paris est plante en mon coeur. It was one of the few sentences in French I could read without the help of a French–English dictionary. The concierge, a stout soldier of a woman, told me she was putting me on the top floor, which she reserved for “artistes.” The next day, I spread my notes all over the room and began to write.

  All writers are hostages of their own divine, unchangeable rituals. I am a prisoner of yellow legal pads and fountain pens. In habit lies safety. I like classical music playing softly in the background, and I carried a small transistor radio across the Atlantic to satisfy this harmless though fundamental need. But since the concierge had honored me with a residency on the sixth floor, I often had far more classical music than I desired. There was a flute player with the lung power of a small whale across the hall and an accordion player in the room next to mine. The accordion player, frail but absolutely indefatigable, would whack away at her indelicate instrument through much of the day. When the flute player practiced at the same time, the accordion player would become furious and there would be spirited disagreements between two-thirds of the artists in residence at the Grand Hôtel des Balcons. The concertos of accordion and flute made
for a most obscene accompaniment.

  I would turn the radio up loud, especially when the accordion lady began her daily assault against music. My room filled up with the sound of Mozart accompanied by accordion. By the end of the week I would rather have listened to a duet of tuba and spoons than listen to an accordion. I wanted to start a club to assassinate accordion players. When I memorized a long conciliatory French sentence and knocked on the accordion player’s door to register a mild complaint about the noise, she howled demoniacally at me for ten minutes and played her accordion far into the night as an act of retribution for my temerity. She was giving me my first memorable lesson into the nature of French national character and, more specifically, my first glimpse of that perverse and ornery creature, the Parisian.

  Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers. There is something glacial, fishlike, and prodigiously remote about Parisians. At the sound of an approaching foreigner, their faces are as bland and expressionless as salamanders. When they fix you in their imperious stares, it is as if they are studying you from the raised periscopes of submarines right before they blow you out of the water. In Europe, climate shapes character, and the Parisians have been left out in the rain too long. But there is something irresistible in their sangfroid, magnificent in their imperturbability. Parisians also relish the xenophobic sport of stereotyping and love to offer an infinite variety of theories on the nature of Americans. To them, we as a people are shallow, criminally naïve, reactionary, decadent, over-the-hill, uncultured, uneducable, and friendly to a fault. To Parisians, all Americans are Texans, grinning cowboys. France is the only country in the world where friendliness is one of the seven deadly sins. I am deeply inoculated with the serum of American cheerfulness, and I had to make a serious effort to become melancholy and funereal in front of Parisians who called me “frère.” To look Parisian, I walked around with my face tragically set as though I had just received a telegram announcing my mother’s death. It was an admirable disguise, but my mouth betrayed me. Whenever Parisians heard my execrable attempts at French, they would cover their ears with their hands and moan over the violation and butchery of their sweet tongue. My concierge, with her great black autocratic slice of a face, grew increasingly indignant at my lack of facility in French. Her dark eyes, circled with bruised rings, would glower as she heard my voice skipping inexpertly through the dense arpeggios of her language. Finally, when her hostility had become a palpable, living thing at the Grand Hôtel des Balcons, I took her aside and, in a carefully memorized speech, confessed to her I was mentally retarded and had been sent to Paris on a special program of rehabilitation. With heartbreaking cries of, “Oh, pardon, monsieur, pardon, pardon,” she clutched me in a wrestler’s grip to her breast. From that day forward, I received an extra croissant at breakfast, a maternal pat on the head, and she regarded each pitiful advance I made in the French language as miraculous and proof of a living God. Not only was I retarded, she would explain proudly to her friends, pointing her index finger to her temple, but I was also writing a book on the agonies of retardation on a grant from the American government.