My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  A guide met us in the entry hall and showed us the great sitting room where the boarders would gather before dinner to listen to Mabel Wolfe play the piano and sing popular songs. The actual piano was there on display. The furniture was authentic and original, and the house still looked and felt like the place that Wolfe had written about. The dining room table was set for twenty-five or thirty people, and the china and silverware belonged to both the house and the book.

  Memorabilia of Thomas Wolfe hung from the walls: photographs, drawings, diplomas, and samples of his handwriting laid out in display cases. Looking at Wolfe’s handwriting came perilously close to being a religious experience for me. It satisfied some itch of recognition or acknowledgment I was unaware I even had. I saw his signature written at the bottom of a letter and understood for the first time the obsession of autograph collectors.

  The guide led Mr. Norris and me into the small, cramped quarters off the kitchen where Julia Wolfe lived out her days in heroic simplicity. The kitchen was large and functional, and the equipment displayed was exactly the same as it was when Mrs. Wolfe was feeding hungry tourists during the high season. Each room was exactly how Thomas Wolfe had described it. It was like being let loose in the pages of his novel.

  When we walked upstairs, it was Gene Norris who led me to the bedroom in the far-right corner of the house, the most spacious of them all. Mr. Norris lightly touched my shoulder and said, “This is the room where Tom’s brother Ben died. That’s the bed where he died. In that chair, Mrs. Wolfe sat. His father sat over there. Tom watched his brother die from the foot of the bed.”

  My teacher knew that the death of Ben Gant in Look Homeward, Angel had torn me apart, tamed something in me with its chilling finality, and taught me something permanent and fine about an artist turning the worst moment of his life into something sweetly beautiful. When I read about the death of Ben Gant, I was certain I could feel as much pain as Thomas Wolfe, but I was uncertain whether I could love with such unflinching, astonishing power. I stared at that bed and those chairs and could not have felt more emotion if I had been brought to a bedroom made famous by the deaths of kings. That bed contained an aura of sanctity for me. The death of Ben Gant and the bed he died on had lived in my imagination, as vivid as fire itself, for six months before Gene Norris brought me face-to-face with them. I looked at the bed and saw the dying brother. The chairs held the mother, the father, and then the writer. I stared at the chair where Thomas Wolfe watched his brother die and I could barely contain my sorrow for the way the world cuts into us all by killing the softest of us first.

  In the backyard, the apples were beginning to ripen on a tree, and the branches hung low, laden with bright fruit. The guide motioned for us to help ourselves, then said, “Thomas Wolfe used to love to eat the apples from this particular tree. He claimed the apples of western North Carolina were the best in the world.”

  Mr. Norris leaped up and grabbed an apple from a low-lying branch, gave it to me, and commanded, “Eat it, boy.” As we drove out of Asheville and headed toward the road leading into the mountains and Lake Lure, I asked, “Why’d you want me to eat this apple, Mr. Norris?” Mr. Norris drove fast along the curves of the mountain road, pausing, selecting his words with care. “It’s high time, boy, that you learned that there is a relationship between life and art.”

  So I learned it and ate that apple and remembered the words of my teacher. I set out to live my life and did it quite badly. One book had set me out in the direction that my soul was yearning to follow. Boys like me—you know the ones—we’re the boys from the families no one knows, from schools that few have heard of, from towns defined by their own anonymity, from regions unpraised and unknown, from histories without stories or records or echoes or honor. Thomas Wolfe taught me that if I looked hard enough at the life I was living, the history of the world would play itself out before me within earshot of my mother’s stove. I had to be vigilant, and courageous. But I already knew I was saddled with one great liability that could sabotage my career as a novelist from the outset.

  “Mr. Norris?” I asked.

  “Yes, creature,” he answered.

  “What a shame my parents are so boring,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe had really interesting parents. His daddy was a stonecutter who carved angels for dead people. His mother owned a boardinghouse and became rich investing in land. My old man’s a jarhead. Mom’s just a housewife.”

  Mr. Norris shot me one of his most disapproving glances. “Your father’s checked out to carry nuclear weapons against our nation’s enemies, boy. He breaks the sound barrier when he goes to work every day. You looked at your mother lately? Beauty, brains—Peg could be the president of General Motors, not raising critters sorry as you.”

  With that second burst of great teaching that day, Gene Norris set me on the road that would lead to my life’s work. I began to study my parents the way a lepidopterist pored over the details of a luna moth’s wing structure. They sprang to bewildering, amazing life to me under my secret inspection of every aspect of their lives.

  The following October, my mother drove me out to the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in morning darkness. We watched as my father and his squadron scrambled off the runway on the way to Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. The Cuban Missile Crisis was heating up and Russian ships on the high seas were shipping nuclear warheads into Cuba. My father and his men were part of the American forces that would stop them if war was declared. I was afraid for the whole world. My mother said the rosary, quietly and to herself, until I asked, “Mama, are you praying for Dad and his pilots?”

  “No, son,” Peg Conroy answered, wife of a marine fighter pilot, helpmeet of an American warrior. She prayed as the planes rose in thunderous noise around us and said, “I’m praying for the souls of the Cuban pilots your father and his men are going to kill.”

  I stared at my mother as though I had never seen her before. I knew her as carpooler, housewife, party girl, terrific dancer, beachcomber, president of the PTA, and a hundred other disguises she used to hide herself from me. My mother revealed her true identity at last and let me know that I was sitting in a Chevrolet station wagon next to a goddess of battle.

  When Dad returned home disappointed that the Russian navy had turned back and the flag had not gone up, I got up my nerve to ask him about the things he saw and felt training his squadron for war above the skies of the Caribbean.

  “Dad, what was your mission in Cuba? If war had broken out?” I asked.

  “You a detective, jocko?” he asked.

  “No, sir. I was just curious.”

  He looked at me, then said, “To clear the air of MiGs over Cuba.”

  “You think you could have done it?” I asked.

  My father stared me down, then answered in the voice of the Great Santini, “There wouldn’t have been a bluebird flying over that island, son.”

  Look Homeward, Angel was the text of my liberation into myself, the one that gave me access to the ceremonies and procedures that could lead me to the writer’s way. Because Thomas Wolfe had done me the immense favor of dying, I could study his life and career from beginning to end and try to learn by his example and guard against his mistakes. Because he seemed to be much like me—no, that is dishonest. What I meant to say and was afraid to say is that I thought that Thomas Wolfe was me. My identification with this one extravagantly American and exaggeratedly Southern writer was so complete as to border on the demented and the mystical. His life has long served as the ox goad to the passion and inflammation I bring to all discussions of art.

  It has become almost a rite of passage for Southern male writers of great talent to take their turns deflating the literary reputation of Thomas Wolfe. Academics, with some rare exceptions, have been murderous in their appraisal of the merits and quality of Wolfe’s work. He inspires more mockery than devotion. English professors in major universities attach the names of other writers to their résumés if they want either tenure or publication. Wolfe’s r
eputation seems to dim year by year, and academics cannot quite forgive him for the absolute temerity of his daring to write like Thomas Wolfe and not someone much better.

  I, however, stand by my absolute devotion to the man and his work. Do I not see his flaws? Of course I do, but I see my own with much greater sadness and embarrassment. Has my taste in literature not grown and matured and become far more refined than it was when I was a boy? I certainly hope so, but here is why I still pull guard duty for Thomas Wolfe: I think that he tells more of the truth about the world he found himself in than anyone else has. Anyone. Wolfe hovers above a blank page like God dreaming of paradise. With every word he writes he tries to give you a complete and autonomous world. Because he cannot do otherwise, Wolfe takes you high up into the mountains, past the tree line, to those crests and snowy peaks of the highest points of the earth. He stammers, he murmurs, he hunts for the right words, and words spill out of his pockets and cuffs and shirtsleeves as he tries to awaken us from the dream of our own barely lived-in lives. When he spots our interest flagging, he flails his arms, collars us, makes us look upward out toward the stars where all the mysteries and silences and functions and secrets of time are. Thomas Wolfe tries to tell you things that none of us are supposed to know. His art fails because he cannot quite deliver the goods and the critics know it. This does not stop him because Wolfe knows that he is onto something very big. He almost gets it … he almost takes us there … he almost pulls it off and that’s why those who love his work revere him. Wolfe writes like a man on fire who does not have a clue how not to be on fire. Yes, I see the flaws of Thomas Wolfe and I could not care less. His art is overdone and yet I find it incomparably beautiful. I still honor the boy who accepted Thomas Wolfe into his life when he was sixteen. I do not know what I would have done if he had failed to find me that year in Gene Norris’s English class or where I would be or what I would be doing. I owe my life as an artist to him, and I will never forget that debt or dismiss his work with my scorn. I thank him with my heart for the greatness of his spirit and work.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE COUNT

  Many writers and critics have called Leo Tolstoy’s magisterial novel War and Peace the greatest novel ever written, and their ranks include such luminaries as E. M. Forster, John Galsworthy, and Hugh Walpole. Virginia Woolf gushed over it like a schoolgirl, saying, “If … you think of the novels which seem to you great novels—War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Pride and Prejudice, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Villette—if you think of these books, you do at once think about some character who has seemed to you so real (I do not by that mean so lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it itself, but all sorts of things through its eyes—of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul. There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace.…”

  Let me now add my own voice to the hallelujah chorus of novelists who have found themselves enraptured by the immensity and luminosity of War and Peace and cast my own vote that it is the finest novel ever written. I can think of no other novelist who could take the entire known world as his subject matter and not be overwhelmed by the task at hand. But Count Leo Tolstoy writes with such assuredness and unshowy mastery that his powers can sometimes strike you as almost godlike as he looks over the world of the Napoleonic Wars with the calmness and certainty of a master surveying a chessboard with a hundred thousand pieces. Tolstoy overwhelms and humbles and delights me. He is massively interested in everything he sees around him. Nothing escapes his attention, and there does not seem to be a single subject that bores him. His subject is all the world and all the people and creatures who populate it and everything in between. Once you plunge into the inexhaustible depths of War and Peace, Count Tolstoy will take you prisoner for more than thirteen hundred pages. He will exhaust you with the deadly movement of troops the length and breadth of Europe; dance with you at soirees where you meet some of the most fascinating people in literature; make you happy to be young, fearful to be old, eager for battle, terrified of battle, anxious to fall in love, betrayed by the deepest soundings of love; place you in the middle of conversations with serfs and in the company of tsars—Tolstoy will do everything a novelist can do with all the magnanimity and confidence one possesses when one is born to be the greatest novelist who ever lived.

  When I first bought War and Peace, I was showing off to my splendid English teacher at Gonzaga High School, Joseph Monte, who had handed out a list of a hundred great books that we should read before leaving home for college. The sheer size of the book both intimidated and spurred me on to begin reading it as quickly as I could. It was my announcement to myself that I was going to be a serious student of literature for the rest of my life. For a year, Mr. Monte had taught me that I wanted to be smart and gifted in the language more than anything else. I read David Copperfield and The Peloponnesian War and The Sound and the Fury and Crime and Punishment under the wondrous scrutiny of his tutelage. When I bought my copy of War and Peace, Mr. Monte simply nodded in approval, as though I had taken my first step on a newly discovered continent.

  When I booked a return flight on War and Peace, I was in my thirties and had made my living writing novels for a good ten years. But I felt seized by an overwhelming urge to seek a deeper knowledge of and a mastery of my craft that writing books alone had failed to grant me. I wanted to read War and Peace as a mature and, I hoped, discerning man, and I wanted to take my time doing it, so I could study its labyrinthine architecture to see how its great engines worked. On my second around-the-world voyage with this novel, I took thorough notes and made charts of battles and wrote down family trees and tried to plunder the riches of Tolstoy’s art, in much the same way the French army had fleeced the abandoned mansions of Moscow after the Russian army had pulled back from the city. I studied battle maps of Austerlitz and Borodino and read accounts of Napoleon’s life and the court life of the Russian aristocracy at the time of the French invasion. It was at this time that I studied biographies of Tolstoy and began reading about friends and relatives of the count who he placed in key fictional roles throughout his voluminous novel. I tried to understand its matchlessness, the perfection of its grandeur, its intimidating lucidity, and the unsurpassable authority of its narrative power. My amazement was in its naturalness, as though it poured out of Tolstoy’s soul in a pure stream of light. There was no strain or sign of heavy lifting in Tolstoy until he arrives at his onerous but pardonable theories of history, which struck me on the second reading as didactic. If I am honest with myself, I think I skipped over all his historical musings the first time I read the book because I was so anxious about the fate of characters I had come to know and love. I cared deeply about their stories as the armies of Napoleon crossed the Niemen River, entering the heart of Mother Russia and affecting the life of every character in the book.

  On the third reading, I found that spending time between the pages of War and Peace was one of the most compensatory pursuits I had ever discovered. I cannot think of another novelist who writes with such serene self-confidence. As a narrator, Tolstoy creates a world that seems miraculous in its inclusiveness and its nobility of effect and even its strange lightness on its feet. You feel everything in War and Peace except the strain of its creation. It’s like a book made from starlight and fire; the spirit of life itself lends it structure. The language is always in sublime service to the force of this light that illuminates the entire work. On my third reading, I even read Tolstoy’s discourses on history with great pleasure.

  The novel begins without fanfare or introduction at Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s soiree in St. Petersburg. She is speaking with a fierceness that tells us a truth about the forces that will drive the entire book. “Eh bien, mon prince,” she begins. With great irritation and contempt, Anna tells Prince Vasili Kuragin she understands that the kingdoms of both Genoa and Lucca in It
aly are now family estates of the Bonapartes. In her second sentence, she warns the prince that if he even tries to defend the horror and infamies of Napoleon, whom she refers to twice as the Antichrist, then she will terminate their friendship, and she will no longer function as the prince’s “faithful slave.” Thus, the novel is laid out in its introductory speech delivered by a voice that sounds like Mother Russia herself. Tolstoy catapults us into the center of the aristocratic life of Russia’s most sophisticated society at a party that has continued to attract millions of readers since the book’s publication in 1869. In its completeness and almost eerie circularity, the speech of Anna Pavlovna could just as appropriately serve as the last words of the book.

  The conversations at this party are carried off with such artfulness and authority it makes dinner parties I have attended in New York City and Los Angeles seem like they were conducted by the barely living for the recently dead. This party hums with bright intellect and a lust for living that is as fresh today as it was when first written. The reader finds the spontaneous nexus of the Tolstoyan genius on the first page as he informs us that Anna Pavlovna’s invitations have been written in her own hand—in French—and that she refers to her slight cough as “la grippe,” which has become fashionable among the elite in St. Petersburg society that season. Tolstoy’s details always seem to shimmer with a delicacy of precision.

  In his supreme naturalness, Tolstoy introduces two of the most important characters of this novel at the same party: the stout, nearsighted Pierre, the illegitimate son of Count Cyril Bezukhov, a fabulously wealthy nobleman whose youth dated from the time of Catherine the Great. In his shambling, good-natured innocence, Pierre will become the conscience and the lodestar of the story, and his charming affability and deep intellectual curiosity will make his arrival on any scene or battlefield a welcome one. Pierre’s social clumsiness displays itself immediately when he defends Napoleon as a principled defender of the rights of man and the equality of all people, in front of the horrified Anna Pavlovna and a roomful of guests who owe their quality of life to the institution of serfdom. Only Prince Andrei Bolkonsky smiles at Pierre’s naïveté, since he and Pierre are already devoted friends, as we will discover in the next chapter. Prince Andrei is the next most important man in the narrative, as well as one of the most stalwart and admirable characters in world fiction. Biographies have argued persuasively that Pierre and Andrei represent two partitions of Leo Tolstoy’s world-encompassing personality. If this is true, Tolstoy was a fascinating, complicated, and self-actualized man. He is the kind of writer who wants and needs readers to fall in love with his characters, and this novel will make you dizzy with a joyous affection for the people you will meet on these pages. I fell in love with Natasha Rostova when I was a teenage boy and let it happen again after my third reading of this inexhaustible novel at the age of sixty-one. Tolstoy would find my attraction to Natasha a natural response, for he is, at the dead center of his art, a great nature writer, and nothing is more natural in his world than the mysterious and necessary attraction of men and women. It is impossible not to be suffused with happiness when Prince Andrei and Natasha announce their love for each other. Their impending marriage seems part of the design of the universe, as right as the stars that make up the belt of Orion.