The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  Charlie was born poor and died that way, but not for lack of backbreaking work. He grew to manhood with the Great Depression, which came early and stayed late in his particular corner of the South, and as Bragg makes clear in Ava’s Man, it carried its own special brand of hurt.

  It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.

  Charlie Bundrum lost one baby, but he scrapped and fought and he and Ava raised seven others, and mostly they grew up happy and strong. But they also learned that life was hard and a little bit mean, and a lot of the time you had to keep moving to stay ahead of trouble. That’s what Charlie and the rest of them did, moving more than twenty times, back and forth across the Georgia line, swapping one rented house for another, most of them hidden way back in the woods. In places such as these, Charlie could fish and hunt and work for pay when the work was there, digging wells, putting roofs on houses, and to supplement the family income he could also make a little moonshine. He loved to sample his own wares and many a night his wise and patient horse named Bob would have to find the way home and deposit Charlie gently in the front yard. But Charlie never got mean when he drank, never loved his family any less, and that love was the thing that everyone remembered. It could turn suddenly fierce if his children were threatened, but most of the time it was tender and generous and extended to neighbors down on their luck. He even brought home a hermit one time, a gnome-like man who lived in a shack hidden down by the river, and Charlie just made him part of the family, became his protector, to save him from the bullies who nearly beat him to death. And so, writes Bragg, even four decades after his death the memories of Charlie were strong and bittersweet.

  I remember the night, an icy night in December, I asked three of Charlie Bundrum’s daughters to tell me about his funeral. I sat in embarrassment as my aunts, all in their sixties, just stared hard at the floor. Juanita, tough as whalebone and hell, began to softly cry, and Jo, who has survived Uncle John and ulcers, wiped at her eyes. My mother, Margaret, got up and left the room. For coffee, she said.

  I admit to being a sucker for these family stories, for all of Bragg’s books, and for memoirs like the late Tim Russert’s Big Russ and Me or Calvin Trillin’s Messages from My Father. And even in the world of fiction a writer like Winston Groom in Forrest Gump—amid all the irony, humor, and satire—could add in layers of meaning and heart by the story of a mother’s love for her son. But there is, of course, another dimension to this complicated subject. From William Shakespeare to William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker, writers have probed the dark, fertile ground of family dysfunction, that corner of life in which people feel most free to be who they are. As many of us know, there are times when this is not a good thing—which brings us inevitably to Pat Conroy.

  III

  Before I read The Great Santini, and thus considered the depths of Conroy’s rage, I had read his first best seller, The Water Is Wide. I found it delightful. Here was a memoir, with a few name changes to protect the innocent, of a young teacher’s time on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, a place of stark and moss-draped beauty, where a small population of African Americans—still speaking, in fact, in the dialects of Africa, still traveling by ox cart on the island’s sandy roads—lived as if the mainland were a thousand miles away, instead of just three. And this was 1969.

  It is true, looking back, that there were hints of Conroy’s molten anger hidden in the pages of The Water Is Wide, though at the time it seemed like moral indignation. He had come, after all, to a wooden schoolhouse where the children had been so neglected through the years that they didn’t know which country they were living in, which ocean washed upon the shores of their island, or who was president of the United States. Their best guess was John Kennedy, for they had heard that he was good to black people, and they reasoned that if he were the current and the greatest of all presidents, he was probably also the first. They had never heard of George Washington.

  “Sweet little Jesus,” Conroy thought, gazing at their faces on the first day of class, “these kids don’t know crap.”

  Not knowing precisely where to begin, he launched a scattergun assault on a wasteland of ignorance, regaling his fifth- through eighth-graders with stories of the greatest classical composers while he played their music on a crude phonograph; or forcing the class to listen every morning to the radio news, while he pointed out the global hotspots on the map—Vietnam, Israel, the nations of Europe—and he did it all with a needling sense of humor that came to him naturally. As the year progressed, the students grew to love him, and he took delight when official visitors made their way to the island, primed most often for condescension or pity, in putting his students through their paces, identifying the music of Beethoven or Brahms.

  But in the end the authorities were not amused. On his third day on the job, Conroy wrote a blistering letter to the superintendent of schools, decrying the official neglect of Daufuskie, and though he obviously spoke the truth, his diplomatic skills could have used a little work. After a year of righteous proclamations he was fired, and when The Water Is Wide came out in 1972, I read it first as a political protest, an expose of racism in a quaint, forgotten corner of the South. It was only when I read The Great Santini that I began to understand—like a lot of other readers, I suppose—the reason for Conroy’s problem with authority, especially when the power was abused or misused.

  Santini tells the story of a Marine fighter pilot by the name of Bull Meacham, who is bombastic, overbearing, and sometimes violent toward the members of his family. He has some other qualities also, giving the story its subtlety and depth. He is a fearless warrior and defender of his country, a skillful pilot and leader of men, and it is clear that he loves his wife and four children, and they love him. But they live their lives in an undertow of dread, tiptoeing through the dangers of Bull Meacham’s moods, and their caution ultimately is never enough. Meacham’s tyranny and explosions of fury eventually, inevitably turn to abuse, and the target most often is his oldest son, Ben.

  Ben is a boy with the soul of a poet. He is a star on the high school basketball team, and he possesses a kind of dogged self-esteem even in the face of his father’s tirades. But he also suffers along with the other members of his family. Once just before he turns eighteen, he and his father are locked in a game of one-on-one at the basketball court in the family driveway. In Ben’s whole life, not one of the Meacham children has ever beaten their father at anything—not even checkers, but on this occasion Ben is too quick for the Great Santini, the name Bull Meacham has given himself, ostensibly as a joke. But winning and losing are not a joking matter, and when Ben wins the game by a single point, the Great Santini explodes in a rage.

  Bull took the basketball and threw it into Ben’s forehead. Ben turned to walk into the house, but Bull followed him, matching his steps and throwing the basketball against his son’s head at intervals of three steps. Bull kept chanting, “Cry, cry, cry,” each time the ball ricocheted off his son’s skull. Through the kitchen Ben marched, through the dining room, never putting his hands behind his head to protect himself, never trying to dodge the ball. Ben just walked and with all his powers of concentration . . . tried not to cry. That was all he wanted to derive from the experience, the knowledge that he had not cried.

  As Conroy’s career continued to unfold, evolving through novels like The Prince of Tides and later Beach Music, he employed the agony of family dysfunction to explore the darkness of the human condition. These were, I thought, magnificent, disturbing works of art, with language that reminded me of Lillian Smith or Robert Penn
Warren, those most poetic of all Southern writers. And if any of us wondered how much of it was true, how much was rooted in the literal experience of his own family, Conroy would later offer up an answer. In 1999, he wrote an article for Atlanta magazine called “The Death of Santini,” telling the story of his Marine Corps father, Donald Conroy, who died in 1998. In this quite startling piece, this is a part of what Conroy wrote:

  I did not tell the whole truth in The Great Santini by any means. I lacked the courage and I thought that if I told the truth about Donald Conroy that no one would believe me and that no one would want to read a book that contained so much unprovoked humiliation and violence. It was not just that my father was mean, his meanness seemed grotesque and exaggerated and overblown to me . . . I can barely look back on my sorrowful youth, yet it haunts my every waking moment and makes me a terrible husband, father and friend. My childhood rides with me and I cannot shake it off or dull its murderous power over me. I always thought that the sight of my father’s corpse would be one of the happiest days of my life. I thought I would be fawn-like and boyish as I danced on his grave and urinated on his headstone . . .

  And yet there was also redemption in the story, remarkable given the severity of the wounds, and it all began with The Great Santini. When Donald Conroy read the book he was furious. He brooded and grieved at his son’s betrayal, at what he insisted was a cruel and distorted portrait of himself, but slowly and resolutely over time he also did something else. Incredibly, according to Pat Conroy, the real Santini willed a new identity for himself, displayed a kind of strength and courage more subtle and profound—more reflective of the ultimate power of family—than the courage he had shown on the battlefields of war.

  He returned to his children in the disguise of The Great Santini—the fictional one, not the real one. He became the Santini who gave his son Ben a flight jacket on his eighteenth birthday, the one who sent his daughter Mary Anne flowers at her first prom, who left his duty as an Officer of the Guard when his son got in trouble . . . By an act of sheer stubbornness and will, my father used my first novel to transform himself into something resembling a most wonderful man.

  These are the most surprising words I have ever written.

  They are also some of the most surprising that I have ever read, the poetry of hurt, and the poetry of love, from a writer who has demonstrated over time an inexhaustible understanding of each.

  10

  The Classics and the Glory of the Stars

  featuring:

  Ahab’s Wife—Sena Jeter Naslund

  Year of Wonders—Geraldine Brooks

  Adam & Eve—Sena Jeter Naslund

  Also, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Peter Benchley, Thomas Hardy

  I

  It was a book that literally began with a vision. One clear spring night in 1993, Sena Jeter Naslund was driving a rented car through Boston when an image suddenly sprang from her mind, almost as if she could see it with her eyes. There was a woman standing on a widow’s walk, gazing out across the harbor, waiting for her husband’s ship to come home. Suddenly, the woman is struck full-force with the knowledge that the ship is not coming—not that night, and in fact, not ever—for something terrible has happened at sea. And before the grief can sweep her away, she finds herself staring at the star-filled sky, asking the most basic question of all: Who am I in the face of this vast glory? What’s my place in the universe?

  This celestial image that came unbidden was not the only inspiration for Ahab’s Wife, a novel of soaring ambition and beauty that is surely one of the finest of our time. There was also a journey that Sena Naslund made with her daughter, just the two of them traveling by car, listening mile after mile to books on tape. As Naslund recounted the trip years later, her daughter Flora was then eleven, and Sena wanted to share with her the books that she had loved as a girl. She had, in fact, been quite a bookworm as a child growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. One of her earliest reading memories was of a hot summer day when she was maybe ten and reading a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, so caught in a passage about a blizzard on the prairie that she suddenly realized she was cold.

  “It was over ninety degrees,” Naslund remembered, “but these words I was reading had made me shiver. I said to myself, ‘I’d like to be able to do that someday.’”

  And so her passion for the written word grew. She read Little Women, reveling in the tomboy world of Jo March, and then Moby Dick when she was thirteen, followed by Jane Eyre, War and Peace, and most of Charles Dickens. During high school, she began to develop her love of Shakespeare, reading Macbeth and Hamlet, and on an English paper about Julius Caesar she received a grade of A++++.

  She began to think harder about being a writer.

  Many years later, Sena wanted her daughter to understand such things—the power and the passion of a well-written story—and as she and Flora began their summer of travel, she picked the books they would listen to together. There was Little Women, of course, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and most significantly, as it turned out, there was Moby Dick. Naslund was surprised that this was Flora’s favorite, for it was not simply the adventure or the terrible menace of the Great White Whale that seemed to leave the little girl entranced, but the roll of Herman Melville’s language.

  I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the day nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her . . . and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!

  Sena shared her daughter’s fascination with the words, but sadly this time, for it occurred to her that in this grand and glorious story, this Shakespearean mixture of tragedy and quest, there was not a strong woman character to be found. Melville, she noticed, had not even named the wife of Ahab, the whaling captain possessed by hatred of the whale Moby Dick, and in that failing—and in the shining eyes of her daughter—Naslund saw an opportunity for herself. She wanted to create a female character, complicated, strong and deeply sympathetic, who could take her place beside Hester Prynne in the great pantheon of American letters. Naslund admired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Prynne, the persecuted heroine in The Scarlet Letter—a Puritan woman who, thinking that her husband is dead, conceives a child out of wedlock and resolutely refuses to identify the father. Though scorned by her community and forced to wear the scarlet letter A as a symbol of adultery, Prynne ultimately emerges in the course of the novel as a woman secure in her own identity.

  As John Updike would later write, “She is a mythic version of every woman’s attempt to integrate her sexuality with societal demands.”

  But Naslund knew there was something else about Hester Prynne that made her the object of enduring fascination. With the possible exception of Scarlet O’Hara she had stood nearly alone in American fiction as a strong and memorable female character, a hero to compare with Captain Ahab or Huckleberry Finn, Willie Stark, Tom Joad, or Atticus Finch. And so it was that on a clear spring night in 1993, driving her rental car through Boston, Sena saw a young woman on a widow’s walk, scanning the harbor for her seafaring husband, and thinking these words: Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.

  She knew she had the first sentence of her novel.

  She would travel once again the path that Herman Melville had chosen, but with a woman character this time, a woman whose strength would be a mirror and a match for the character of Captain Ahab. Naslund, in fact, thought she saw possibilities for developing a side of Ahab that Melville had hinted at, but left unf
inished. Remembered mostly for his raging fury, his obsession with revenge against the whale who had earlier cost him a leg, the great sea captain, Naslund believed, had been a man of sensitivity and intellect. She plumbed the depths of Moby Dick, searching for evidence to support this view, and among other things, found the testimonial of a fellow sea captain:

  Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales . . . Ahab has his humanities!

  It was a measure of the audacity of Ahab’s Wife that Sena Naslund set out not to alter, but to enlarge one of the largest characters in American fiction. And having done that, she made him a secondary character in her novel, for it is certainly true that the strongest character in Ahab’s Wife is not Ahab, but Una, once an innocent farm girl from Kentucky, who as part of her odyssey of spirit and flesh, marries Ahab and bears him a child. Before that happens Una has already been to sea, a stowaway on a whaling vessel in love with two young members of the crew.

  As part of the model for Una’s voyage, Naslund relied upon a book by Owen Chase, who had been first mate on the whale ship Essex. On August 12, 1819, the Essex sailed from Nantucket harbor, but the following year a sperm whale turned on the ship and rammed it twice, sending the shattered vessel to the bottom. Twenty-one men initially survived, scrambling into three open boats, but because of a terrible miscalculation only eight were rescued. Owen Chase was one of the eight, and his account of the voyage, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, was said to be Herman Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick.

  When Sena Naslund read Chase’s book she was startled by the irony at the heart of the story. The Essex survivors stood a good chance of drifting to the Marquesas Islands, some twelve hundred miles to the west. That was the plan of Captain George Pollard, but the mutinous crew, led by Chase, feared there were cannibals living on the islands and demanded instead that they aim for South America. It was a fatal mistake, a voyage of more than four thousand miles, skirting the trade winds blowing from the east, and before they could make it they ran out of food. Desperate, the crew drew lots to see which of their number would be sacrificed so that the other survivors might eat. The loser was the cabin boy, who was said to declare: “It is as good a fate as any.”