Understanding Pat Conroy , livre ebook

UNDERSTANDING PAT CONROY
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
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UNDERSTANDING
PAT CONROY
Catherine Seltzer

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2015 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-516-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-546-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-517-2 (ebook)

Front cover photograph by Jennifer G. Hitchcock
For Dave
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Pat Conroy
Chapter 2
The Water Is Wide
Chapter 3
The Great Santini
Chapter 4
The Lords of Discipline
Chapter 5
The Prince of Tides
Chapter 6
Beach Music
Chapter 7
My Losing Season
Chapter 8
S outh of Broad
Coda
The Death of Santini
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, “the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed.” Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the start of this project, I contacted Pat Conroy to see if he might be willing to sit for an interview. Instead he sat for multiple interviews, opened his papers to me, and, along with his gracious wife, the writer Cassandra King, invited me to their home. I am deeply grateful, and I hope this study is richer as the result of his immense generosity.
I am also indebted to friends, colleagues, and mentors who helped with this project in any number of ways, beginning, as always, with Linda Wagner-Martin, and including Patience Graybill Condellone, Kate Drowe, Jessica DeSpain, Kassie Garrison, Sharon James McGee, Maggie Schein, and Sara Miller and the rest of the (very patient) Southern Illinois University Edwardsville interlibrary loan staff. I am also grateful for broader assistance I received from SIUE, including a grant that supported the initial research for this project.
Finally I’d like to express great appreciation to my family: my husband (and excellent close reader), Dave Limbrick; my son, Owen; and my daughter, Lily (who went so far as to “illustrate” many of my copies of Conroy’s work in her self-appointed role as my assistant). And special thanks to my mother, Helen Seltzer, and to my father, Bob Seltzer, who served as my first reader. As has been true my entire life, I probably should have taken more of his advice.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Pat Conroy
It is relatively naive to try to pinpoint the exact moment in which a person becomes a writer, but Pat Conroy’s “origin story” is almost impossible to resist. The story, as Conroy has told it, generally runs along these lines: one summer his high school English teacher Eugene Norris took him to visit Thomas Wolfe’s home in Asheville, North Carolina. For Conroy, a young man who had been immediately and fully “infected” by Wolfe’s prose after being introduced to his work, the trip was an essential pilgrimage. 1 What was intended as an act of tribute became a genesis of sorts, however, when Norris took an apple from one of Wolfe’s trees and handed it to Conroy, telling him, “Eat it, boy.” With that bite, Conroy explains, “I was given the keys to go out and try to write.” 2 This story’s evocation of the tree of knowledge—and its perils—brims with suggestions of artistic and spiritual inheritance, yet Norris’s explanation for offering Conroy the apple is equally as compelling: according to Conroy, he simply said, “I want you to understand there’s a relationship between art and life.” 3
Conroy’s work is interested in the sorts of dramatic patterns, resonant symbolisms, and shared mythologies evident in this snapshot from his initiation as a writer, but it is the larger relationship between life and art, so succinctly captured in Wolfe’s apple, that ultimately guides his work. He has explained that “from the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself,” and this connection between experience and literature informs all of his work in some way, regardless of genre. 4 Conroy is best known as a novelist, and he has published five novels: The Great Santini (1976), The Lords of Discipline (1980), The Prince of Tides (1986), Beach Music (1995), and South of Broad (2009). Interestingly, though, Conroy has published an equivalent number of books that are explicitly autobiographical; his memoirs include The Water Is Wide (1972), My Losing Season (2002), and The Death of Santini (2013), as well as a culinary memoir ( The Pat Conroy Cookbook , 2004) and an intellectual memoir ( My Reading Life , 2010). 5 Indeed this neat balance in Conroy’s creative output (which is rounded out by a 1970 book of sketches and reminiscences, The Boo ) is representative of the porous nature of art and experience in his work.
Just as William Faulkner relentlessly paced his “own postage stamp of native soil,” Conroy regularly returns to the fertile ground of his own family life in his both his fiction and his autobiographical work, noting, “Only rarely have I drifted far from the bed where I was conceived.” 6 Echoing Leo Tolstoy’s maxim, Conroy has wryly observed, “One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family. I could not have been born into a better one. They’re from Central Casting. Mom and Dad were Athena and Zeus. I don’t have to look very far for melodrama. It’s all right there.” 7 “Zeus” was Donald N. Conroy, a Marine Corps fighter pilot whose violent and unpredictable temper rendered him an unfathomable colossus. Pat, born on October 26, 1945, was the eldest of seven children, and Don viewed his youn