A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

by Pat Conroy

  My shooting guard, John DeBrosse, died this past Wednesday after being in a coma for a week. I was in New Orleans when I talked to his wife, Pam, and she told me that their children had assembled in the room to discuss taking him off life support. I cried on the phone, but Pam was rocklike and spent her time comforting me. She and John used to come to Fripp Island to spend weeks in our summerhouse. Every time I’d see John, he’d bring up that godforsaken season again and again. It especially galled John that Coach Thompson had named me most valuable player on that undeserving team when John had enjoyed a far better season than I had. With humor and some petulance, John would grab my tarnished trophy and walk with it around the Fripp Island house.

  “I’m taking it, Conroy. It’s mine. I earned it and you didn’t,” DeBrosse would say.

  “I’ll let you sleep with it, DeBrosse,” I said. “Or you could take it for rides in Beaufort. But bring it back, loser. It belongs to me.”

  “You, the most valuable player? The worst player on the team gets MVP. And you’re a Bolshevik who voted for Obama,” John would say, fuming. “How did you get to be a communist going to a school like The Citadel, Conroy?”

  “I met so many nice Nazis like you, John,” I’d say, taking the trophy back, “it was easy.”

  “That MVP award? That trophy should be in my house and not yours.”

  “You didn’t deserve it. You missed that layup on purpose and got our poor coach fired,” I said, as John grabbed the trophy again and held it in his lap.

  In the time we were young men together, John and I were part of an American generation of males who had no clear ways to talk emotionally with each other. We had to invent a language that only we could understand and interpret. We would curse each other and knock each other all over the court and elbow our way to the basket and stick our forearms into the chests of those who came at us in the controlled fury of games. Even as adults, DeBrosse and I would pick at each other, mouthing off as we showed off to our wives and kids, and turning almost boylike again when surrounded by our own teammates from that lost, ugly year. But I knew the secrets of how men communicate by observing DeBrosse and my teammates as we gathered ourselves together after My Losing Season came out. When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other. John and I were men of a lock-jawed generation who lacked a specific language to communicate in the deepest places those hardest of things.

  Dave Bornhorst and Doug Bridges are going to the funeral to represent our team. I’m on a book tour and cannot, to my shame and guilt, attend. But Dave and Doug are carrying up a memento from those days of anguish and friendship. They are taking a huge basketball trophy up with them to present to the family with a plaque that reads:

  JOHN DEBROSSE

  MOST VALUABLE PLAYER

  THE CITADEL BASKETBALL TEAM 1966–67

  FROM HIS TEAMMATES IN MY LOSING SEASON

  Before John died, I asked Pam to do something for me as a favor. I asked her to kiss John for me, then whisper these words into his ear:

  “Hey, John DeBrosse, your point guard says good-bye and he’ll love you the rest of his life. Thanks for giving me My Losing Season.”

  Pam did so.

  Great love…

  A Room of Her Own…and the Birth of Moonrise

  OCTOBER 12, 2013

  Hey, out there,

  To write about your own wife’s novel should cause shame to any serious writer, but in this case I find that I can do it with pleasure and a strong sense of pride.

  Since I met Cassandra King at the Hoover Library Authors Conference and we decided to spend the rest of our lives together, we have written our books on opposite sides of the house. When we got married, I discovered that Sandra had never had a room of her own to write in during her entire adult life; I promised her a room with a view and all the time she needed to do her work and craft her books. She has written four novels since we met, and I believe that her new book, Moonrise, is the best of them. It eases my soul that I share a house with a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

  I know it must seem like home cooking for a husband to praise his own wife’s work. But the shadow of divorce court looms over a marriage where the spouses loathe each other’s work. When Sandra hands me a completed chapter or leaves it on my pillow to read, an immense joy fills me because Sandra always hands me a complete world to cast myself adrift in. In The Sunday Wife, she changed the English language. I’ve met a hundred women around the South who’ve whispered to me, “I used to be a Sunday wife,” or “I’m still a Sunday wife; I’m married to the Bishop.”

  Nor can I read the last section of The Same Sweet Girls without breaking down at the end because I’m so touched by those amazing ties of women’s friendship. I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength. Cassandra captures all this as well as any writer producing literature today, and I love it that our house is the source of its creation.

  I was present at the birth of Moonrise. I took Cassandra to Highlands, North Carolina, to visit my dear friend Jim Landon, who owned a lovely mountain home made holy by well-selected books and Asian art. Jim is one of those perfectly charming Southern men who dresses with distinction, decorates his home with unerring taste, makes a perfect omelet, and is one of the best lawyers in Atlanta. Cassandra fell in love with Jim immediately, as I had done when I met him in 1974. All life has more savor when Jim is around. He introduced us to his cast of immemorial friends, and hosted elegant parties on a deck that overlooks the Blue Ridge Mountains. The mountains have a clear call for certain people, and my wife was a goner for Highlands after that first week. Her novel is the product of her love affair with the high country of the South, its natives and its “summer people.”

  Cassandra and I have always been devotees of Daphne du Maurier’s glorious book Rebecca. Moonrise is pure homage to that novel, as well as a ballad of recognition for all the strangeness and comeliness of the mountains of North Carolina. It is told in three distinct voices. It begins with an outsider, Helen Honeycutt, who is brought into a group of Highlands summer veterans who don’t like it that the recently widowed Emmet Justice has married a young dietician from Florida in unseemly haste. Helen is properly terrified of the upcoming summer, when every inch of her will be reviewed and judged by some practiced Atlanta swells. The second voice is a mountain woman named Willa, who cleans and cares for all the houses. She has watched the whole strange Atlanta tribe grow up, and they have all become attached to Willa and her family. Willa adds history and perspective to her narration in the novel. By far, my favorite voice belongs to the waspy, acid tongue of Tansy Dunwoody. I perked up whenever she took to the stage because her voice can be withering and caustic, but it is always hilarious, and tender in the deepest part of her.

  Cassandra loops these three voices into a stranglehold of tension as it becomes obvious that the legendary house of Moonrise means to bring great harm to the newcomer, Helen. The suspense is handled with flair and expertise, and I read the book in a single reading for that most ancient of reasons…to know what happened. I couldn’t go to sleep until there was a sense of resolution over the fates of characters I had come to love at a mansion I’d come to fear.

  Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

  Great love…

  On the Road Again…Airports, Editors, Publicists, and My Writing Life

  OCTOBER 22, 2013

  Hey, out there,

  I flew to New York on October 1 for the opening shots of my upcoming tour for The Death of Santini. The book comes out on October 29, when I’ll be running my mouth and signing my books until I’m mercifully released to return to my writing desk to continue the writing life that has become my life. Though I far prefer writing to touring, I’ve alway
s thought it was part of the contract to try with all the resources I can bring to bear to help sell the book and to give my publisher an incentive to publish my next book. Because I’m older now, travel takes a lot out of me, but my mother raised me to be a boy who likes to please, and meeting readers has given me pleasure that few writers have ever known. It’s part of the business of being a writer, and I try to approach it with an open spirit and a clear-eyed understanding of how lucky I am to be asked to do it.

  After arriving, I was met at the Essex House hotel the following morning by Todd Doughty, who has served as my publicist for the last three books. Over my career I’ve come to revere the work of publicists, and the charming Todd Doughty is exemplary of the breed. Their work is backbreaking and constant and, I believe, underappreciated. Very often, they are the best-looking people in a publishing house, and I’ve met some great beauties and handsome men in my various swings through their hallways. Editors, in general, are a plainer, more cerebral tribe, but even among this group, there are some dazzling exceptions to be found. My own editor, Nan Talese, has always walked the earth as one of those self-contained, well-composed New York beauties you catch glimpses of as you stroll down Fifth Avenue. In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.

  Todd had arranged five interviews that day. The first was with Bob Minzesheimer, the book editor for USA Today, whom I’d met before and liked a lot. He has great style and looks like he could have been friends with Hemingway if they’d known each other in Paris in the twenties. Our interview was cut short when he received a phone call that Tom Clancy had died and he needed to get back to his office to write an appreciation of Tom’s life for the next day’s edition.

  Next was a radio interview where Teresa Weaver asked questions of Fannie Flagg and me about our new books. I’ve long been enamored of the works of Fannie Flagg; her books have always made me howl with laughter and taught me a great deal about how Southern women think. Hell, how all women think.

  At lunch, Nan Talese and I had a meal brought in from the Random House cafeteria. Nan and I have been a team for over thirty years now, and I was present the night she received the first Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement in editing. It was a proud night for both of us. I’ve worked with some of the great editors of my time during my career, beginning with Shannon Ravenel, one of the founders of Algonquin Books, who passed me on to Anne Barnett, who passed me to the superb Jonathan Galassi, who has enjoyed one of the most successful careers in the history of publishing and whose departure left me in the able hands of Nan Talese. I don’t think that a writer and an editor have ever been so mismatched, yet made it work out in our own ways. In her elegance, I’m always somewhat of an aardvark in her presence. She wears Armani with an unmatchable grace while I wear L.L.Bean only for dress-up occasions. Her husband, Gay Talese, writes a prose so impeccable that I find myself studying it between books. His suits are so perfect that they look woven from pelts of manatees. Together, Nan and Gay look like café society taken to its highest register.

  Nan and I were there to talk about my new book, The Death of Santini, but I wanted to know what her other writers were doing. She always provides fresh news of Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, and I wanted to hear everything about her writer Valerie Martin, whose book The Ghost of the Mary Celeste I had just read and admired. Because we’ve spent thirty years together, we wander back and forth in time. Editors and reps and bookstore owners we have known together. We still remember the editorial assistants using typewriters, and when tons of people smoked in the sanctity of their own offices. But we’ve always agreed that it’s the beauty and power and skillful use of the language that will sell a book—no matter what it is printed on. She’s found great happiness on a farm she bought several years ago in Connecticut. I wondered how long our relationship could last, but I was proud of the things we had accomplished together. Looking back, I wish I had not been so sullen and cantankerous when we were editing my books, and good God, I wish I’d been better dressed as I met them at their table at Elaine’s.

  Great love…

  A Long-Lasting Friendship

  CHARLIE GIBSON OF

  GOOD MORNING AMERICA

  OCTOBER 27, 2013

  Hey, out there,

  It is a day before my sixty-eighth birthday and I ready myself for life on the road, which I’m too edgy and tired-blooded to do as I did with pleasure in my misspent youth. When I was in New York, I taped an interview with Charlie Gibson for Good Morning America. Charlie has always struck me as a man of exceptional qualities. Because he is a creature of television, I fell in love with his looks and spirit long before I got to know him. The most difficult thing for a television reporter or anchor to suggest to an audience is authenticity. Charlie’s body language speaks a truth that can’t be faked or polished up or improved with time. It’s a natural gift and Charlie was born to his naturalness and it’s the rarest gift of the famous.

  When Beach Music came out in 1995, Charlie and his crew (also delightful) came to my house on Fripp Island in South Carolina. I have a small addiction to showing off the beauty of the Lowcountry, its white-sand beaches and its green mileage of marshlands, and Charlie’s enthusiasm matches his integrity. When we first met, he told me he thought I’d been influenced by John Irving and I told him about Garp thundering into my life and letting me know that I wasn’t being brave enough as a writer. It was a splendid literary appraisal and let me know that Charlie Gibson was a serious and thoughtful reader, as well as one of the greatest students of politics I’d ever met.

  New York is a city abloom with secret studios. They exist in buildings without style or architectural merit, but I met Charlie at one of them for a seven-in-the-evening taping. In his elegance, he has become handsomer as an older man than he was in his twenties. We embraced when we saw each other and he’s the only anchor I’ve ever hugged on a regular basis. It’s an emotional war between my Citadel and his Princeton, but he’s an affectionate, easygoing guy and I’ve taken advantage of that. At one meeting, he told me that he’d met everyone in the world for five minutes, but then often never saw them again. He was an aficionado of five-minute friendships. If we’d lived next door to each other I think we’d have been best friends for life. But he was incising his name into the history of American news and I was trying to write those books of mine. The interview moved me. Charlie moved me, as he always does. Once, I saw him treat two black high school girls as if they were royalty when they recognized him on a ferryboat in the Savannah River. Not every famous man or woman treats strangers with such openhearted wonder as Charlie Gibson. His interview with me was superb. Gibsonian. Deep. It airs on Tuesday, October 29.

  I am lucky to get to know a man as fine as Charlie Gibson. America is lucky to have him delivering its news.

  Doubleday had me staying at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South. When I was a younger and nimbler man I used to love walking the streets of New York for hours at a time, but neuropathy has slowed me up. I did walk over to Rizzoli’s bookstore on Fifty-eighth Street because I have cherished the atmosphere of that store since I first arrived in New York City in 1972. I bought the new Donna Tartt book (which I’ve heard the best things about on earth), and the new Marisha Pessl, because I’d found myself overpowered by her prose style in her novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Also, I picked up the new novel by Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. I’d revered his early short stories and did not know about his new work of fiction. As I was checking out with my credit card, a young black woman looked at my name and said, “There’s a writer that goes by this name.”

  Once, I tried to make jokes about it and said I’d heard about the guy and understood that he was a talentless jerk. But painful experience has taught me that confession i
s good for the soul and certainly the most polite way of handling an awkward situation.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m that guy,” I admitted.

  “Ma’am? You are from South Carolina. I’m from Saint George.”

  “No, you’re not. Nobody’s from Saint George,” I said.

  “You don’t even know where Saint George is,” she challenged.

  I laughed and said, “For four straight years, I played for the city of Beaufort in the Saint George Tournament, which was the state championship for all towns in the state. One year, Columbia beat us by two points in the championship.”

  She was so excited, she did what all South Carolinians do when they meet on the road. She came out and we hugged and exchanged addresses. Then she told me she was a working poet and ran into her office to print out her poetry. Her name was Leonore Tucker and her poetry was skillful and artfully expressed. I think that Leonore Tucker may have a bright future in poetry. But it is the accidents of the road, the unplannable encounters, that I always have loved best. South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

  Great love…

  Vietnam Still Haunting Me…

  NOVEMBER 11, 2013

  Hey, out there,

  When I was in New York two weeks ago, I received word that my Citadel classmate Ted Bridis had died. The news of his death shocked me on several levels. While we were at The Citadel, Ted and I were both “jocks,” a despised underworld in the Corps of Cadets at that time, and it may still be so at a lower level in that rough world. Ted played football and ran track and had one of those lean, elegant bodies that trackmen wear with such ease. In memory, he was a wide receiver on the football team, but I could be wrong about that. We were mess-hall friends and we’d stop to talk every time we saw each other on campus. The Citadel was a small college and remains so, and I will always think these small places are richer in intimacy and shared experience than the universities.