A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

by Pat Conroy

  The day before I finished The Lords of Discipline, I wrote the last chapter of the novel in a single sitting. One cadet had betrayed his three roommates and that cadet was my favorite character in the book. But novels take on a life of their own and sometimes drift out of the writer’s control. I now know that could happen even when the writer was living in Paris. Now, Atlanta was calling me away from this enchanting, provocative city, a part of which would live inside me forever.

  When I met Frank and Cliff at the Gare du Nord the next day, I was greeting one of the best parts of my Atlanta life. Before we left Paris, we rented a white Simca and bought three wineglasses, a corkscrew, paper plates, knives and forks, and paper napkins. At a charcuterie near the Hôtel des Balcons, we bought our lunch for the first day, consisting of two cheeses, Chaource and Camembert, a hard sausage, a duck pâté, a baguette, and a bottle of Rosé d’Anjou. I packed my seven-hundred-page manuscript as carefully as though I were transporting the Book of Kells across hostile borders. While putting it in my suitcase, it struck me as a very bad idea that I had resisted making a copy of the book because of the exorbitant price. We loaded up the Simca with our luggage and set out for Rome with Frank, driving out of the sixth arrondissement, my home for five months.

  We took all back roads through the peerless French countryside, through villages that were breathtaking to behold and past farms that were hundreds of years old. For lunch, we stopped and ate beneath an arched bridge that crossed over a swift stream where trout hunted mayflies. A herd of sheep grazed on a nearby hillside. We ate slowly, spreading the pâté on pieces of the baguette after Frank had cut sausage and cheese with his well-kept Swiss Army knife, and Cliff had cooled the wine in the stream before opening it.

  “This must be the most beautiful spot in Europe,” Frank said.

  “You’ll say that ten thousand more times before we get to Rome,” I told him.

  Lunch became our joy and our specialty. We searched out locally produced cheeses, olives, sausages, and breads. We tried to buy wines made in the same district where we purchased them. We lunched on a pier overlooking the city of Geneva, near a waterfall looking at a monastery near Brig, Switzerland, and in the ruins of a portico that extended out into the waters of Lake Maggiore, in Italy. At Maggiore, as we feasted on grapes and olives and prosciutto, we agreed we had come to the most beautiful place on earth.

  At one of the beaches near Portofino, Cliff and Frank decided that they wanted to join the crowds who were swimming in the ocean. I issued a warning that I had been robbed my first time in Rome, but the day was hot, and Cliff and Frank were determined they were not going back to America without having swum in the Mediterranean. We locked the car, changed into our bathing suits, and, despite my misgivings, were soon by the water’s edge. Frank and Cliff swam out into deep water as I remained in the shallows and tried to keep an eye on the car. I soon grew fascinated by the sight of an Italian man lifting black sea urchins out of the water, disemboweling them, and eating them raw.

  When we returned to the car, Cliff was the first to notice that a thief had kicked in one of the windows and robbed us. Frank lost his camera and Cliff lost a gold watch his father had given him. I went weak at the knees when I remembered that my manuscript was in a suitcase in the backseat. If the robber had reached in and stolen all the luggage, my life would be very different today. I could easily have lost five years of my life. But he was discriminating in his desires and had no need for a novel written in a strange tongue.

  On the evening we entered Rome, we rented a cheap hotel room near the Spanish Steps and met Jonathan and Susan Galassi for dinner at the Trattoria del Pantheon da Fortunato. I handed my novel to Jonathan, and the next day he called to tell me that he would accept it if I would make one major change. When we met, I agreed on the spot to the change, and we shook hands. For the next two days Jonathan and Susan took us around to explore a city they had come to love as much as they had Paris. Here, in a Roman setting, they seemed even more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and enlightened than ever, and they treated Cliff and Frank as though they had known them all their lives. Because of fate, the Galassis had given me the city of Paris, which led to Frank and Cliff’s discovery of Europe.

  On my last night in Rome, I watched the sunset with the Galassis on their terrace in Trastevere. I was full of emotion and felt lucky to have such friends. The sun darkened the enameled, coppery city below us. I raised a glass of wine to toast my friends before I went back to my life in Atlanta, the one I was born to live.

  When I had first gone to Paris, almost twenty years before, I had read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s broken-down, elegiac novel Tender Is the Night. I had always loved his dedication to Sara and Gerald Murphy in the book, and that is what I wanted to convey as I toasted friends and Europe good-bye. “Many fêtes,” I tried to say. I don’t think anyone heard me, but they all caught the mood of what I meant.

  A Letter to the Editor of the Charleston Gazette

  OCTOBER 24, 2007

  I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

  I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

  In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will.

  Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

  About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocau
st and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

  People cuss in my books.

  People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books, just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

  The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in Saint Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

  The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book banners, and teacher haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works—but writers and English teachers do.

  I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against—you’ve riled a Hatfield.

  A Lowcountry Heart

  In 1961, the Marine Corps sent my father orders that would send the Conroy family rocketing toward a destiny we were never supposed to have. When our child-laden car entered Beaufort County as we crossed over the pristine waters of the Combahee River, I caught my first unforgettable view of the Great Salt Marsh. It was the year I learned to water-ski in the Broad River, that I attended my first oyster roast at a house on Port Royal Sound, and that a Marine colonel took me on a fishing trip to an uninhabited sea island called Fripp. It was during this enchanting, unforgettable year that I developed a Lowcountry heart.

  When I began to write my books, I thought I carried the comeliness of the Lowcountry deep inside me. Its beauty was a shining thing and a living thing that would never leave me as long as I was true to that starry, everlasting river-fed country of my art. That was Beaufort’s gift to me. I can’t write an English sentence without breaking out in song praising the everlasting summons of these shining sea islands we call home. When I came to Beaufort I had struck upon a land so beautiful I had to hunt for other words that ached with the joyous, carnal charms of the green marshes that seemed to be the source of all life. I would watch the breath of earth move the high tides of spring as shrimp boats inched out to sea at first light. On the beaches, loggerhead turtles would emerge in the fire-struck linens (maybe havens?) of full moons to deposit glistening, sea-born eggs into funnels of beach-sculpted sands as herds of white-tailed deer drifted like smoke through palmetto forests. Osprey would impale the mullets from golf course lagoons, and cobia would lace their way through salt rivers in their own madness to spawn as blue herons hunted in perfect stillness, as hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs gathered to mate in the shallows along Land’s End. This is the homeplace the Marine Corps brought me to as a boy. In my stories, my currents are shad-honored and dolphin-laced. They bring the sure knowledge that the lord of waters watches over them in the deepest pride of creation.

  Ten years ago, I stood on a balcony of an endangered house that sat on the beachfront of Fripp Island. The man standing beside me was from the Upcountry. He was well-spoken and deeply religious. He and I watched a full moon rise out of the Atlantic. Neither of us spoke a word. The moon laid down a prayer cloth of light that stretched out for a thousand miles of seawater.

  The man spoke first. “I’m afraid of dying,” he said.

  “Because you’ll miss all this,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m worried that heaven’s not going to be this pretty.”

  I knew the soul of that man by the words he spoke. And I know the souls of the people who have gathered here tonight. We are here because of our love of this incomparable portion of the earth. We are here because we have Lowcountry hearts.

  Pat Conroy’s Citadel Speech

  General Grinalds; the Board of Visitors; Lt. Col. Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, The Boo, and my first book; Greg and Mary Wilson Smith, The Citadel family who did more than anyone else to bring me back to my Citadel family; Skip Wharton; Rogers Harrell, member of the Class of ’01 [who] lost his father last year, and his father will not be able to hand him his diploma, but members of the Class of ’71 have rallied here because of the love of that father. Class of 2001, listen up, I don’t have much time. They don’t give you much time for graduation speeches. Because of various aspects of my character and fate, I did not get to address the Corps of Cadets in the last century. There were many years when I thought that Saddam Hussein or Jane Fonda had a better chance of addressing this class than I did.

  In 1979, the year most of y’all were born, I was finishing up The Lords of Discipline and I tried to think of a line or words that would sum up better than anything how I felt and how other people feel about this college. I wanted it to be something ringing and affirmative, something true, something that would be true for every person who has ever gone through the long gray line. I came up with this line: “I wear the ring.”

  I think it is the best line I have ever written and best English sentence I am capable of writing. I love that phrase; I love that sentence. Thirty-four years ago, I sat in this field house. My mother and father, my six brothers and sisters, sitting in the audience as your parents are sitting now. My parents—it was their proudest day. My mother wept when I came off [the stage] that day. She wept so hard, and I said, “Mom, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Son, you are the first person in my family who has ever graduated from college, and you did it at The Citadel.” And she said, “The best college in America.”

  Let me tell you something about that mother. Here is my mother’s socioeconomic status exactly. Everything you need to know about my family [you can learn] from her mother’s family name. My grandfather, Jasper Catholic Peek; his brother, Cicero. Then there’s Vashtye, Taleatha, Clyde, Pluma. And my favorite—I was cleaning up a grave with my grandmother, Stanny, and I came across this name, “Jerry Mire Peek”—okay, that’s Jerry Mire—M-I-R-E Peek. And I said, “Stanny, who is he named after?” And she said, “He is named after the prophet, Jerrymire.”

  My father was a different case. My father, six feet, three inches, 230-pound Marine Corps fighter pilot, knuckles dragging along the ground when he walked. When he was dying, I interviewed Dad. I said, “Dad, tell me about what it was like in the war.”

  He told me about coming off the aircraft carrier Sicily in Korea. His was the first squadron that got there, and they said, “Keep the Koreans north of the Nakdong River.” So he dove down—the first plane the North Koreans had seen—he dove down toward the enemy. I said, “How did you do, Dad?”

  He said, “I did pretty good, son.” He said, “I had a good sign—they were running. It’s good when you see the enemy running. There was another good sign, son.”

  “What’s that, Dad?”

  “They were on fire.”

  That was the man who dandled me on his knee when I was a young boy—the Great Santini. I once introduced my father when I was giving a talk like this, and I said, “My father decided to go in the Mar
ine Corps when he found out that his IQ was the temperature of this room.”

  My father got up right behind me. He stared down at the audience and he said, “My God, it’s hot in here…it must be at least 165 degrees.”

  These were the people who raised me, the people who inspired me. They sent me to this college. They did not ask me where I wanted to go. Both of them wanted [me] to go here. My father applied to this college. I did not. I never saw an application. Never signed an application, but ended up here in 1963 for Hell Week. I remember Hell Week. I don’t know how you did it, kids, but they did it good back then, I want to tell you. And after Hell Night, I remember going there—it was a vivid experience—an upperclassman came and said, “Mr. Conroy, you look tired, exhausted. Why don’t you come to my room and just hang out for a while.”

  The next thing I knew I was hanging from the pipe in his room. And I realized that I had come to a place that has etched itself on me, etched itself on my character. I have written more about my college than any writer in American history. My book will be coming out next year—it will be the third book I have written about this college. And I write about it because I cannot keep away from it…the experience, it’s so fresh and fiery on my imagination. And because it’s a great relationship, I wanted to tell you something seriously, I wanted to tell my Citadel family how I got involved in the great war of bringing women to this college. After I wrote The Lord of Discipline in 1980 and the reaction of this school, kids, Conroy ain’t stupid. This is a tough place. And I said, “Okay, I have gotten through that,” and I was retiring from the field for the rest of my life. I was speaking in colleges in the Northeast. I spoke at Harvard, the Rhode Island School of Design. And then I was looking down at the next college I was supposed to speak at, and, to my amazement, it was the Coast Guard Academy. Ladies and gentlemen, the Class of 2001, you probably think I speak at military colleges a lot, but after The Lords of Discipline, the invitations—I got one invitation from VMI. The man who invited me was fired the next day. So I called my wife, and I said, “There’s the Coast Guard Academy. I cannot possibly speak there.”