Pat Conroy died today. Long one of my favorite writers, I read early this morning that he succumbed to pancreatic cancer after announcing that he was sick just last month. It seems that a very human disease, too human of a disease, captured the man whose prose was poetry, whose sentences seemed not of this world. I am sad.
I remember reading The Prince of Tides for the first time in 1990. By then it was out in paperback. I had never heard of it until, for some unknown reason, I picked it up for a trip back east. I started reading in the airport as I waited for the plane. I read across the country. As the plane was touching down at JFK, I was on the last pages. Determined to finish, I feverishly devoured the words. The wheels of the plane screeched, the plane lurched and we careened down the runway as I read the last words.
There is a passage on page 565: “We swam in the warm opaque waters, diving in deep from the shrimp boat’s bow. After swimming, we ate dinner from the picnic basket and toasted my father’s homecoming with champagne. Savannah approached my father and I watched them as they walked to the front of the boat holding hands.
“I tried to think of something to say, a summing up, but I could think of nothing. I had taught myself to listen to the black sounds of the heart and learned some things that would serve me well. I had come to this moment with my family safely around me and I prayed that they would always be safe and that I would be contented with what I had. I am southern made and southern broken. Lord, but I beseech you to let me keep what I have. Lord, I am a teacher and a coach. That is all and it is enough. But the black sounds, the black sounds, Lord. When they toll within me, I am seized with a capacity for homage and wonder. I hear them and want to put my dreams to music. When they come I can feel an angel burning in my eyes like a rose, and canticles of the most meticulous praise rise out of the clear submarine depths of secret ambient ecstasy.”
His words always mesmerized me, even though none ever came close to having the impact of The Prince of Tides. I had never read prose like that before, though I’ve no doubt that it exists elsewhere. I’ve read it since, but that book showed me what true writing could be. My Aunt Barbara sent me a copy of The Water is Wide: A Memoir, which Conroy had written in 1972 chronicling his teaching experiences on Daufuskie Island in the late 1960s. The island, off the coast of South Carolina, had a population of all blacks. The children who lived there didn’t know what country they lived in, the name of their president, or what ocean lapped their beach.
“There is something eternal and indestructible about the tideeroded shores and the dark, threatening silences of the swamps in the heart of the island. Yamacraw is beautiful because man has not yet had time to destroy this beauty.”
By the time Beach Music was released in 1995, I was with Kevin. He knew of my adoration of Conroy and it had no sooner been released than he came home with a hard copy of it for me. I think I sat down with a glass of wine and began reading immediately. It didn’t reach to my core like The Prince of Tides did, but it was filled with lush, haunting and harsh descriptions of relationships, and of Conroy’s beloved South Carolina.
He was actually born in Georgia into a military family and moved 23 times before he was 18 years old. Eventually, after attending the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, he settled there. He married three times, and had several children. I don’t know what kind of man he was, what kind of father. He described his writing style as “sitting in gloom and darkness.” I doubt he was cheery and light, but that’s ultimately what made his writing so exquisite. It hurts to read his prose, to absorb it into your soul. Again, I am sad.
I haven’t read any of his books since Beach Music unless you count re-reading The Prince of Tides. My Aunt Barbara sent me a copy of My Losing Season, published in 2002. I am embarrassed to say it remains in my stack of books yet to be read. It’s a stack that has grown very high. This news today though makes me think I’ll move it to the top, and read the first words. It was always the danger with Conroy’s writing, because to start is to read through to the end, and then sit there bereft, and yet elated by the haunted life he had brought me into, only to leave me wanting more.
I suppose that is the mark of a literary artist for to me, Pat Conroy was so much more than just a writer, or an author. He was an artist, one who used words to paint colorful pictures on a black and white page.
My copy of The Prince of Tides is now tattered, literally, from several times reading. The cover has detached itself from the spine, sections have pulled away from the glue. I could get another copy but I don’t. It reminds me of the first time I read it, on an airplane, flying over a flawed country and paying no attention to what was drifting by below me because I was wrapped up in Tom Wingo’s world. As the plane touched down, with tears streaming down my face, I read the last paragraph:
“Each night, when practice is over and I’m driving home through the streets of Charleston, I ride with the top down on my Volkswagen convertible. It is always dark and the air is crisp with autumn and the wind is rushing through my hair. At the top of the bridge with the stars shining above the harbor, I look to the north and wish again that there were two lives apportioned to every man and woman. Behind me the city of Charleston shimmers in the cold elixirs of its own incalculable beauty and before me my wife and children are waiting for me to arrive home. It is in their eyes that I acknowledge my real life, my destiny. But it is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can’t tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: “Lowenstein, Lowenstein.”
I am very, very sad.
