A Lowcountry Heart Page 14

  WHY I WRITE MEMOIR

  In 2002 I published my first memoir, My Losing Season, about my year as captain of the Citadel basketball team. I wrote it because I wanted to tell the truth about the harsh culture of The Citadel, and my relationship with the coach. That led to writing about the harsh reality of my family.

  I waited more than a decade to start writing my second memoir. I’d always wanted to tell the full story of my family, but I had to wait until my parents died. I wanted my readers to know where all my fiction came from. I wanted my memoir to be based not only on what I’d experienced, but also on what my brothers and sisters thought of it all. And I knew I wanted to wait to write it until we had time to age into it—to let it ripen somewhat and to look back on what happened.

  When I was researching The Death of Santini, I found out some things that absolutely staggered me. My brothers and sisters remembered almost nothing. Each of them remembered only certain things. Much of what they remembered were things I’d written about fictionally. So my “fiction” became part of the memoir.

  The same thing happened when I was writing about The Citadel. I went back to get the memories of my classmates about the plebe system and our horrible first year. Most of the guys who survived had simply repressed what happened.

  I began to get the thought that some of us are the designated rememberers. Why do we remember? I don’t know. But I think that’s why memoir interests us—because we’re the ones who pass the stories.

  FICTION: STRANGER THAN TRUTH

  Fiction contains memoir; memoir contains fiction.

  Funny things happen when you’re writing fiction. Because my father died at the end of my novel The Great Santini, when I introduced people to my father in real life, they’d say to him, “Wait! I read about your funeral.”

  Storytelling is so much more powerful than I’d ever realized. People will take whatever story you tell to be the literal truth. I’ve had guys I’ve never seen before come up to me at book readings and say they were my college roommates. I used to think they were just crazies. Now I think it’s an imaginative jump they’ve made, a spark across the night. They somehow actually believe that.

  I wrote about a basketball game that took place in 1967. I must have had five thousand people tell me they were there that night. The stadium only holds five thousand! Did I run into every one of them?

  I taught in a high school for two years after I was at The Citadel. My brothers and sisters said they’ve met endless numbers of people who said they were in my classes during that time.

  My fiction has become so interwoven with my nonfiction that it has confused everybody, including my brothers and sisters, even though I interviewed them about it before I wrote it. Except for my poet sister Carol, who has disappeared from my life, my siblings and I have been doing panels together about The Death of Santini. It’s been fascinating to hear their insights.

  My brother Jim surprised me during the latest panel we were on. He said, “I can tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction. My father was a total asshole and Pat has always painted him as much too nice. That’s fiction!”

  ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND MEMOIR

  My teammates at The Citadel were all concerned when they heard I was working on My Losing Season. None of them had ever had a book in their homes. They’d never read another book in their lives. They said, “We don’t want you to do a book. You don’t make an honest living. All you do is you make shit up about us.” Their wives were terrified. Their children were terrified. Everyone was scared to death I’d be making up stuff about them.

  I said, “Guys, relax. Here’s what you don’t know. I’ll go over every little thing with y’all. We’re going to talk about conversations we had thirty years ago. None of them will be true word-for-word. What we’ll aim for is the spirit of those conversations, the flavor of those conversations.”

  I ended up calling all these guys a million times. I’d call Zipper and I’d tell him, Rube said this; Zipper, do you remember that conversation? Then Zipper would say, Rube’s fulla shit. I kept going from one guy to the next. Some guys remembered almost nothing. Some trusted my version of the entire experience. Some guys had amazing memories. I wanted all of them. I told the guys I interviewed, “When the book comes out, and you read it, you need to remember that it’s some version of the truth, even though I’m telling you right now it’s probably not going to be yours.”

  The guy I worried about most was the one who suffered the most the year I wrote about in the book. He said, “Conroy, I don’t trust you. I read your other books. Look what you did to your old man! If that’s what you did to your family in your other books, I can tell you I’m going to hate this one.”

  After the book came out, that guy stood up and said, “No one is more knowledgeable than I am, and every word in that book was true.” As a professional writer I know that that’s an impossibility. But it was good to hear.

  TRUTH AND LOSS

  My sister Carol isn’t speaking to me. She barely spoke to me at our mother’s funeral. She said we had a toxic family. I said, “No shit. I’ve been making a living off that toxic family my whole life.” What an observation.

  Since The Death of Santini came out, I haven’t heard much from her. I’m sure she’s furious about her portrait in the book. I can’t blame her. She’s a poet, and she’s very private. Her privacy means everything to her. She’s fiercely guarded. You will not find her giving interviews to anybody about anything.

  The only time she’s broken that rule was for an odd CNN Conroy Thanksgiving special when Dad was still alive. He had cancer. It was his last year alive. We all got together, and Carol finally accepted me and Dad and the family for what we were.

  The reunion was phony. Everyone knew it. It was the most uncomfortable scene since the Pilgrims sat down with the Native Americans after Plymouth Rock. I watched the show and I thought, My God in heaven, what a travesty of a festive moment. It was so painful.

  I’ve thought about this a lot. When you write memoir, who are you hurting? It’s always been the great taboo: hurting your parents, hurting your family, hurting your children—although I tell my children I can’t wait to write about their hellion teenage years when they dated the most hideous boys in America, just to torture me.

  If I’m writing a portrait of my family and I don’t talk about the effect of that family on Carol, my beloved sister, if I don’t talk about how her childhood ruined her life, I’d be a liar and an unfit witness for the family I’ve been writing about. I decided that if I’m going to write about this, I want to write the truth as I know it, as I lived it.

  TRUTH: RELATIVE

  People who read my memoirs ask me how I know what’s true and what’s not true. I don’t worry about it too much. I understand memoir and fiction, and I understand that there’s making-up going on with both.

  I’ve seen memoirists who go nuts for absolute scrupulous word-for-word truth telling. It’s an impossible standard. If you have to write it perfectly, the story won’t be told. Here’s what I know: If a story is not told, it’s the silence around that untold story that ends up killing people. The story can open a secret up to the light.

  When you write a memoir, you want it to be as true as you can make it. With fiction you have a much larger body of water to play in. But I have to admit this right away: I’m swimming in dangerous water when I talk about the difference between memoir and fiction. I’ve often intermingled the two.

  Trying to figure out where the truth lies is one of the perils of writing memoir.

  TRUTH: HARD TO BELIEVE

  I had trouble with The Great Santini because my very proper editor said, in her British accent, “Pat, it’s simply not believable that a father would treat a son in this extraordinary way.” I had to clean up the book to make it believable to people who went to Harvard.

  I was light on my father in that book. I wasn’t yet prepared to say he beat us half to death and left us in the driveway. I had trouble getti
ng people to believe me. There was an article in Atlanta Magazine saying that I’d made the whole thing up. My father told them, “If anything, I was too good a father. My son has a vivid imagination.”

  I wrote a letter to the editor, saying Yeah, I made the whole thing up. My father was a Carmelite nun. I used my imagination to make everything up.

  MEMOIR MATTERS

  Memoir has been necessary for my life. I’ve found writers whose voices I can trust. In their memoirs they came out and told me things I needed to know about how to live a life. If not for those writers telling me how to look for truth in life, how to know it’s there when you find it, I don’t know who I’d be.

  WRITE ANOTHER ONE? I THINK NOT

  I’m glad I made it out of that last memoir alive, except for Carol. I can’t tell you how much I regret losing my sister, and I can’t say she’s wrong to have those feelings. I suffered over that. I suffer still. When you write memoir, that’s part of the bargain you make with God and the devil.

  On My Paris Days

  GOURMET, AUGUST 2006

  On the last days I would ever feel like a young man, I went to live in Paris to finish the novel I was writing at the time, The Lords of Discipline. While attending The Citadel, I had gone into an uncontrollable rapture when I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. He made the city of Paris glisten with a romantic luster it has never lost for me, and I could think of no finer way to spend a part of my life than by writing a book in the storied, uncapturable city of literature and light.

  My decision to go to Paris was both whimsical and spontaneous. Houghton Mifflin had just assigned me my third editor at the publishing company, the brilliant, young, and fastidious Jonathan Galassi, who was destined to be one of the greatest editors ever to walk the streets of New York. I had liked everything about Mr. Galassi until he called to tell me he had accepted a grant and a sabbatical to live in Paris and Rome for a year while he translated the essays of Eugenio Montale. It irritated me that I had never heard of Montale, but Jon was that kind of intellectual. His mind was the most exciting country he would ever visit. But it amazed me that he would be in Europe and unavailable when my novel made its shy appearance the following year.

  “It’s an outrage,” I said on the phone. “It’s a complete betrayal of our relationship as novelist and editor, Harvard boy.”

  “It’s a done deal, Pat,” he answered in his calm, mannerly editor’s voice, which contained all the passion of a bivalve. “I’ve already accepted both the grant and the sabbatical.”

  “You can’t do this to me,” I said. “You just can’t do it.”

  “Why don’t you go with us?” he asked. “I’ll work something out with Houghton Mifflin.”

  So I spent a cold and glorious winter in an overcast Paris, where it rained almost every day. Susan and Jonathan Galassi helped me find the reasonable, finely located Grand Hôtel des Balcons, just steps away from the Place de l’Odéon and the Luxembourg Gardens, in the sixth arrondissement. My concierge was a surly, imposing woman, but she brightened when I paid her the first month’s rent, and she put me in a garret on the top floor with her other artistes. My room had a balcony, a sink, a bed, a very good desk and chair, and a view of the Eiffel Tower. The room cost me seven dollars a night, and every time I paid my rent, I felt I had just robbed a bank. The room was not only cheap, it came with a breakfast of croissants, butter, jam, and coffee. It was easy to fall in love with morning when it started off with such a simple but delicious feast.

  From the very beginning, the writing went well. I learned to work with the French doors thrown open to the balcony, which also served as my refrigerator and wine cooler and cheese drawer. I learned to write to the rhythm and pace of French rain, and I could feel the story unfolding inside me as I filled up yellow legal pads in a language that few in the hotel could read. Though my French did not improve, I would feel the English language beginning to well up inside me as it formed itself into chandeliers and peacocks and burnished cutlery. I could feel the whole city doing its subtle, cunning work on me, as I had begun to write sentences that sounded more like stained-glass windows than clear-eyed explanations of the events at hand. Before that moment, I didn’t know a writer’s style could change, and that a strange, fascinating city could hasten the process along. Each time I walked out of the Hôtel des Balcons, I could turn in any direction and find a Paris of mysteries both heady and disquieting. In my mind, I could take along the novel I was working on. I could wander the inimitable greenness of the Luxembourg Gardens with characters who knew how to clean M1 rifles and spoke in Southern accents.

  If I veered right when I exited my hotel, I would soon be walking beside the river toward the islands of the Seine, or drifting through the imposing college buildings of the Sorbonne, watching the impeccably dressed diners enter La Tour d’Argent. Both day and night, I walked Paris as though it were duty and opportunity and chance of a lifetime. My mother had made me hunger for culture from the day I was born, and now I found myself a temporary citizen in a city that had given the world its most beautiful language and writers passionate enough and gifted enough to write books that were deathless and breathtaking in their execution. It was the winter I read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time from beginning to end, then visited his grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery and had lunch there. When Parisians spoke to each other in restaurants and cafés, it sounded to me as though they were passing orchids and roses through their lips. I spoke French like a donkey, and no amount of mimicry or fakery could make any of the French think differently. There was not a French word I could not make potted meat of as it fell to the floor from the meat grinder of my tongue. There was not a single district in the city I could enter without becoming a laughingstock when I ordered a brioche or a dozen escargots.

  In the evening I would often join Jonathan and Susan Galassi for dinner at a restaurant they had selected with great care for both its quality and relative cheapness. They were living in the lovely Hôtel des Grandes Écoles, across the street from the sawmill where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had lived when they were young and poor and in love with Paris and each other.

  I had never met a couple like the Galassis in my life. The sheer range of their education and intellectual passions bedazzled me. Often we would begin our evenings with a slow walk down the Rue Mouffetard, a profligate market street with endless stores overflowing with fruits and cheeses and vegetables of every sort. To me, it looked as if the farmers of France had delivered everything their fields could grow to this amazing, spilling-down street where carts reeling with tomatoes, avocados, cauliflowers, and grapes stood taller than I did. Sometimes, we would stop and buy food for our lunches the next day.

  That winter we ate cheaply. That winter we ate like princes of the earth. The Galassis would study the menus of brasseries and cafés that fell within the realms of our limited budgets. By the light of candles, I ate sweetbreads and lamb kidneys for the first time and learned the extraordinary range of pâtés and the names of fish that swam in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, we would talk about the work we had done that day. Susan Galassi, as finely boned and pretty as the woman etched into the bottle of White Shoulders perfume, would speak of her progress on her doctoral dissertation, which she was calling Picasso: Variations of the Old Masters. One night she took us to Delacroix’s studio; afterward, we ended the evening by toasting each other with Armagnac, a rougher kind of cognac that they had discovered on their honeymoon. As we lifted our glasses, tuxedoed waiters flowed past us at Les Deux Magots, where Sartre and Beauvoir had once argued philosophy. We pledged our friendship to be immortal and unbreakable. I felt like an artist, bright and footloose on the boulevards.

  All day I would write. It came to me in a flood tide, like it has never come before or since. At night I would attend concerts with the Galassis, or the opera, and I would roam the Louvre and other art galleries with Susan whenever I could. She could take a painting, any painting, and contrive a love story to it in words t
hat sprang out of her with vivacity and charm. When she was confronted by a masterpiece she had given her heart to, the words came out slowly, and I could watch the conversion that has always united art and prayer. To Susan, an art gallery was her cathedral, her sacristy, her confessional, and her life’s work. My great luck lay in her openness of heart as she shared the secrets of canvases I had never heard of, and her eyes appraised the work of artists through miles and miles of Parisian hallways. Art, like the Seine, was just another river to fall in love with in Paris.

  Before they left for Rome for the final months of their sabbatical, Jonathan made a long-distance phone call to Houghton Mifflin to get permission to take me to one fine restaurant in Paris. Neither of us had produced great dividends for the company at that time, but he received permission to eat in a nice restaurant, though not a fine one. We chose a celebrated French place called Dodin-Bouffant, which was known for its seafood, for one of our last nights together. I ordered a half-dozen Bélon oysters because I did not want to return to the States without ever having tasted the famous Bélons, and they were priced like amethysts even in those faraway days. They were cold, superb, and salty, and a Chablis Premier Cru that Jon had selected accompanied them to perfection. As the meal progressed, I remember passing around plates that contained Dover sole, turbot, and a scallop dish that approached sublimity. The meal ended with a cheese cart, then Armagnac, and then talk turned to our meeting in Rome, when the novel would be finished and I would present a manuscript to Jonathan in payment to him for the ineffable gift of Paris.

  For over a month I was in Paris alone, writing about characters who moved through the streets and houses and barracks of Charleston, South Carolina. The weather began to change slowly, and I could feel spring in its ballet slippers making its shy appearance onstage in the Luxembourg Gardens. The fruit and vegetables on the market street of the Rue de Seine near my hotel grew brighter and fresher every day. The chestnut trees began to bloom, and I had never known those magnificent trees were one of the glories of Paris. Each day I wrote a letter or a postcard to my three daughters in Atlanta. I would go to American Express to mail them, stopping by the Louvre each time I went. I received a letter from my friend Cliff Graubart, telling me that he and another friend, Frank Smith, were going to meet me in Paris in the middle of May. The three of us would drive my manuscript down to Rome. “Plan to have the greatest time of your life,” Cliff wrote, and I so promised myself.