My Reading Life Read online

  In 1994, the American Booksellers Association held their annual meeting in Los Angeles, and I was one of the speakers scheduled to address the convention on Saturday. I convinced Gene to let me fly him out to the convention first-class, because I wanted to praise his remarkable gifts as a teacher and tell the story about the part he played in my teenage collision with Thomas Wolfe. It took more than a month of argument to win Gene’s approval, because he fought a guerrilla action against every single phase of the trip west. His consent finally came when I promised not to tell the audience that Gene was in attendance, and I had to swear that I would not have him stand up and act like a fool when I mentioned his name. It was only when we took off from the Atlanta airport that I understood Gene had a fear of flying that was immobilizing. I ordered him a martini from the flight attendant, and he said, “I’ll be a wino before I set foot in Hollywood.”

  Gene wandered all through the enormous convention hall accepting every free book and magazine offered by the major and minor publishing companies. To my surprise, he identified himself as my English teacher at several of the booths when he struck up conversations with publicists or sales reps. Someone from Doubleday said Gene wept during my talk about a great English teacher finding me when I was a boy and brand new to a high school in South Carolina.

  At a party given at Universal Studios, I watched Gene moving out of the periphery. As I met new members of the Doubleday staff, I lost sight of Gene, who drifted toward the outer perimeters of the party drawn by forces I didn’t quite understand. When the party was nearing its completion, I began to search for Gene and was wondering how I would find him in the labyrinthine sets of the studio. I had walked through a New York street scene, passed through a small New England village, then a Western town, when I spotted Gene. He was speaking with a man who was showing him a square in London. The man was clearly enjoying walking Gene though the Hollywood sets where hundreds of movies had been filmed, and I could tell Gene had captivated the stranger with that uniqueness that set Gene apart wherever he went. When Gene caught sight of me, he turned to shake the man’s hand, then waved at me and walked through a classical Main Street, USA, façade.

  “Remarkable. Just remarkable,” Gene said as he joined me and we drifted in step with the crowd moving toward the exit. “I saw where they shot part of Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, a dozen Westerns, gangster movies, Southern Gothic novels.… It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw. That man was a wonderful guide and so knowledgeable. He seemed to know where every film in the world was made.”

  “You know who that guy is, Gene?” I asked.

  “His name’s Steven. He says he works out here,” Gene said. “He was a generous and very fine man. Very fine indeed.”

  “That was Steven Spielberg,” I told him. I didn’t know if Gene Norris had ever watched a movie and do not know to this day.

  “Steven knows his business. I predict he’ll do well,” Gene said.

  “Gene, Steven is to the movies what William Faulkner is to books.”

  “So you’ve heard of him?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Over the years I would introduce Gene Norris to dozens of people I met through my writing life. I arranged for him to meet Barbra Streisand, Nick Nolte, Robert Duvall, and Blythe Danner, but Gene’s character was set in stone years before I met him, and he remained impervious to any claims of prestige or celebrity. He was happy in his own home surrounded by those special antiques and “beauties” that he had collected over the years in Salvation Army bins and yard sales. His ex-students came back to his house by the hundreds and Gene delighted in the low-maintenance miracle of their return. He knew that they arrived at his doorstep of their own volition, and they came to thank him for honoring them and breaking into the immovable storms of aloneness in the hormonal tempests of their teenage years. Gene lived for these students who booked return passages into his life. He would pull out the yearbooks, and Gene and his visitors would revisit the lives they lived twenty and thirty years ago, catching up on the delicious gossip that was now beginning to sound like history in the making. When one of his students died, Gene would never forget to cry. If there is more important work than teaching, I hope to learn about it before I die.

  Gene Norris got me to do more speeches and fund-raisers than anyone else in my life. Though I would gripe about them until the owls flew home and the cock began its morning cry, I would speak pretty much anywhere Gene asked me to. When he asked me to speak in his hometown for the restoration of the Newberry Opera House, I addressed the crowd before the extensive remodeling began, then returned on that sublime evening when the opera house was restored to its former splendor. I had given the first speech of my life as a writer to a ladies’ book club at the opera house in 1972. The Water Is Wide was published to a storm of controversy in South Carolina, but the women of Newberry had received me with the utmost courtesy and excitement. I took great pride in the opera house’s flawless restoration.

  “I used you, Pat,” Gene apologized on opening night. “I took advantage of our friendship. I wanted to thank my hometown.”

  “It was a pleasure and an honor, Gene. I needed to thank Newberry too. And now I have.”

  “Why would you thank Newberry?”

  “It gave me you,” I said.

  When Gene was diagnosed with leukemia, the Nation of Gene Norris sprang into action. Since we all knew Gene and his countless whims and oddities, we knew he would not accept with much forbearance at all our attempts to help ease his path. Gene grew touchy if someone even mentioned the fact that he had cancer. We learned to avoid the subject unless he brought it up. He would conduct his fight against cancer according to his own unpublished rules. I offered to quit writing when he went into the hospital for chemotherapy and take care of him until he recovered enough to live on his own. He yelled at me when I first suggested this course of action, but Gene was afraid; he was dealing with something uncontrollable for the first time in his life. Soon after he heard the bad news about his health, Gene called me from his parents’ house in Newberry and asked me if I would attend a concert at the opera house. I said yes immediately and then Gene told me that Joan Baez was singing that night.

  One night after I had gone to a community sing at Penn Center with Gene, he took me to visit his apartment in Beaufort’s historic Point afterward. He lived on the second floor of the Christensen house and had a beautiful view of the Beaufort River. I still remember when Gene served me orange juice in a sherry glass and asked me if I’d ever heard of a young folksinger named Joan Baez. He had bought her first Vanguard albums after he heard her singing in a coffeehouse near Harvard Yard several summers before. “Her voice makes me believe in angels. There’s a song I think you should hear.”

  When I heard her voice that night, my heart locked on to it and I felt as if someone were pouring straight silver into my ear. I lost myself to this comely woman whose hair was made from raven wings and midnight as I stared at the jacket cover Mr. Norris had shown me. I’ve written four or five books listening to Joan Baez’s songs over the years. Her voice has always been like a homecoming to me.

  As we sat in a box seat at the Newberry Opera House that night, Gene and I were both moved by the queenly presence of Joan Baez when she walked out onto the stage. Her hair was white now and so was ours. When she began to sing, Gene made a strange and unprecedented gesture in our friendship together. He reached over and grasped my hand. He held tightly to my hand for most of the concert and tried to hide the fact that he wept through every song. Something was contained in the mysteries of that night that led to some derangement of Gene’s lifelong instincts of forbearance. He had mastered all the styles and habits of the Southern gentleman. But not on this night, not when Joan Baez came to the Newberry Opera House.

  When the concert was over and the crowd was heading out into the night, Gene gathered himself together and said that he wanted us to meet Joan Baez, that he wanted that circle completed. We met Joan in her dressing room
, and she was as gracious and delightful as I prayed she would be. I told her the story of listening to her voice on that long-ago Southern night when Gene introduced me to a song he thought I needed to hear.

  “What song was that?” Joan Baez asked my English teacher. Gene took off his glasses and wiped them clean with his tie, an unconscious gesture I’d watched him do as a kid.

  “The song was ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” he told her. “I think Pat might’ve been the first white boy in this part of the world to hear it.”

  “You played that song in the Deep South in the early sixties?” Turning to me, she asked, “Do you know how lucky you are?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said to Joan Baez while looking at Gene Norris. “I sure as hell do.”

  When Gene died of leukemia in a Columbia hospital, the world stood still for me. I had spent as much time with him as I could in the last two years of his life. Gene and I had talked every day for the past ten years, no matter where we found ourselves. If I could’ve been a better friend to Gene Norris I would have done it; and if I failed to, it was a flaw in my character. I don’t think I’ll ever get over his death and I don’t see much reason to try.

  After his funeral and burial in Newberry, there was a reception at a pretty restaurant on Main Street, to which I was late after a brief meeting with the other executors of Gene’s will. The heat was unbearable and breathing was difficult as I parked the car behind the restaurant. As I walked along a side street, a beautiful young woman called out to me, “Mr. Conroy?”

  I turned and this pretty woman kissed me and said, “You don’t know me, but we met when I was three years old. You were the May king and my sister was the May queen.”

  “Ah! Your sister is the lovely Gloria Burns,” I said. “But why are you here? Did you know Mr. Norris? You’re too young to have been a student of his.”

  “My first year at Robert Smalls,” she said, “I was such a mess. In trouble. Boys. Drugs. That kind of thing. They sent me to Mr. Norris.”

  “He was good, wasn’t he?”

  “Mr. Norris told me to come to his office every day at lunch. We could talk and get to know each other. I went there for the next two years. Two years. Yet he didn’t even know me.”

  “You got the best of Gene,” I said.

  “He saved my life. He literally saved my life.”

  “Come on in,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I’ll introduce you to a couple of hundred people who’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “Mr. Norris acted like I was the most important girl in the world,” she said.

  “You were. That was Gene’s secret. All of us were.”

  In the months leading up to Gene’s death, I could not write a word while I was losing the English teacher of my life. When I called Gene to wish him a good night, he always asked me to tell him what I was reading. During the spring and summer before Gene died, I had begun to read the twelve-volume set of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Gene venerated all things English and he liked to end our communications each night with me providing a thumbnail sketch of what I had read the previous day. Throughout the spring and summer, I would keep Gene abreast of all the petty hardships and complaints the narrator records as he makes his way through Eton and then embarks on his upper-middle-class passage into London society in the venomous, suffering England in the feverish days between the wars. He wondered how Powell had discovered the theme of his life’s work, and the title of the vast production intrigued him. I told Gene about Powell’s coming by accident to a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Wallace Collection, which is titled A Dance to the Music of Time. Though it’s a small painting, it carries enormous power and chill factor as four unidentified figures engage in a ritual dance of the seasons or fates or destinies caught up in all the ineffable movements of time.

  “Pat, don’t you think the passage of time is what all literature is really about? Poems, plays, novels, everything?”

  “I think so, Gene.”

  “Mr. Powell seems to think it’s a dance. Do you agree?”

  “I wish I’d thought of it before he did.”

  “You walked into my class in 1961.”

  “Our dance began.”

  My summary of those books became a secret language between us and provided a passageway to intimacy that made no mention of his health. It was sublimation and surrender to the efficacy of denial, but it was all very human to me. As I saw it, my job was to follow Gene’s wishes and to allow for him to die in his own manner, with strict adherence to the blueprint of his own design. In his dictionary of last days, there were notable blanks in the space that defined the properties of either “cancer” or “leukemia,” and those words never passed between us. The Powell novels provided our avenue where we could talk about art and literature and the living of a good life in whatever allotment of time we were given on this earth. When we grew weary of that, he would tell me about the ex-students who called him and the memories each one shared with their former teacher. I waited for his pause, then heard Gene say, “Tell me a story.”

  I would take Gene back to the England he idealized. The England of fog-banked London streets illuminated by lamplight and the shine of candelabras throwing soft light on shelves of leather-bound books. In the second volume, A Buyer’s Market, Gene took infinite and voluptuous pleasure in Powell’s exacting detailing of set pieces with a large cast of characters—there is a dance at the Huntercombes’ and a long dinner that preceded it, a party at Mr. Andriadis’s house, and a birthday party for Mr. Deacon. Gene took special pleasure in the decor of rooms, the description of lavish banquets, the elaborate furnishings of upper-class dwelling places as the aristocracy rubbed elbows with the most important artists of the day, and the bizarre shock waves that could be set off when privileged gentlemen brushed against the lives of shopgirls armed only with the artillery fire of their beauty. Like many readers who have surrendered themselves to the pleasures of the Powell masterpiece, Gene could not get enough of that immortal creation of one of the greatest antiheroes in English letters, the creepy and power-mad Widmerpool.

  Throughout that morbidly hot summer, I read those twelve volumes and would treasure the moments when I coaxed Gene to follow me into a world he both coveted and never knew existed. He sometimes fell asleep as I was recounting some delicious, gossipy scene from Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant or Books Do Furnish a Room.

  The month before he died, Gene had a dream of us on my senior trip to New York. With infinite pleasure, he recalled my excitement when I looked down at the great city from the Empire State Building for the first time. My acceptance of his flippant wager to reward any boy five bucks if he’d urinate on the statue of William T. Sherman in Central Park. His horror when he saw me unzipping my pants and peeing to the applause of my classmates.

  “I underestimated your attraction to the most shocking behavior,” he said.

  “Five bucks looked like a horse blanket to me back then,” I explained.

  “Then we were riding down Park Avenue, Pat,” Gene said. “We were so young then. Even I was young. I was in my early thirties then and thought I’d live forever. Remember where I took you?”

  “Yep. You took me to the clock in the Biltmore Hotel. Where Holden Caulfield met Sally Hayes.”

  “You looked as if I poked you with a cattle prod,” Gene said, chuckling at the memory. “I was rewarding you for that essay you wrote to the school board. God, you loved The Catcher in the Rye! But you didn’t know that was a real clock, or that the Biltmore was a real hotel.”

  “My teacher was pretty good then.”

  “So was the student.”

  A month later, Gene left his Newberry house and entered the Richland County hospital, also for the last time. Again, I called him every night, and though his weakening, unsteady voice alarmed me, he insisted we continue our talks as though nothing had changed. I had reached the final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time and I was partial to the luminous title of the last book
, Hearing Secret Harmonies. I thought that Gene must have been the approximate age of Anthony Powell when he wrote this elegiac book in his ambitious series. The world that Powell was born into had transformed itself into something radical and maybe unspeakable to him. The history we are born into always seems natural when we’re young, but it seems misshapen and grotesque as the winter years come upon us. On the last night we spoke, Gene’s voice was unrecognizable and frantic. Though I tried it was hard to get him off the phone; he grew angry and I grew resigned.

  “Tell me a story,” he commanded, and I did.

  Those were the last words he ever spoke to me, and they formed an exquisite, unimprovable epitaph for a man whose life was rich in the guidance of children not his own. He taught them a language that was fragrant with beauty, treacherous with loss, comfortable with madness and despair, and a catchword for love itself. His students mourned Gene all over the world, wherever they found themselves. All were ecstatic to be a part of the dance.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHARLES DICKENS AND DAUFUSKIE ISLAND

  In 1969, I received a Christmas gift whose staying power is as timeless as water. During the first year of teacher integration in South Carolina, I had volunteered to teach grades five through eight on Daufuskie Island, a remote backwater isle in the coastal lowlands of Beaufort County. For a year, I walked the island and was known as the “white schoolteacher.” I taught eighteen black children who were brilliant in the arts of survival, but deficient in academic achievement. I learned that five of them did not know the alphabet, all read below the first-grade level, none knew that the Atlantic Ocean washed up on the shore of their island.

  I was in way over my head and lacked all qualifications to teach those kids. Even so, I pulled up a chair and told them not to worry. “I can teach you everything you need to know,” I said. “We’re going to have a blast.”