A Lowcountry Heart Read online

  You, out there. Listen up.

  Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers. Before George R. R. Martin told me that in front of eyewitnesses in Santa Fe, no other writer I recall had ever told me something I’d written had influenced them. I don’t think it had ever happened to me before. I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer’s imagination.

  When I first read David Copperfield in Joseph Monte’s English class, the book took full command of my imagination and I longed to write novels in the Dickensian manner; until I was stopped in my tracks that same year by Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Down the road, I got Faulknered and Steinbecked, Hemingwayed and Fitzgeralded. In college I was Virginia Woolfed and dazzled by Willa Cather and became a devotee of George Eliot. I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

  A great book took me into worlds where I was never supposed to go. I met men whose lives I wished to make my own and men whom I would cheerfully kill. Great writers introduced me to women I wanted to marry and women who would make me run for my life. I was raised in a tyrant’s home and my mother had thirteen pregnancies while sleeping in her oppressor’s bed. Let me marry Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and put on my track shoes when I encounter the rise of a Lady Macbeth in my life. But literature is vast and subtle enough to make me fool enough to fall in love with its villains and scoundrels. I’ve a soft spot for Becky Sharp in my heart, and the dry-ice evil of Iago still manages to raise my blood pressure when I dip again into the pages of Othello.

  I’ve admired the work of Don DeLillo, but never gave my heart to it, whereas John Irving found his voice and made me his devotee forever after The World According to Garp. When Gabriel García Márquez is good, there is no one better. I could read Richard Russo forever.

  But there I go again. Even as I record this, I’m aware of a hundred writers who filled me with happiness over the years and provided countless pleasures as I read through their books and started to expand with fresh knowledge of the family of man. Some books I took on as self-improvement projects. In sixth grade, under the tutelage of Sister Nathaniel, I decided to read the entire Bible. I thought it would bring me closer to God. It took me three years to complete the project and then my mother was upset that I had read the King James version of the Bible that Grandpa Peek had given me, instead of the Douay-Rheims version that was approved by the Catholic Church. By accident, I had read the beautiful Bible, and the magisterial rhythms of the King James version are the ones that still move through my bloodstream. In my twenties I read the four volumes of the journals of Andre Gidé and everything that Camus ever wrote. I read ten volumes of Balzac, ten by Zola, all by Colette, and I found I admired the work of Simone de Beauvoir far more than that of her strange lover, Sartre. For some reason, I’d gotten it into my head that the French held the mystery of where all knowledge lay.

  So a lifetime passes and I manage to live a life quite badly. I marry three times, help raise four children, have one of them stolen from me, inherit five stepchildren, and write the books that have described both the pains and the joys I encountered living that life. Then I arrive on a stage with George R. R. Martin in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in my sixty-eighth year, and encounter a writer whose body of work is completely alien to me. I’ve avoided science fiction most of my life—for the simple reason that I didn’t care much about it. No matter how many years Katherine Clark had championed Mr. Martin, she had revealed nothing that made me want to rush out and buy his work. Up to now, I’d cared little for the march of imaginary kings in made-up lands of yesteryear. Though I’d been one of those “comic book boys” whose heart once sang with the heroics of action heroes, I’d grown up surrounded by Marine Corps fighter pilots whom I thought would make out just fine in battles with Superman and Batman and Spider-Man and all the rest. They never quite took me prisoner in my imagination. It might have been my biblical reading that made me unprepared for the comic book pantheon of heroes. I was not as afraid of Batman beating me up when Lot’s wife was being turned into a pillar of salt for the lightweight crime of looking back at a burning city. So I entered the world of George R. R. Martin tentative and doubtful. But I needed to hush Katherine Clark up, and reading the work was the only way to do it.

  So, I agreed to a compact to read A Game of Thrones and nothing else if I thus desired. I had not prepared myself for the pure genius of George R. R. Martin. His writing is lush and beautiful and is a perfect fit for his life’s work. His entrance into this exotic and created world of his is confident and shows no sign of hesitation or doubt. He inhabits his world with an ease of creation that seems impossible to imagine. His achievement brings me to a halt—to study the many limitations of my own imagination. The dialogue between his characters is as real and distinct as are those to be found in John le Carré or Elmore Leonard. His descriptions are first-rate and his fiery tale of the birth of dragons is fully equal, if not far more spectacular, than the resurrection of Christ in the New Testament. He writes about religion, wars and gods, men and women, mothers and children, with a pure shiningness that surpasses mere talent. Mr. Martin has to be dealt with in some serious way by the gatekeepers of American fiction. What do The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Atlantic do about this guy? I’m now finished with A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and am three hundred pages into A Dance with Dragons. This much reading at least allows me to pour wine for the guests of the great number of his tribe of devotees he’s attracted. I am 4,300 pages into the world George R. R. Martin has created, and long for 5,000 more. Do I consider it grand entertainment? I certainly do, but I also consider it literature standing on the high ground of our language. His characters spring to life on every page and I’ll take Tyrion the Imp over Falstaff any day…take Cersei over Lady Macbeth…take Jon Snow over Hamlet…take Sansa over Cordelia. Martin has created his own world and it shines with its own set of special constellations, its own comets, its unforgettable citizens, its cold immensity, its bloodthirsty battles, its score-settling by the gods and their rapacious servants among the hideous and beautiful men and women created in their passage…It’s all extraordinary and unlike anything I’ve ever read. A Song of Ice and Fire is not like anything I’ve ever read before. It is American literature thrown at our feet—and for those of us in a love affair with the language, it’s up to us to stretch and broaden our horizons, to bend and welcome it into the pantheon.

  Great love…

  A Eulogy for a Southern Gentleman

  APRIL 23, 2014

  Here is the way it was in the city of Atlanta in 1973, over forty years ago when the dogwoods bloomed along Peachtree Road and there was a party in the Governor’s Mansion in Buckhead. Barbara Conroy and I were new to the city, and an invite for a party from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter sounded like a ticket to heaven after being run out of South Carolina. We knew no one in the city until that night, and it seemed like we knew everyone when the evening was over. As we were crowding around the doorway to the huge dining room—it was a night to celebrate the writers and journalists in Georgia—I heard the sound of high heels clicking against marble in the old tap dance of youth and radiance, and I turned to see Anne Rivers Siddons and her flashy, dapper husband by her side—that devilish boy from Saint Albans, the one with that ironical smile he perfected while at Princeton—and he was laughing about something that Annie was saying as they made their brilliant entrance into the heart of things.

  They were beautiful to look at. Annie was as pretty and sexy a woman as ever drew breath in the sweet air of Georgia, and Heywa
rd symbolized some essence of the Atlanta businessman—sharp, tailored, and successful, every inch of him finely wrought, brimming with the innate class of the Eastern establishment. To me, this is what I wanted Atlanta to look like—these were the people I’d moved to the city to meet. This was the night I met the writers Paul Darcy Boles, Paul Hemphill, Jim Townsend, Larry Wood, Joe Cummings, Betsy Fancher, Terry Kay, and so many more, people I would come to love over the years. By all accounts, it was a magnificent gathering, except that alcohol was forbidden to be served in the Governor’s Mansion during the Carter years. Toward the end, the sound of various writers choking and clawing at their throats was heard around the dining room as the first stages of delirium tremens began to set in at the tables to our right and left.

  So that was how it began on a tender spring day in Atlanta, and now it has ended in one of the tenderest springs in the memory of Charleston. I was too young to understand then that the brisk sound of high heels tapping out a rhythmic clatter on Georgia marble would result in a friendship that would last for forty years, that would open up my heart in so many ways I didn’t know it could be opened, and that my life had changed forever by this couple born into it at that very moment.

  Here is how Heyward and Annie struck me then and strike me now; time has done nothing to change what I feel about them both. They had sprung alive from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Heyward was shy about revealing his privileged, Ivy League background, and I believe it took over five seconds for him to tell me he was a Princeton graduate that night. In the next four thousand meetings we enjoyed, Heyward would dip into his high-stepping past and remind me that he had gone to Princeton while I had spent the majority of my youth majoring in “flamethrowers and bazookas” at The Citadel. It was an article of faith in our relationship that Heyward believed he had received a better college education than I did. It got so bad that I would enter an Atlanta party, spot Heyward in the corner with Annie, and I’d say, “Hey, Heyward. Tell me now that you went to Princeton so you don’t have to drop it later.” I’d then hug both of them, and find out what was going on in their very well-lived lives. It assured me that I’d always have my first drink of the night while talking to Annie and Heyward.

  My association of them with F. Scott Fitzgerald was not accidental. Heyward, in his understated elegance and good taste, had fallen in love with Anne Rivers, who was about to begin a career that would make her a household name among discriminating readers in America. By marrying Heyward, Annie had placed her destiny alongside one of the greatest readers she would ever encounter, her head cheerleader during her remarkable career as the queen of Southern fiction, whose passionate love of her work was just another side to the most successful literary marriage it’s been my pleasure to observe. Heyward became her number one fan, first reader, first editor, first critic, and the first to tell Annie that what she’d written was original, unique, and even magical. Heyward Siddons found great joy in telling me that he had married the most beautiful prose style in the South. Here is what was remarkable about Heyward Siddons, the Princetonian: he knew it, supported his wife in every way conceivable, and would shout it aloud to the world. He was the first great male feminist I ever met. He made his life a conscious celebration of his wife’s career. Heyward Siddons made it all possible, and he made it look effortless.

  It was not lost on me that Anne Rivers Siddons was some wraithlike incarnation of that lost soul of American letters, Zelda Fitzgerald. But where her husband, Scott, was enormously jealous of his wife’s talent, Heyward held his hand over Annie’s, realizing its precious flame. It was never easy for women writers in America, and it was especially not easy in 1973. The legendary editor Jim Townsend dismissed Annie’s writing as mere “froufrou” when I came to Atlanta. Women were held back, not listened to; given the lightest stories to report; and never given the chance to walk as equals in the boys’ club of Atlanta writers. As Heyward announced to me my first year in Atlanta, Annie was about to change all that, and change it she did. It was Heyward who gave me my first warning of incoming fire when Heartbreak Hotel was published. “It’ll define Southern college life in the 1950s, Conroy, the way Fitzgerald described Princeton of the twenties,” and it did.

  Annie then embarked on a many-pillared career that lifted off into the stratosphere…Peachtree Road, Gone with the Wind’s successor as the Atlanta novel; Downtown, Annie’s rendition of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, including a grand portrayal of Jim Townsend. Fox’s Earth, Colony, Homeplace came off her typewriter with astonishing speed, proving that hers was a deep, profligate talent that was not bound by any singular geography. Heyward Siddons played policeman, watchdog, and was the furious protector of her privacy as Annie wrote the books that would change our times.

  Their house on Vermont Road served as a pleasure palace for the writers of Atlanta. Heyward and Annie hosted dinner parties that still feel like some of the best parts of my young manhood. Heyward was a refined, articulate host who wrote book reviews for Atlanta magazine, read The New York Times daily, kept up with the news of the world and literature, kept alive the curiosity he developed in his early career in television and radio, could charm your socks off (on the rare occasions I wore socks), and turn his sardonic, or should I say satanic, wit on anyone who popped into his news-finder on any particular night. He had a special genius for ferreting out any bad review I had received throughout our great land and cheerfully reciting from it as we dined over one of Annie’s shrimp casseroles. You had to be fast on your feet to be a worthy guest at Heyward Siddons’s house. Those conversations sparkled in the Atlanta air.

  Remember the click of Annie’s high heels coming around that corner of the Governor’s Mansion? I’ve been following the dance of that pretty woman and her debonair husband for forty years now. I followed them from Atlanta to a writers’ weekend in Tate Mountain, Georgia, to the mansion South of Broad, to a wedding in Rome, and to the deep immortal silences of the Maine coast. For me, the great, unseeable reward I received from the marriage of Heyward and Annie Siddons is to have been a witness to the greatest love story it has been my privilege to watch. This couple found each other in Atlanta during a time of stormy change in the South. That woman with the tapping heels found a man who did an elegant soft-shoe beside her in a dance that would last the rest of their lives. If Heyward and Annie ever fought, I was never a witness to it. If they were ever furious with me or anyone else, I never knew of it. They seemed inseparable to me, and I rarely saw them when they weren’t together, a perfect match, a bindery of souls. They taught every writer they ever met the limits of marriage and came close to proving it had no limits. Heyward Siddons taught all the male writers in his life how to treat a woman, how to love a wife, how to live a life that was joyful and rich with happiness and worthy of imitation. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heyward, you lived a full life with stalwart sons, lovely grandchildren, and a remarkable body of friends.

  There were no madhouses or crack-ups, and you let your Zelda bloom into one of the most storied careers ever lived by a woman in the American South. You made that possible, Heyward, and through Annie’s work you helped launch the careers of Josephine Humphreys, Patti Callahan Henry, Cassandra King, Mary Alice Monroe, Sue Monk Kidd, Dorothea Benton Frank, Rebecca Wells, and hundreds of others like them. A writer has never found a better man to accompany her on her waltz toward art. Every writer needs the solid foundation of the love and grounding you brought to Annie’s life. And in your generosity, you gave it to the whole generation of writers who came to adore you, and that is your legacy for all time—until our last words are written.

  Remembering an Irreplaceable Friend

  NOVEMBER 8, 2014

  Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life. I met Tim Belk in Beaufort in 1967, the first year I taught and coached at Beaufort High School. We were the only guests at a dinner that the only writer in Beaufort, Ann Head, had put tog
ether so we could meet and form what she was certain would become a serious “literary” friendship. Ann had taught me creative writing my senior year in high school and had written me a series of generous-spirited letters about the sad-sack poems I wrote for the literary magazine at The Citadel. Ann Head and my father hated each other on sight, and she worried that my college was the worst possible breeding ground for a young man who wished to be a novelist. Ann’s articulate response to the shaping of my writing life by my father and The Citadel was my introduction to Tim Belk. With this, Ann Head made my life delicious and presented me with a friend who would prove a treasury of constant delight. Tim Belk became a dreamboat of a friend, and the news of his death in San Francisco this October killed something of measureless value inside of me and all of his friends.

  Tim Belk had received his master’s degree in English from the University of South Carolina and come to live on Port Republic Street and teach at USCB. He became famous as a gifted and hard-nosed teacher of the language, a stickler for grammar who considered a dangling participle a minor crime against humanity. He was passionate about literature, music, and all the arts, and he was the kind of Southerner I had only encountered in literature. He seemed to drift out of the pages of Carson McCullers and would have looked natural with a walk-on part in a Tennessee Williams play. It was true. I had met no one remotely like him at The Citadel. At that first meeting, Tim Belk and I had no idea he would one day have leading roles in the novels I would write. He would make his original appearance as himself, playing the piano for my Daufuskie students in The Water Is Wide. In The Lords of Discipline, he took the stage as Tradd St. Croix, a Charleston aristocrat who was part of a quartet of roommates bound by the infinite resources of their deep affection for each other. When South of Broad came out, I granted Tim one of the most pivotal roles in the book as Trevor Poe, a gay piano player in San Francisco. Note that gayness has become a theme here.