Celebrating a Southern literary giant: We miss you, Pat Conroy. That’s a great big WE like your great big heart and your “big-beaming” smile, and the big shock and loss we all felt when you passed away in 2015 at 70. We’ve been honoring your greatness ever since. Through the establishment of the Pat Conroy Literary Center. Through an annual literary festival in your beloved coastal town, Beaufort, South Carolina. With this little gem of your writings, packed with your bigness.

Meant to be a “keepsake” with an attached red ribbon bookmark, A Lowcountry Heart celebrates Pat Conroy’s literary prowess, convictions, and generous heart. It’s a loving and thoughtfully selected compilation of “letters” – blog posts the long-handed, “language-obsessed” author called them, not liking the word blog at all nor wanting to give up the feel of his craft despite “writer’s cramp,” relented in 2009 when his health was declining limiting his travel. It also includes his speeches and other writings, a collaboration between his long-time (thirty years) editor/publisher Nan A. Talese and Conroy’s writer wife, Cassandra King, both of whom contributed personal reflections adding to his.

It’s a perfect selection to read as the second Pat Conroy Literary Festival kicks off soon, running from October 19 – 22, 2017. Inspiration for this “letter.”

We miss Pat Conroy even if we never met him at one of his legendary book signings, for we’ve likely read one of more of his books. A prolific writer of Southern fiction and memoir, he “often intermingled the two.” You probably figured that out already if you’ve read The Great Santini influenced by his “tyrant” of a father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot who moved the Conroy clan (Pat Conroy was one of seven children) all around the South, the settings for his works. Or, read The Lords of Discipline based on the “four-grueling years” he spent at The Citadel, the military college in Charleston. You may not know, though, that a girl who caught his eye in kindergarten is a character in The Prince of Tides; that the gay piano player in South of Broad was inspired by an “irreplaceable friend” whom Conroy cared so much about he moved to San Francisco for a while since his friend’s southern family disowned him; that The Water is Wide is based on his gloriously happy year teaching poor black kids on tiny Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, a book some call a novel, others a memoir; that a girl he swooned over in 8th grade appears in Beach Music; or that The Losing Season is about the year his basketball team lost the Southern Conference. The way he went about contacting and uniting his old teammates is one for the books. I myself just found a gorgeous copy of his last published memoir, The Death of Santini, said to put closure on his relationship with his tyrannical father.

There’s a powerful theme here that has everything to do with never forgetting the people who “changed my whole life and the way I saw the whole world,” for good and for bad. Bless his mother who taught her son Pat about “evil” because in this splendid insight into this writer’s world we feel his deep moral compassion and outrage against wrongs. He called it out the way he saw it. “How the world presented itself.” What words of wisdom and eloquence would Pat Conroy be saying about how the world is presenting itself today? Eerily, a world not many years since his searing voice left us, but it sure feels that way.

Which is why we can’t help but be struck by how self-effacing Pat Conroy was, always striving to be “good enough,” to be ”bold enough.” Writing that “generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers,” it seems just from these memorable samplings and anecdotes, Pat Conroy may have been the most generous of them all.

“Reading became the most essential thing about me,” says the avid collector of 8,000 books. So you’ll find heartfelt tributes to so many writers living and gone. He dubs Anne Rivers Siddons “Queen of Southern fiction.” Says Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto “knocked my socks off.” Speaks of Barbara Kingsolver’s work as “eye-popping.” He’s so very proud, as in “shouting it out to the hills” of his wife’s writings; Moonrise a “fabulous novel.” He calls Phillip Roth a “gift to American letters.” Of Ron Rash’s Serena, Conroy glowingly says: “it made me think of the North Carolina mountains like Thomas Wolfe never did.” Then there are the stages he went through when he was “Faulknered” and “Steinbecked” and “Virginia Woolfed” and “Hemingwayed” and “Fitzgeralded.” The list and accolades go on and on.

Pat Conroy was an equal opportunity praiser. Encouraged by a good friend (he maintained so many friendships, some going back forty years) at 68 to give science fiction a try, a genre he’d stayed clear of all his life, prior to meeting George R. R. Martin on a book tour that stopped in Santa Fe. What joy he expresses discovering this imaginative “genius” of a fantasy writer, reading everything Martin wrote beginning with A Game of Thrones. He admires Gay Talese, Nan A. Talese’s husband, a writer of “impeccable prose.” Pat Conroy movingly thanks friends and their spouses alike, writerly and otherwise.

That may be the key to the greatness of his literary style. So much raw emotion soars in his prose. A terrific example of his wordsmithing and enormous gratitude for literature and those who teach it is seen in a passage from a 2007 letter he sent to the Charleston Gazette:

“The world of literature has everything in it, and 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.”

Pat Conroy’s appreciation for his readership is just as strong. This great writer found “one of the greatest things about being a writer” was engaging with his legion of readers. So much so he encouraged them to bring as many of his books to his signings, which notoriously ran on for hours, contrary to the way these events typically go. For he was a contrarian who mischievously admits he’s “obnoxiously friendly,” so he never ran out of steam for his devoted fans. That makes us feel good, particularly when we’ve read other acclaimed authors complaining about the drudgery of big city tours. Since we can no longer tell Pat Conroy what his books mean to us, A Lowcountry Heart tells us what we meant to him.

Pat Conroy speaks of the beauty of Beaufort, South Carolina as a “cult.” That may be true as Southern Living named Beaufort the best small southern town in 2017But the voters who make up these nominations tend to change their opinions annually, whereas Pat Conroy’s cult will endure year after year.

Lorraine

3 thoughts on “A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

  1. Reply Jackie Cangro Oct 13,2017 9:01 AM

    What a wonderful tribute, Lorraine. I didn’t know there was a Pat Conroy Festival, but now I wish I could go! Do you have a favorite Pat Conroy book?

    • Reply lorraine Oct 13,2017 11:05 AM

      Hi Jackie – Well, it’s been a while since read his earlier ones, South of Broad the most recent read. Knowing now that a dear friend who was gay and a piano player inspired this work, might suggest that one if you’re up for heartbreaking. It was darker than others. Haven’t read The Great Santini. As I wrote, plan to read his latest, The Death of Santini. The Literary Festival sounds wonderful. There’s also a Literary Center you can visit anytime, on my travel list! Thanks for writing. Lorraine

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