To Thine Own Self...Remembering Pat Conroy

            The most honest writer in America is gone.  Pat Conroy passed away last week and the literary world is remembering him as a giant who used the stuff of his own life to craft unforgettable fiction and nonfiction.  I remember him as one of the warmest, most generous people I’ve ever been around.

            It was 1986.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, was scheduled for publication, and my editor, on a lark, had sent Pat a copy of the bound manuscript.  Pat was already a household name in American letters with The Water Is Wide and The Great Santini, both of which had been made into acclaimed movies -- not likely to have any interest in a novice like me.  But, incredibly, he did.

            Pat had been living in Italy, but came home to do the promotional tour for his new novel, The Prince of Tides, which was becoming a huge success.  One of his stops was Charlotte and a signing with his longtime friend, bookseller John Barringer.  And one of the publicity events in conjunction was a visit to the television station where I worked.

            I made it a point to meet Pat, mostly because I admired his work so much, but maybe secretly hoping some of  his talent might rub off on me.  He recognized my name immediately.  “My agent gave me your book, and I read it on the plane back home.  It’s terrific.”  I, who made a living gabbing on television, was speechless.  Pat was not only effusive in his praise and encouragement, he offered on the spot to write a “blurb,” a brief appraisal that my publisher could use in promoting the book.  Over time, I learned that Pat was just that way – a kind-hearted man who always had time to share himself with other writers, especially the new and struggling.

            Several years later, I introduced Pat to a standing-room-only crowd at a Charlotte literary festival.  We had a chance to visit backstage before the event, and I told Pat that like him, I was raised by a hard-nosed military father.  “I’m so sorry,” he said with a smile.  Pat’s dad, a Marine Corps pilot, was a monster who browbeat, belittled, and physically abused his wife and children.  Pat captured him exquisitely in The Great Santini.  My own father was mild by comparison, but Pat and I toted around similar baggage. 

            Pat was brutally honest in his writing.  In both fiction and nonfiction, he used the angst of his youth to craft stories that were so painfully authentic that they could make you cringe and cry.  He stepped on some toes and made some enemies, but he did it anyway because he had to.  “The reason I write,” he said in an interview, “is to explain my life to myself.  I’ve also discovered that when I do, I’m explaining other people’s lives to them.”

Pat created out of himself, and in that, he was a great inspiration to me and so many others who scribble, and even those who don’t.  He was the epitome of that oft-quoted line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Polonius says to his son Laertes, This above all: to thine own self be true.

I’m working on a new novel now, and reaching back into my own sometimes-painful youth, the way Pat Conroy did so eloquently and unflinchingly.  As I write, I’m aware of a dim figure looking over my shoulder, and with that presence, I feel braver, more sure of myself.  No, the Pat Conroy I knew did not die last week and never will.

And That Reminds Me...

The ultimate payoff for a writer is when a reader says, “That reminds me…”  meaning that something you wrote – a character, a place, a situation, an emotion – triggered something from the reader’s own experience.  Sure, a check in the mailbox is nice, especially when it arrives in the nick of time, but checks get cashed and money gets spent.  What connects with a reader is more likely to last.

I thought about that when I got a note from a friend who had read my recent blog “Among The Graves At Thiacourt,” about my visit to an American cemetery in France, the final resting place of 4,000 of our soldiers from World War One.  For my friend, it brought back the memory and emotion of his visit to the cemetery at Omaha Beach, where American casualties from World War Two are buried.  And that’s the magic of writing and reading: two imaginations intersect through the telling of a story.  What I wrote resonated with my friend.  I couldn’t ask for more.

I get a fair number of similar responses from folks who read my stories.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, is set in a small town somewhere in the South.  It bears a pretty good resemblance to the small southern town where I grew up.  I set the story there because it was familiar territory.  I populated my fictional town with the kinds of people I knew growing up.  After the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who said, “You wrote about my hometown in Iowa.”  That told me there was a good measure of universality about the characters and the story, and that’s why it resonated with a reader from another part of the country.

Setting and plot can trigger something in a reader’s imagination, but the part of a story that’s most likely to connect is character.  For that to happen, a writer has to be honest and authentic with the characters he or she imagines.  The writer is asking a reader to take a leap of faith into the story, and to do that, the leap has to start from solid ground.  You have to be able to believe the character is plausible – someone you might know – and the character has to be presented warts and all.  We human beings are combinations of dark and light, and if, in presenting a character’s story I omit the dark places, you know right away the character isn’t authentic.  The same goes if something the character says or does doesn’t ring true.  And that probably means you aren’t ready to take the leap of faith.

The central character in Home Fires Burning is a crusty curmudgeon of a small-town newspaper editor named Jake Tibbetts.  I knew I had presented Jake honestly and authentically when a reader called me and said, “I stayed up all night with that book, and if I could have gotten my hands on Jake Tibbetts at three o’clock this morning, I’da wrung his neck.”  But then he went on to say that Jake had a fiercely independent streak and a willingness to speak his mind, good traits for a newspaper editor.  My reader and I had connected through Jake.

A story is a meeting place between two imaginations – the writer’s and the reader’s.  Every reader brings his or her own knowledge, experiences, beliefs and emotions to the reading of the story and finds things in it the writer might never have suspected were there.  It’s a kind of alchemy, a magic that exists nowhere else, and it makes each reader’s experience with the story unique.  When a reader tells me it worked, I’m satisfied.

But…I’m also happy to find a check in the mailbox.

Santa Claus Is Coming, Regardless

It starts every year about this time, without fail: grownups begin to threaten young people over Santa Claus.  The air is full of dire predictions about what might happen Christmas Eve if children aren’t something akin to saintly.  It is the bludgeon used to produce clean plates at mealtime, tidy rooms, impeccable manners, and timely homework.

Of course, adults have been putting the evil eye on children’s behavior since time immemorial.  My grandmother, for example, had a special word of terror for kids who trampled her flowers, tracked mud on her rug, or swung too high in her porch swing.  “Nasty stinkin’ young’uns,” she bark, “I’m gonna pinch your heads off!”  Mama Cooper was a sweet and kind person who never would have pinched the head off a radish, much less a child, but she could strike fear into her grandchildren.  We were careful around her flowers, her rug, and her porch swing.

So the grownup weapon of fear is a time-honored tradition.  But the direst predictions of ruin and misfortune, it seems, are always saved for the Christmas season.  “If you don’t clean up your plate, Santa Claus won’t come.”  “Act ugly one more time, buster, and you’ll find a bag of switches under the tree.”  Well, baloney.

I came to my senses about the Santa Claus business when I met Jake Tibbetts, a crotchety old newspaper editor who appeared in my imagination one day and then took over the pages of my first novel, Home Fires Burning.  Jake had a built-in bull-hockey detector and could spot nonsense a mile away.  Jake’s grandson Lonnie lived with Jake and his wife Pastine, and when Christmas rolled around, Mama Pastine put the pox on Lonnie about Santa’s upcoming visit.

At the breakfast table one morning, Lonnie let a mild oath slip from his ten-year-old lips.  Mama Pastine pounced.  “Santa Claus has no truck with blasphemers,” she said.

“Hogwash,” Daddy Jake snorted.  “Santa Claus makes no moral judgments.  His sole responsibility is to make young folks happy.  Even bad ones.  Even TERRIBLE ones.”

“Then why,” Lonnie asked, “does he brings switches to some kids?”

Jake replied, “This business about switches is pure folklore.  Did you ever know anybody who really got switches for Christmas?  Even one?”

Lonnie couldn’t think of a single one.

“Right,” said Daddy Jake.  “I have been on this earth for sixty-four years, and I have encountered some of the meanest, vilest, smelliest, most undeserving creatures the Good Lord ever allowed to creep and crawl.  And not one of them ever got switches for Christmas.  Lots of ‘em were told they’d get switches.  Lots of ‘em laid in their beds trembling through Christmas Eve, just knowing they’d find a stocking full of hickory branches come morning.  But you know what they found?  Goodies.  Even the worst of ‘em got some kind of goodies.  And for one small instant, every child who lives and breathes is happy and good, even if he is as mean as a snake every other instant.  That’s what Santa Claus is for, anyhow.”

Well, Daddy Jake said it better than I ever could.  I believe with all my heart that he is right, just as I have always believed fervently in Santa Claus and still do.  Santa Claus is for real.  Just look in a kid’s eyes and you’ll see him.

Grownups are wrong when they threaten kids with the loss of Santa.  We adult types need to grant the kids their unfettered moment of magic.  If they act up, threaten to pinch their heads off.  But leave Santa out of it.

A Sense of History

I like history.  I think we have to know where we’ve been before we can understand how and why we got where we are now.

It’s true of the world at large, and a lot of what we call history is the recounting of momentous events and larger-than-life people doing momentous things.  But I’m even more interested in small histories -- the very personal, intimate stories of individuals.  The sum of our small histories gives texture and meaning to the larger sweep of mankind.

If you read one of my novels, you know the importance I attach to backstory.  I have to know how my characters got here, how the baggage they tote from their past affects how they’re moving through the present.  When I offer a story, I’m like a lawyer arguing a case before a jury.  I need to give enough background to let you know that my story and characters are authentic.  I need to offer what lawyers call extenuating and mitigating circumstances.  In my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, I devote chapters to my central character’s history.  In other works, it may be a sentence or paragraph here and there.  But the backstory is crucial to me in understanding the character, and then presenting the character to my readers.

That really hit home when the Hallmark Hall of Fame folks were making a movie from my first novel, Home Fires Burning.  I adapted the two-hour screenplay from a 500-page novel, so I had to leave out a great deal.  But Glenn Jordan, the director, required the cast members to read the book before they came to the set, and I’m sure that in a thousand ways, they brought a richer understanding of their characters to the portrayal.

StoryLine Project

My love of histories large and small is what intrigues me about an oral history project going on these days in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  It’s called StoryLine, and it’s based on the premise that when people in a community share their stories, it fosters an understanding of what they have in common.  StoryLine does its work from a small bus that serves as a studio.  You and a story partner sit down before microphones and have a conversation about who you are and where you come from.  Some of the stories, in edited form, air on local radio stations.  They all go into an archive at the Forsyth County Library: a treasure trove for the community’s understanding of itself, now and in the future.

But you don’t have to have a studio in a bus to record history.  Any kind of recording device will do just fine.  The thing is to sit down with a friend or relative and just talk about who you are, how you got where you are now, your hopes and dreams.  It’s especially important for the older generations in our families.  Before it’s too late, preserve their stories.  I wish I had been smart enough to do that with my parents.  When they passed on, I lost a good bit of my own history.  I’m poorer for that.

I once heard a semi-famous man say, “We never see the handwriting on the wall until our backs are to it.”  I think he was right in the sense that we often turn our backs on our history and keep repeating mistakes.  But it needn’t be that way.  It takes having a sense of and appreciation for history – and then, like StoryLine, doing something about it.