Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201030198
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MOLLY O'NEILL THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
CONROY'S LIFE IS A TALE OF TIDES
For most of his 46 years, Pat Conroy has been trying to tell the truth of his childhood through his writing. To him, "the truth" is a psychic Brillo pad, one that could smooth away the memory of his first 18 years. Each publication and every premiere opens wounds and could be the balm that heals them."The Prince of Tides," playing at Valley View Mall 6 and Salem Valley 8, is the closest he's come to the truth, he says. The film, based on his most recent autobiographical novel and for which he co-wrote the screenplay, stars and was directed by Barbra Streisand. It scored opening weekend ticket sales of $10 million.
Conroy is hopeful that this time the balm may overcome the bruises. He is even magnanimous about his bete noire.
"Dad never hit a kid until he was old enough to walk and he never hit girls," said Conroy.
Col. Donald N. Conroy, a Marine fighter pilot, didn't exactly coddle his seven children. The most that Pat Conroy grants his father is that he helped develop the family's sense of humor.
"Once my brother Jim fell out of a tree and came in crying. Dad said, `Knock off the crying, Jocko.' We could feel the slam coming and we thought it was so funny that this guy who was over 6 feet tall was going to pound a little bleeding boy. We cracked up. So Dad heaves a glass of milk at my face and it smashes and there is broken glass and blood all over and Mom says, `Nice going, Don, you blinded the kid.' "
As she drove her son to the hospital, Peggy Conroy uttered what he calls "the most chilling refrain of my childhood." Nothing happened at dinner, she said. "The Conroy boys were playing touch football and when you tried to get your father, you fell and hit your head on a water spigot."
That is what Pat Conroy told the doctor who treated his split eyebrow. He believed the story himself until he was 30.
Since then, he has been teasing the truth from the humid jungle of his memory. In the process he has become a best-selling author and screenwriter. "The Prince of Tides" is his second screenplay. He is working on two other films and finishing his sixth book. He uses writing, he says, to tell the truth, to avoid the truth, to tame the truth.
He knows for sure that he is the first-born son of a violent man and a self-fashioned Scarlett O'Hara, whose Tara was a progression of military bases.
"She had seven children and six miscarriages," said Conroy. "My sister Carol says the miscarriages were the lucky ones."
Donald Patrick Conroy was born in 1945 and was followed by two sisters and four brothers. The Conroys attended 11 schools in 12 years, were A students and star athletes.
"You hide in achievement and humor," he said. "You project strength and you lie. You lie all the time."
He told his first small truth as a student at Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C. After a lecture on family violence, he wrote a story about his grandmother, an alcoholic. "It was the first crack in the family code of silence," he said.
Having flicked fiction at his truth like a wet towel, Conroy took cover under a steamy shower of words. "The Boo" was a non-fiction account of a colonel at the Citadel. He wrote the 250-page book by hand and found a publisher in the telephone directory: "R.L. Bryant, Invitations, Birth Announcements, Books."
He found a lower bidder in Virginia; he had to pay only $3,000 to have the book printed. After graduation, he avoided the draft by teaching English and coaching at a tiny school in Beaufort, S.C. By then he was reckoning with his own war. Grandiloquence was battling denial, forgiveness was struggling against bitterness. And a certain determined naivete emerged.
When he finished "The Water Is Wide," for instance, a non-fiction book that became the 1974 movie "Conrack," Conroy sent the manuscript to a literary agent. "He called and said that Houghton Mifflin could do the book for $7,500, and I said, `Hell, I can get it done cheaper than that in Charleston.' I never imagined that they were going to pay me."
In 1972 he began "The Great Santini," a 480-page epic about a Southern military family headed by a wife-beating child abuser, aka Santini, his father's nickname for himself when he was a young stunt pilot.
"I'd gotten close enough to the truth to precipitate a breakdown," said Conroy. He tried to commit suicide in 1975. He says that each of his projects elicits the same despair, but he and his family have learned to live with it.
"I thought I wrote these books because I hated my parents," he said. "But I realized that I had to create an idealized version of them. I had to make them lovable."
It isn't easy to love Henry Wingo of "The Prince of Tides," a South Carolina shrimper who baits and bruises his family much more skillfully than he fishes. In this story, the wife is less victim and more social striver than the wives in his earlier works, and their offspring aren't as precocious. They are older. Humor no longer compensates for the failure of love in their lives.
They have breakdowns, break hearts, get hurt and create Gothic dramas to make up for the everyday life that seems to elude them. "The bruises show more when you get older," said Conroy.
In addition to being literary therapy, his writing has steadily raised his tax bracket. Critics called "The Great Santini" a "flagrantly overwritten melodrama," but the book still sells steadily and the movie was a critical success. One critic claimed that "The Prince of Tides" was the sort of "Confederate prose" that "gave Southern writing a bad name." To Pat Conroy, that's like saying his family gives Southern life a bad name.
After divorcing his father, his mother died of leukemia in 1984. Col. Conroy retired from the Marine Corps in 1973. He lives in Atlanta and signs his Christmas cards "The Great Santini."
Thinking about the end of "The Prince of Tides," when the hero talks about the importance of forgiving, the author said is not so sure. Last summer, in an interview with Atlanta Magazine, his father dismissed his son's version of his youth, saying, "Pat had an ideal childhood." They haven't spoken since. "It never stops," said Pat Conroy. "I am not sure I believe that forgiveness is the appropriate response."