Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508110075
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NICHOLAS A. BASBANES SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Fiction is where I go to tell the truth," the noted author said during an interview in New York City. "That is where I tell the darkest secrets about myself."
While not autobiographical in a rigidly conventional sense, each of the 49-year-old Atlanta native's books nevertheless has been inspired by people and events from his past, including "Beach Music" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), his latest work and his first to appear since release of the phenomenally successful "Prince of Tides" nine years ago.
If experience is any guide, people who see aspects of themselves in his writing may not be entirely flattered by the renderings they have received this time around.
"You have to understand that no writer has ever come up more innocently than I did," Conroy explained. "I was a military brat who moved every year from house to house throughout the South, everywhere the Marines had built their bases. I had this ambition to be a writer because that's what my mother wanted me to be. My assessment has always taken in what I came from. I can't deny that what I see in all my books is a single voice."
Conroy's first novel, "The Water Is Wide," published in 1972 when he was 27, was inspired by a year he spent teaching poor children at a school on Daufuskie Island, S.C., and became the basis of the film "Conrack" starring Jon Voight. "The Great Santini" explored the conflicts and confusion of a child torn between love, loyalty and fear of an abusive and often dangerous father.
When that book was published in 1976, Marine Col. Don Conroy - the model for the hard-nosed fighter pilot profiled in the novel and played memorably in the film version by Robert Duvall - was so outraged by what his son had written that he heaved his copy of the book across the family living room and disappeared for three days. When Don and Peg Conroy were being divorced a few years after that, Peg Conroy gave the presiding judge a copy of Pat's book as "evidence" of the abuse she had suffered over the years.
Four years later came "The Lords of Discipline," a devastating attack on the brutality often experienced among students in private military schools. Not surprisingly, Conroy graduated in 1967 from The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., a rigid military academy he attended reluctantly at the insistence of his father.
In "The Prince of Tides," Conroy probed even deeper into the realm of family relationships and personal crises, and achieved greater levels of artistic power. The narrator of that book, Tom Wingo, shared the same age as Conroy, and the South Carolina setting had much in common with the region of the author's youth.
A central character in "The Prince of Tides" was Lila Wingo, Tom's mother, who was modeled loosely on Peg Conroy. She died in 1984 of leukemia while Conroy was finishing the novel.
"My mother was a complicated woman," he said. "I loved her dearly, but there were times when I hated her. There were seven children, and she treated each one of us like cards in a tarot deck, always playing one off against the other. Scarlett O'Hara was a one-cell animal compared to my mother."
In "Beach Music," the narrator, Jack McCall, moves to Italy in the early 1980s in the wake of a dispute involving custody of his daughter, still another scenario that parallels Conroy's own domestic experiences over the past decade. A food and travel writer, McCall is a man on the run from his past.
Though McCall's flight is occasioned by the suicide of his wife, much of his personal history involves a manipulative mother and a bullying father. When he returns home to be with his dying mother, he must deal with some wrenching truths, including the Holocaust experiences of his dead wife's parents.
Beyond the need to explain his world is the need to enchant and entertain, a talent that Conroy utilizes as well as any writer now at work. It is a gift that allows him to transcend the often ambiguous line that separates imitation from invention.
"To me, story is the holiest thing," Conroy said. "Stories have to move me. If I am not moved, I will not write them."
Conroy makes clear that there "has been a great raging depression" in his family, a pervasive anxiety that has led to five suicide attempts over the years, the most recent resulting in the death last year of his youngest brother, Tom - the model, in a sadly ironic way, for a paranoid schizophrenic character in "Beach Music" named John Hardin.
"I was very worried about Tom reading the book when it came out, because I knew it would be no big stretch for anyone in the family to know who I was writing about," Conroy said. "I had made up instances with John Hardin. I had made up dialogue, and in one late draft I actually had him killing himself. I was hiding this from Tom, trying to figure out ways to approach him and discuss it with him before the book came out."
Before such a conversation could take place, Conroy got a telephone call last August with the awful news that Tom had jumped off the roof of an 18-story apartment building in Columbia, S.C., killing himself.
"I called my editor, Nan Talese, in New York and told her I had to change that part of the book. I just said, `OK, he's back; he didn't die.' I brought him back from the dead."
In an odd way, Conroy said the reason he took nine years to complete "Beach Music" can be traced to the overwhelming success he experienced with "The Prince of Tides," which at last count had 5 million copies in print worldwide.
What he feared most of all was that the expectations of an enormous new readership might force him to abandon the qualities he valued most as a writer.
"I had always felt that if I could write things that moved me, I could write things that moved other people," he said. "There was always passion when I sat down to write, and I don't ever want to lose that."
Nicholas A. Basbanes is a Massachusetts author and free-lance writer. His book, "A Gentle Madness," is being published this month by Henry Holt.
by CNB