THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508020632
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE D'ORSO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 190 lines
SO THE BOOK IS finally out, five years late but what the hell, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do, and Pat Conroy has had plenty to do during the past decade besides write the next great American novel.
Consider, first, the challenge of fame. You think it's easy having a book leap to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and roost there for a year - a year - selling more than three million copies while becoming a major motion picture, with none other than Barbra Streisand herself calling to welcome you aboard as screenwriter and you refuse to believe it's really her on the other end of the line until she belts out a chorus of ``People'' to prove it?
That's what happened with ``The Prince of Tides,'' which came out in 1986 and which turned Pat Conroy's life into a living nightmare. It wasn't his first book, nor was it the only one to be made into a movie. ``The Water is Wide'' (1972), ``The Great Santini'' (1976), ``The Lords of Discipline'' (1980) - they all jumped from hard cover to the screen, but they were nothing like this. This was nuclear. This was insane. A coast-to-coast book tour, TV and radio spots from dawn to dusk, the lecture circuit, Barbra's people calling day and night about that screenplay, and the agent back in New York reminding him that he'd just inked a $3-million deal for his next two books, the first of which was due in 1990, so there was no time to lose.
Fine, he could handle that, if it weren't for his family, that fabled Conroy clan, America's most documented dysfunctional unit, the maddening wellspring for every word Pat Conroy had ever written, the heaving home and hearth that even now continued to haunt him with the tendrils of its volcanically twisted legacy, all rooted in the foul-mouthed, bullet-spitting, child-smacking, globe-bestriding Colossus himself, U.S. Marine Colonel Don Conroy, model for ``The Great Santini,'' perhaps the fiercest father figure in all of American literature.
The Colonel went ballistic when that book first came out, cursing as he flung it across his living room. But it didn't take the old man long to warm to the glow of being an honest-to-god, larger-than-life legend, and soon he was driving around his home town down in South Carolina with SANTINI plates screwed to the bumper of his Cadillac, joining his son at book signings, manning his own table with his own ink pen and a line of fans longer than Pat's waiting for his signature. Old likable, lovable, the Colonel would write, adding, My son has a wonderful imagination.
Funny, that. But not to Conroy's mother, Peg, who at first had defended her husband and family from the painful portraits Pat painted on his pages, then turned around and divorced the bastard, tossing a copy of ``Santini'' on the judge's bench as proof of the man's violent nature. Not long after, in 1984, Peg Conroy lay on her deathbed in the last throes of cancer, facing her son the novelist and telling him how hard it was for her to relax, ``knowing you're going to write down every damn word I say.''
He did, though none appeared in ``The Prince of Tides.'' That book was almost done by the time Peg passed away. When it appeared, it was Conroy's sister Carol's turn to feel used and betrayed by her brother, who modeled one of the story's central characters, a suicidal poet named Savannah, after her. Carol was, and still is, a poet, and to this day she has not spoken a word to Pat.
That hurt - it still hurts - but it hasn't kept Conroy from continuing to plumb the troubled souls of his parents and six siblings, turning their rapier-sharp wit and wounded psyches into the black humor and bittersweet pathos that infect the pages of each of his novels. That he surrounds those crackling conversations with settings as lush and lyrical as any in all of literature does nothing to soften the edge. Both in fact and in fiction, Pat Conroy's people are in pain.
It was his own anguish that finally brought Conroy to his knees during that ``Prince of Tides'' tour. Call it a nervous breakdown. He does. He'd had one before, in the wake of ``Santini,'' but this was far worse. The tornado of fame, the tight yolk of fortune, his fractured family and a crumbling marriage - his second - sent him reeling back to Beaufort, S.C., where he tossed his bags on the floor of his Fripp Island home and settled into some serious sessions with a psychotherapist over at Hilton Head.
Friends told him he'd gone far enough. He had made a career of picking through the emotional entrails of his life and the lives of those around him, laying them bare for the world to examine, and the price had been high. Too high. His landscape was littered with carcasses, and now, at age 49, he was dangerously close to adding his own - all gut-busting 250 pounds of it - to the pile.
So he checked out, spent time in his beloved kitchen, filled his home, as always, with friends and laughter. But something was missing. Suffering, he told his friends, it's my native land. How could he leave it? Wasn't it Tolstoy who spoke of the sameness of happy families? What great writer ever came from a happy family? No, Conroy considered himself blessed to have come from an unhappy one, and so he returned to those rich, agonizing roots, digging in this time with the death of his mother. That would become the basis of his new book. And his four brothers, including the youngest, Tom - sad, schizophrenic Tom - it would now be their turn to take center stage, too.
The 1990 deadline came and went, but no matter. Conroy's editor, Nan Talese, the doyenne of Doubleday, was more than patient. She knew what she was getting when she got Pat Conroy. He wrote like he cooked, and he so loved to cook - planned, in fact, to make the narrator of this new story a food writer, a gourmet chef, a blustery bon vivant not unlike himself. Talese understood that her star writer's life, like his language, was a sumptuous stew, thick and seasoned, bubbling at a slow burn until it was finally ready to serve. There could be no rush. The stuff had to simmer.
And it did. For a year, then another, and another. And then it was 1993, and the book was still nowhere near done. Conroy's cash was disappearing - only a fraction of that $3 million was paid up front - a back problem landed him in a hospital for surgery, and the marriage that had been unraveling since the mid-'80s was now in rigor mortis. Talese realized something was wrong when the chapters stopped arriving that fall, and Conroy knew he was in trouble when he went shopping one afternoon for a gun.
It was time to return to Hilton Head, this time twice a week. Once again the therapy put Conroy's legs back under him and now he came back to the book with a vengeance, seeing it through to the end, the entire epic saga, a sweeping story far bigger and broader than anything he had ever attempted, its setting ranging from Italy to the Ukraine to, of course, the Carolina coastland where a Conroy story always returns. The plot was grandiose, stitching the Holocaust to Vietnam to Hollywood. The vast tapestry was finally nearing completion when Conroy's phone rang last November with news that Tom, the baby of the family, had leaped to his death from an 18-story building in downtown Columbia.
Conroy was numbed, not only because his brother was dead but because, uncannily, he was at that moment working on a chapter in which a character fashioned after Tom kills himself.
Again Conroy checked out, this time from grief not depression. It was healthy. It was needed. And by year's end he was back with his paper and pen - to this day he does not type, thanks to his father, who forbade his sons to learn such a ``sissy'' skill in high school.
In mid-January Talese got a call. The book was finished. Gone was the chapter on the brother's suicide. What remained was a manuscript massive enough to sink the boat Conroy keeps on the creek by his home. When the package landed on Talese's desk, she could hardly lift it. More than 2,000 pages. Read it and weep.
It took three months to edit, with Conroy camped in a hotel room just up the street from Talese's Manhattan home, the two of them cutting and slicing until they had a novel half the original size, the book Doubleday had been holding its breath for for nine years. ``Beach Music,'' they would call it.
And now it is out, debuting last month on the Times' best-seller list at - what else? - No. 1, already a million copies in print, a $5.1-million contract in hand from Paramount for Conroy to write the screenplay, and a 34-city tour well under way, including an appearance this weekend in Virginia Beach.
In other words, the man's got a blockbuster on his hands, as expected, which means he ought to be due for another chest-heaving, rug-hugging collapse right about now. But no, he says, this time is different. He's taking care of himself, actually trying to work out while he's on the road, though it's tough swimming laps in those kidney-shaped hotel pools. As for the family backlash, he says, there's been none this time. He wasn't sure how his brothers would react, but now he needn't hold his breath. They love it, he says. Sure, he still hasn't heard from Carol, but that's OK. Someday, he says. Someday.
And the Colonel? There are two fathers in ``Beach Music,'' a blowhard, alcoholic judge and a brutally sadistic general. Son, the Colonel said to Conroy early this summer, I hear you gave me two for the price of one this time. Dad, answered Conroy, when will I ever escape your larger-than-life ass?
The answer, Conroy knows, and so do the legions of readers who lap up his cascading words like sweet southern syrup, is never.
And he is happy with that.
And so are they. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JAMIE FRANCIS
Pat Conroy will sign copies of ``Beach Music,'' Saturday from 10
a.m. to noon at Barnes and Noble Booksellers, 4485 Virginia Beach
Blvd.
FILE PHOTO
Pat Conroy's ``Beach Music'' debuted on the Times' best-seller list
at - what else? - No. 1.
Graphic
PAT CONROY DAY
Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf has proclaimed Friday
``Pat Conroy Day.'' There will be a reception from 7:30 p.m. to
12:30 a.m. Friday at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts.
Entertainment includes Beach Music performers O.C. Smith, Gary
``U.S.'' Bonds, Chuck Jackson and others. Admission is by
invitation. Call 340-7037 for information.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY BOOKS by CNB