Novelist Turns Adversity Into Profit : Pat Conroy’s Family Is the Stuff of Fiction

Misfortune has been good to novelist Pat Conroy.

It gave him a family of disciplinarians, misfits, eccentrics, liars and loudmouths.

It gave him a Southern childhood in which the bizarre competed with the merely strange.

It gave him a military school education apparently imported from Sparta by way of Prussia.

It gave him a divorce and a breakdown followed by intensive therapy.

It gave him everything he needed to write best sellers, make millions and live in Rome.

How many people would want Conroy’s luck, even with its rewards, is questionable. Even Conroy, 41, sometimes seems baffled by his knack for turning the agony of personal experience into profitable fiction.

“I don’t understand it,” Conroy said recently of his latest success, “The Prince of Tides” (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95), which moved on to national best-seller lists almost before it was published. The novel, which recapitulates recent Southern history from school integration to industrial pollution and also includes many scenes set in 1980s New York, doesn’t seem made for that particular kind of success, Conroy said. Even more puzzling, he added, was why the publisher gambled on a huge first printing of 350,000 copies for the 567-page novel. “They didn’t ask me,” he commented with a shrug during an interview.

These statements are terse by Conroy’s usual standards. Like his books, Conroy is most often expansive, a storyteller from the Southern mold. He also is a man with the hefty build, appetites and passions of a good ol’ boy.

It is exactly these supposedly Southern qualities that seem to have turned off some critics, both to “The Prince of Tides” and earlier works such as “The Lords of Discipline,” based on Conroy’s years at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C. Conroy probably is best known--or at least recognizable--as the author of “The Great Santini,” a novel about a martinet military aviator and his long-suffering family, which was made into a movie by the same name starring Robert Duvall.

Some reviewers of “The Prince of Tides” have complained that the book is too long and too larded with heaps of glistening, fatty prose. Worse, they’ve asserted, the incidents and characters in the saga of South Carolina’s Wingo family are too fantastic, “sentimental” or “melodramatic” to be believed.

Shrugs Off Critics

Told of one particular bad review, Conroy shrugged again and said, “He probably wanted me to only write about the romance between the coach and the psychiatrist. He wanted a little book. I know who he is. He’s a New York critic.”

What reviewers haven’t taken into account, Conroy said, is that many of the events in the new novel are based on real life. What seems implausible--a white dolphin, a captive Bengal tiger, a criminal who also is a giant, for example--to a critic in New York or Los Angeles, can be real in coastal South Carolina, he said.

More importantly, Conroy added, his fictional family of shrimpers on the humid Atlantic Coast contains no more offbeat characters than his actual family, which is truly larger--and possibly stranger--than life.

Over the years, Conroy has developed a standard repertory of stories about his family and himself. One that got a wide hearing earlier this year at the American Booksellers Assn. is about how his father met his mother.

“My father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot, sent to Atlanta, Ga., during World War II,” he recounted. “While he was out on Peachtree Street hustling broads, as he so elegantly phrases it, my mother, 17 years old, crossed the street to catch a bus and walked into her hideous history. My father pursued her, as Chicago Irishmen do. My mother ignored him, as Southern girls are supposed to. He begged her for her phone number. He said he was going to die in the war very soon. . . . Her bus came. She got on, walked back, and sat down as my father pleaded for her number. The bus started taking off and my father, in a foot race, went after her until my mother leaned out and screamed out the phone number. As children hearing this story we would scream, ‘Tell him the wrong number, Mom.’ ”

Relatives and Movies

Because several of his books not only have been optioned, but actually made into movies (“The Lords of Discipline,” “The Water Is Wide” filmed as “Conrack,” in addition to “The Great Santini”), Conroy told the booksellers that all his relatives now expect to be portrayed in movies. When she was dying of cancer a couple of years ago, Conroy’s mother demanded to know if she was in the yet-to-be-published “The Prince of Tides.” After he conceded that she was, Conroy recounted that she responded by saying, “I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role.”

The Conroy family also has its share of religious zealots who left church feeling “bad if they came out without having kissed a rattlesnake on top of the head” and who have picketed his book-signing appearances to “beg people for the love of God not to buy my book,” the author said.

Religion coupled with a hazy knowledge of geography also has played a role in Conroy’s life.

When his mother visited him in Rome a few years ago, Conroy recalled during the interview, “She said she wanted to see Lourdes (the Catholic shrine in France). I said, ‘Mama, Lourdes is a thousand miles from here.’ She thought Europe was a little bitty place like Rhode Island. We ended up showing her most of the churches in Rome.”

Getting Published

Conroy, a former teacher and football coach, has become a cosmopolitan sort despite a beginning as a writer that was almost hopelessly naive. In fact, Conroy’s story of how he became a published author has achieved the status of a staple anecdote. That first book, titled “The Boo” after the nickname of a colonel at The Citadel, was self-published with the $1,500 or $2,000 (the figure varies) Conroy borrowed from the bank in Beaufort, S.C., headed by president Willie Shepherd, a Citadel graduate and a soft touch for a fellow alumni. After that, Conroy figured he had discovered the secret of becoming a published, if indebted, author.

When he had finished his next book, “The Water Is Wide,” Conroy was advised to get an agent, which he did, although he had only a vague idea of what a literary agent did. Then when agent Julian Bach telephoned him with the news that a publisher had agreed to bring out the novel, Conroy was pleased but confused. As Conroy tells it, Bach said, “‘Pat, here’s the great news: $7,500.’ ” Conroy, not realizing that publishers pay authors, replied, “Julian, I don’t think Willie Shepherd is going to lend me that much money.”