Prince of Pain Tries to Find Happy Ending

Like a character in one of his novels, there he was, spending his 50th birthday in a California divorce court. A second split in what Pat Conroy euphemistically calls “a sloppily lived life.”

Then, during a recess, the author had an epiphany--in the men’s room, of all places.

He remembers looking at his body, saying to himself: “My hands are 50 years old. I am standing on a 50-year-old foot. . . . Every part of my body is a half-century old.

“And all of a sudden I started thinking seriously about, I only had a certain number of books I was going to write until I die. . . . What were they? Then I also wanted to just make sure I made friends. I mean, all these fights, what have they been all about?”

Tough questions for a man whose life’s work has won him countless fans but caused him great personal grief.

His novels “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of Tides” alienated him from members of his family.

“The Lords of Discipline” made him persona non grata at his alma mater.

“Beach Music” nearly drove him to suicide.

Now, somewhere past midlife, Conroy is facing his most difficult challenge--writing his own happy ending.

He made peace with his father, Marine Col. Donald Conroy, before the elder Conroy died in 1998 of colon cancer.

He has patched things up with the Citadel, the Charleston military college whose brutality and bigotry he exposed in “The Lords.” Last month, just before his 55th birthday, the school that once barred him as a traitor embraced him with an honorary degree.

He has turned once again to nonfiction, the genre he began his career with in 1968. His newest book, titled “My Losing Season: A Point Guard’s Way of Knowledge,” due out next year, is about his senior-year basketball team at the Citadel.

Conroy is using real names in the book, and his friends are terrified. Their reaction has made him reconsider decisions he’s made as an author.

“There’s power in the naming of people,” he says, as if he had never quite fathomed that before. “Instead of saying I write autobiographically, I wish I’d said, ‘Oh, I made it all up. . . . ‘ “

It’s too late for that.

Thinly Veiled Portrait

Pat Conroy has been picking at the carcass of his family for years. The oldest of seven children, he has made a living telling stories that most people try to hide.

His mother was the poor Southern belle who read “Gone With the Wind” to him at bedtime. In the film of “The Prince of Tides,” which draws on the family’s history of mental illness, Kate Nelligan plays the character based on his mother with a weary Southern sadness.

In the film of “The Great Santini,” Robert Duvall swaggers and stumbles through a thinly veiled portrait of Conroy’s father. The novel’s title was the father’s real nom de guerre.

The colonel was the Northern Neanderthal from Chicago. Fighter pilot. Member of the famous Black Sheep Squadron. Veteran of World War II, Korea and two tours in Vietnam.

This was the man who, after Pat scored 25 points in a college basketball game, pulled him aside, pushed him against a wall and, cursing, said, “I just want you to know that you couldn’t hold my jock as a basketball player.”

“I thought I wrote ‘The Great Santini’ because I hated my father’s guts,” says Conroy, his blue Irish eyes hardening, his red Irish cheeks flushing.

It took him years, he says, to realize that he really wrote the book because he loved his father “and couldn’t figure out why he didn’t love me.”

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, says Conroy’s works have been attempts at creating a world that could live up to his expectations of how things should be.

“If you read ‘Santini,’ you see it was a love letter,” says Marlette, a fellow military brat whom Conroy considers his best friend. “And ‘Lords of Discipline’ . . . Pat’s in love with the truth.”

In his pursuit of that truth, Conroy spares no one--especially not himself.

An essay prepared for Forbes magazine gives a glimpse of Conroy’s upcoming book. He describes visiting the home of Al Kroboth, a player on his senior basketball team.

Conroy avoided the draft after graduating from the Citadel, then became an antiwar protester. Kroboth went to Vietnam. When his A-6 Warthog was shot down, Kroboth suffered a broken back and broken neck. He was a prisoner of war.

“It had never once occurred to me,” Conroy writes, “that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth’s house in Roselle, N.J.: an American coward spending the night with an American hero.”

*

Conroy and his wife, Alabama-born novelist Sandra, share a story-and-a-half frame house on Fripp Island, a gated paradise of tidal marshes and white-sand beaches separated from the mainland by 17 miles and several bridges. Deer graze along the sand-strewn roads. Spanish moss hangs from trees as if someone had the job of draping it in just the right spots.

Conroy tries to maintain two daily routines: Read at least 200 pages, and take a swim or at least walk on the beach. White as a ghost and prone to melanoma, he swims just before dusk, shrimp skipping across the water as he wades in.

The Atlanta-born author has become part of the local landscape.

At his favorite local steam bar, regulars have brass plaques on the tables, and the walls are lined with autographed photos of minor celebrities who’ve eaten there. Conroy has neither plaque nor photo; the waitress who brings his tin bucket of oysters clearly has no idea who he is.

“As a writer, nobody knows who you are,” Conroy says. “It’s a great thing. You’re invisible.”

But not to those who have seen him at work.

Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, spent three years writing a movie script with Conroy. The script “finally disintegrated to junk mail,” but Rawls wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

He talks of long writing sessions with Conroy’s five-disk CD player endlessly cycling through Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and African chants.

“When he starts writing,” Rawls says, “it just sort of flows like this wonderful elixir.”

*

Conroy’s massive leather-inlaid mahogany desk is smothered with journals, account books and diaries. Scattered all over the floor and bed are loose pages from yellow legal pads--lists of words, chapter titles, names.

Conroy does everything in longhand, another thing he blames on his father.

He once enrolled in a typing class. The colonel found out.

“Son,” Conroy says, aping his father’s cold Chicago accent, “corporals type. Girls type. You’ll be a fighter pilot. You won’t need to type. . . . You’re dismissed.”

The study is like Conroy’s mind: cluttered. He confesses to having misplaced pages, only to find them after the book they were intended for has been published.

“So that gets into the next book,” he says nonchalantly.

The rest of Conroy’s house is a reflection of himself--with his wife’s tidying influences.

In every room there are books, floor to ceiling. Nearly one entire bookcase is dedicated to the works of Thomas Wolfe, whose “Look Homeward, Angel” convinced Conroy he should become a writer.

The couple’s kitchen is like a Renaissance still life: drying herbs, multicolored bottles of exotic oils, vegetables in varying stages of dissection.

The bathtubs are dusted with beach sand, and just about every room contains at least one empty wineglass. Everywhere there are reminders of family.

A kitchen wall is a collage of Conroy family moments.

There’s a Christmas list from his childhood.

There’s Carol, the poet sister whose struggle with mental illness inspired “The Prince of Tides.”

There’s youngest brother Tom, whose 1994 suicide prompted Conroy to retrieve “Beach Music” from his editor so he could resurrect a brother character who kills himself.

“I had to go change that,” he says, “because the book had enough sadness without that.”

And there is a black-and-white photo of three women marching down a street, a stiff wind molding cotton dresses to swollen bellies. “This is my mother and her two sisters,” Conroy says. “All of them are pregnant. . . . Two out of three of those kids are schizophrenic.”

As for the Great Santini, he has his own shrine.

As you enter the atrium, the first thing you see is a shadow box filled with medals, including five distinguished flying crosses.

The wall is lined with movie posters from “The Great Santini.” There’s a lonely oil painting of a flight jacket. Beside it is a photo of an older, white-goateed Col. Conroy sticking a gloved finger through a crack in the Berlin Wall.

Conroy made a studied effort not to be like his dad. He’s proud to have kept a vow never to hit his children or wives.

Conroy has often said that his books are dictated to him--screamed at him, really--by the hurt little boy he once was and, in many ways, still is. Rather than hardening him, Marlette says, Conroy’s upbringing has made him “an emotional tea bag.”

“He has to put everything through his bloodstream. He has to ingest the experience and then bleed it through his pores. . . . It’s painful.”

Conroy has been in therapy for years, and his doctor was there for him when he had his worst, most suicidal, breakdown, which occurred after he finished “Beach Music,” which was published in 1995.

He refuses to take drugs for fear they will take away his ability to write. His psychiatrist says he doesn’t need them.

“She said, ‘Pat, there’s enough wrong with your life to explain why you’re crazy.’ ”

Slowly, Conroy has developed his own self-help program.

Healing the Rifts

Last year, when a state senator proposed consolidating the Citadel with other Charleston colleges, Conroy wrote in an opposition letter to the Charleston newspaper: “I love the college more than anyone who ever lived. . . . “

The gesture was noticed, and Conroy has gone from pariah to official greeter. Today, a letter on Conroy stationery is sent to all incoming freshmen. It begins with the opening line of “The Lords of Discipline”:

“I wear the ring.”

Healing that rift was nothing compared with the detente he finally reached with his father.

Conroy believes the colonel took “Santini” as a personal challenge to become the father he had always thought he was. He went on book tours with his son; he joked with his children at family get-togethers and cried with them at Tom’s funeral.

Last year, Conroy wrote in Atlanta magazine that his old man had “had the best second act in the history of fathering.”

Conroy resigned himself long ago to the fact that his father would never say the words “I love you” or “I’m proud of you.” But it’s clear he still suffers from the want of those words.

People who visit Conroy get a tour of his adopted hometown, including stops at two cemeteries.

Across from the historic St. Helena Episcopal Church, Conroy stops by a brick wall at the grave of Anne Wales Christensen, better known to the literary world as Ann Head. She taught him creative writing at Beaufort High School.

“I come here whenever I publish a new book,” he says. “I say, ‘Ann, I published a new one. . . . Thanks for teaching me so well.’ ” His voice is manly and confident.

The next stop is the Beaufort National Cemetery and a grave with a white marble stone that says, “Great Santini.”

Conroy, his voice high-pitched and childlike, half-jokes about not being able to get the government to carve “The” on the stone.

“Dad!” he squeaks. “This is what you get for hitting me!”

Despite all of his success, the little boy is still there.

Still, something was different when, as he wrote his latest book, his imagination grappled with his team’s final game against its archrival, the Virginia Military Institute.

As Conroy watched his younger self suit up in the locker room, in stepped his fictional self, Will McLean, from “The Lords of Discipline.” Then he realized that he, the old, white-haired, paunchy Pat Conroy, was there too.

“It was a very schizophrenic moment for me as a writer,” he says. “But I wanted to explore it.”

Will questioned the old man’s being there, then scoffed at Conroy’s authority. Finally, Conroy says, he decided to put his creation in his place. He took away Will’s breath.

“I could see the fear in his eyes,” he says. “I said, ‘I can erase you. You don’t exist without me.’ . . . I said, ‘Go sit in the stands. . . . ‘

“And I write the game as it happened, not in fiction. And before Will went up he said, ‘How’s the game end? Does it end the same way?’ I said, ‘Watch, pal--and enjoy yourself.’ ”

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Conroy on Conroy

On his oeuvre:

“I thought there’d be a time where I’d just think, ‘Oh this is dreamlike prose.’ But it hasn’t happened. And I’m now old enough to realize it’s not going to happen. So you have to get by those doubts, and you just do.”

On why he writes about himself so much:

“To me it seems that’s the writer’s job. And certainly to expose yourself and the world you find yourself in, the world you see about you. That seems like a good description of what a writer should do.”

On the impact of “The Great Santini” on his family:

“I underestimated it. I underestimated the power of my dad’s reaction, my mom’s reaction. Mom hated it. Everybody did, except my brothers and sisters. That helped a great deal. But my cousins thought I was nuts. My uncle, my dad’s brothers and sisters hated me for years. And I was not, I did not prepare myself.”

On his bouts with mental illness, which started after his first marriage failed:

“I would have, it seemed like, complete nervous breakdowns. . . . And now it’s almost like I have one per book. I write a book, and some part of me breaks down. . . . But I also think that’s kind of normal from a childhood like I had.”

On writing about his losing basketball season:

“Loss is underestimated in America. . . . I don’t think you learn anything from winning. It just feels good, it feels great. You jump around. Wonderful, great feeling. But loss you think about. Loss makes you change the way you do things. Loss makes you consider how to do things differently. You never want to lose again after you’ve lost like we did that season.”

On his decision to protest the Vietnam War:

“I should have gone and done my duty for my country, then come back and run my mouth. I think that would have been fair. Then my country could have looked at that and said, ‘OK. He was over there. He did that. He knows what he’s talking about, and he has the right to talk.’ ”

On growing older:

“The thing I like about being older is you find out that not everything you thought when you were young was true, or that everything you defended was good and noble.”

On fiction:

“That’s one great thing about the novel. You can right wrongs. You’re building the world you want.”