Pat Conroy: Treasure Of The Palmetto Coast

 OTR scoured his Internet sources today looking for a post or two about the birth of the American novelist, Pat Conroy, born in Atlanta on this day in 1945.  Alas, there was nothing to find and he was left with the happy task of writing a few words about the author and his work.

Even in his fiction, Pat Conroy has a way of writing about himself and all of us as we face the challenges and adversities - mental and physical - of growing into young adulthood and beyond. Stated another way, Conroy has extraordinary skill in probing the long childhoods many of us face as we grow old. For him, it's an arduous journey, carried out with the same reality that comes with recognizing nature as a cruel mother. Yes, there is beauty and light along the way, but the mountains can't stand without the valleys, and Conroy's reality has its share of darkness. Some may not enjoy that journey, but it is a good dose of reality and OTR and millions of other readers hold Conroy in high esteem.

In 1977, Conroy's book, The River is Wide, was hardly five years old when OTR moved to the edge of the ocean east of Savannah and a mere five miles across the sound from the book's setting on Daufuskie Island. In a matter of months, OTR succumbed to life on a sea island and having lived there for eleven years - there's a poem about it - was never quite the same.  The coast obviously had a similar effect on Conroy a decade earlier, and  over the next forty years he would blend his experience with the Lowcountry setting and produce many books. His latest, My Reading Life (2010), is a memoir of sorts recalling his love of reading and listing the essential and influential books in his life.

Twenty years have passed since those days when OTR sat reading in his den, feeling and hearing the low frequency vibrations from ship screws in the channel a few thousand feet away. That may seem like an odd recollection from the complex experience of the natural setting and its cultural overlay, but it approaches the unique and remains one of many fond memories. For the most part - small flashes of creativity being the exception - OTR simply enjoyed them. Pat Conroy, on the other hand, took the everyday and unique events in his life journey and turned them into some of the most lyrical writing of our time.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

                                                                The Prince of Tides