Pat Conroy: Lowcountry Lyricist

I could not let the  sun set on this beautiful Sea Island day without a word or two about the American novelist, Pat Conroy,  who was born in Atlanta on this day in 1945. Even in his fiction, Pat Conroy has a way of writing about himself -  who doesn't -  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 millions of readers hold Conroy in high esteem for painting life in its full spectrum. 

In 1977, Conroy's book, The River is Wide, was hardly five years old when I arrived at 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,  I succumbed to Lowcountry living and, as the Rachel Field poem says, was never quite the same. Conroy's affair with the Sea Islands began around 1960.  Over the next forty years he would blend his experience with the Lowcountry setting and produce many books. His latest, The Death of Santini (2013), is a memoir of growing up in a complex, loving, yet often dysfunctional family headed by his strong-willed fighter pilot father. 

Almost thirty years have passed since those late evenings when I sat reading in the den feeling and hearing the low frequency vibrations from ship screws in the Savannah River channel a few thousand feet away. That may seem like an odd recollection out of the complex catalog of island experiences, but it approaches the unique and remains one of many fond memories. For the most part - small flashes of creativity being the exception - I simply enjoy those memories. 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. I'm so glad he did.

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