Even in his fiction, Pat Conroy had 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, he had extraordinary skill in probing the long childhoods many of us face as we grow old. For him, it was 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 had its share of darkness. Some may not enjoy that journey, but it is a good dose of reality and I 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 I moved to the edge of the ocean east of Savannah and a mere three miles or so across the sound from the book's setting on Daufuskie Island. In a matter of months, I 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. One of his last, My Reading Life (2010), is a memoir of sorts recalling his love of reading as well as an interesting list the essential and influential books in his life.
Over thirty years have passed since those quiet evenings when I sat reading in my 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 - I 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.
Born on this day in 1945, Pat Conroy passed away in his beloved adopted hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, in February 2016, not far from Charleston and Daufuskie Island where the wide rivers join the sea.
The image above is a screen capture of Conroy at a UNCTV interview conducted in Chapel Hill in February 2014. Interested readers may view this 27 minute program here. It's an informative look at the author's life and work and well worth your time, especially if you're a Conroy fan.
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