At mid-life, Pat Conroy tries to write his own happy ending

Pat Conroy's newest book, "My Losing Season: A Point Guard's Way of Knowledge," due out next year, is about his senior-year basketball team at The Citadel

In this story: Telling stories most people hide The clutter in the study Shrine to The Great Santini Forgiveness RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Allen G. Breed
The Associated Press

FRIPP ISLAND, South Carolina (AP) -- 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 mid-life, 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 had 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.

Conroy receives an honorary doctor of letters degree by The Citadel earlier this year. The graduate used his experience there in writing "The Lords of Discipline"

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.

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 famed 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."

A wall in Conroy's home holds posters and momentos of his late father, who was a Marine colonel and the subject of Conroy's autobiographical novel "The Great Santini"

"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."

And in his pursuit of that truth, Conroy spares no one. Especially not himself.

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."

Conroy said he tries to take a swim or walk on the beach near his house every day

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.

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.

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

Still, something was different when, in writing 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.' "

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Pat Conroy: 'I was raised by Scarlett O'Hara'
February 4, 2000

Works by Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy Interview
Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot by Pat Conroy

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.