Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on Why ‘Good Writing is the Hardest Form of Thinking’)

“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.” —Southern novelist Pat Conroy (1945-2016), My Reading Life (2010)

Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on How ‘Books Are Living Things’)

“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”—Novelist Pat Conroy (1945-2016), My Reading Life (2010)

Photo of the Day: Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park, Beaufort SC

On vacation in Hilton Head, SC, six years ago, I took a one-day excursion over to Beaufort. There are many reasons to enjoy this Lowcountry community, but the multi-acre Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park is an especially appropriate way to appreciate its charms.

The park, named for the longtime mayor who secured federal funding for the project, was built along the Beaufort River / Intracoastal Waterway in the middle 1970s and renovated from 2006 to 2008. Locals use the park for the Taste of Beaufort, Water Festival and the Shrimp Festival, but it can be appreciated year-round—including by tourists like me—for the green space and riverfront walkways that I photographed here.

Walking around here, it’s easy to understand why favorite son Pat Conroy continually evoked this waterside community, including in his bestselling novel The Prince of Tides. Experienced once, the sea breeze, palmetto trees and gracious antebellum architecture linger forever in the memory.

Photo of the Day: Pat Conroy Country

The news of novelist Pat Conroy’s death from pancreatic cancer at age 70 this week filled me with a sense of loss. It’s hard to think that we won’t be having another one of his books—which, for all their occasional lapses into overheated prose, also exude real storytelling power and insight into dysfunctional families (much like his own, from which, he frankly acknowledged, he drew on for many of his characters in the likes of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini).

But, above all, his work evokes an extraordinary sense of place, as I noted in a prior post. In a Facebook post marking his 70^th birthday, he noted: “It was in Beaufort in sight of a river's sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen."  I understood what he meant so well when I visited his South Carolina town, for a fleeting day, on vacation a year and a half ago.

Conroy came back here to live, in the same lowcountry community where his quarreling parents were buried. And now, his own restless journey has come to an end here—with the ugliness of the disease that killed him counterbalanced by “the beauty of indrawn tides” that moved him and, ultimately, thousands of readers worldwide.

Photo of the Day: Where the Great Santini Came to Rest, at Last

Beaufort National Cemetery, located in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, would have been noteworthy even without its connection to local literary lion Pat Conroy. One of six national cemeteries established in 1863 for the reinterment of Union soldiers and sailors who died in the region, it provided quiet and a final resting place for servicemen who, during life, heard all too often the crunch of cannon and the terrifying “rebel yell.” These youths, frequently thousands of miles from the Northern and Midwestern farms in which they had grown up, long moving with nomadic armies, had now found a most unlikely home for eternity.

Since then, in American conflicts up through the War on Terror, more than 18,000 veterans have been buried on this site, according to the National Park Service Website about the cemetery. That number is expected to increase considerably, a function not just of the conflicts in which the United States continually finds itself, but also of an increasing number of veterans who come here in retirement.

I became aware of this historic, and beautiful, site on a bus tour last November of the town of Beaufort. It was then that I not only learned of the existence of this cemetery (and took this photo) but also that this was the final resting place of Donald Conroy, the father of the novelist.

Marine Corps Col. Donald Conroy is buried in Section 62, Site 182. Death may, in fact, have been the only thing to slow his restless spirit.

This bluff, brash veteran received a host of medals for his service in WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Yet amazingly, he seldom spoke of all his honors to his family. Unfortunately, they knew him better for the war at home he waged with his wife Peg, in which their children became collateral damage.

The details of Donald Conroy’s life are found most directly, in fiction, in The Great Santini, but he also appears, in only slightly altered guise (as a fisherman and judge), in other novels by his son (notably, The Prince of Tides).

As told in Pat’s memoir, The Death of Santini, the novelist eventually made a kind of peace with this brave but very complicated man. Not long before his death, the retired colonel came out to inspect where he would be laid to rest, telling the surprised cemetery administrator that this would be “the second time I’ve been buried” there. He then explained helpfully: “You ever catch the flick The Great Santini? That was me they planted at the end of the movie.”

Oak trees and Spanish moss formed a majestic backdrop to the row upon row of graves when I visited briefly. When Conroy attended the burial of his father in May 1998, the ceremonial rites performed by the military added to the majesty of the setting. 

Even that, however, was not without its irony, he observed: “The beauty of things military takes nearly all of its children prisoner in its primal love of order, its ceremonies that are timeless and changeless—they buried my father in the same cemetery where my mother was laid to rest.”

Photo of the Day: ‘Beauty of Indrawn Tides’ in Conroy’s Beaufort SC

At times, when I’ve read the work of novelist Pat Conroy, I recoil at what sometimes seems like purple prose, yet I have turned the page, again and again, to sample a writer with as marvelous a sense of place as any I’ve come across in fiction today. This is a fair sample, from what is still probably his bestselling novel, The Prince of Tides (1985):

“To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, ‘There. That taste. That’s the taste of my childhood.’ I would say, ‘Breathe deeply,’ and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.”

None of that, however, prepared me for the experience of viewing Beaufort, S.C., the place that, he has said, was “the first town that ever seemed like home” to this child of a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Even the photo I took, when I stopped there on the last day of my vacation two and a half weeks ago, only begins to give a clue of what it’s like to stand by its shores, with gracious antebellum homes shaded by massive Spanish moss at your back, the smells from the tide before you, and the sea spreading out just beyond the marsh.

No wonder Conroy, after a nomadic life, still felt the call of home here, where he has returned to live.

Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on the ‘Sunshine of the Low Country’)

“I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat…I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river.”—Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (1986)

Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on a ‘Full Measure of the Writer’s Heart’)

“Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of the writer’s heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and for economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food and drink, because a writer has possessed me, crazed me with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.”—Pat Conroy, My Reading Life (2010)