Conroy’s Final Memoir?

This is the third “non- fiction” book I’ve read by Pat Conroy.  I put that in quotation marks as the line separating his novels and his memoirs of his youth at the Citadel (My Losing Season), the influence of his mother and teachers on his maturation as a writer (My Reading Life), and now, finally, this tortured history of his entire family (The Death of Santini) completes the trilogy of his autobiographical works.   His memoirs are the building blocks of his fiction.  And that is not a criticism, but a fact.  For some writers it may be more subliminal, but where else does a writer derive his/her deepest experiences other than those lived?  That is what makes moving, meaningful literature, theatre, paintings, you name the art.

I have a profound respect for Conroy’s writing ability.  It flows, whether it’s memoir or fiction.  This particular work, I would think, puts his life story to bed, or one hopes so.  As he movingly puts it at the onset …in the myth I’m sharing I know that I was born to be the recording angel of my parents’ dangerous love.  Their damaged children are past middle age now, but the residues of their fury still torture each of us…Our parents lit us up like brandy in a skillet.  They tormented us in their own flawed, wanton love of each other.  This is the telling of my parents’ love story – I shall try to write the truth of it as best I can.  I’d like to be rid of it forever, because it’s hunted me down like some foul-breathed hyena since childhood.

Throughout this angst-ridden work I hear the refrains of John Bradshaw.  I’ve met Bradshaw.  I wish Conroy had, although he has himself has gone through years and years of therapy.  Bradshaw puts his case very clearly in his seminal work The Family – the family is a system which shapes our lives and survival in a dysfunctional family involves creating a false self, playing a role – getting typecast so to speak – and it is multigenerational. 

It was not until Conroy wrote The Great Santini at the age of 30 that he first heard the phrase “dysfunctional family:”  Because I had studied the biography of Thomas Wolfe with such meticulous attention, I thought I knew all the pitfalls of and fly traps into which I could fall by writing on such an incendiary subject as my own family.  When I began to write the book, I had never heard the phrase “dysfunctional family.”  Since the book came out, that phrase has traveled with me as though a wood tick has attached itself to my armpit forever…My portrait of my father was so venomous and unforgiving that I had to pull back from the outraged narrative voice and eventually decide to put the book into third person. But even then, the words flowed like molten steel instead of language.

In parts of this blog I’ve revealed some of my own family sicknesses, a rageaholic mother and a passive father, sort of the opposite of Conroy but we share some of the same burdens.  And as the oldest in the family of many siblings, Conroy bears the brunt and he is trying to excise those demons in his memoirs and fiction.

It was not until after he had a physical confrontation with his father physically that the impact of multigenerational family sickness dawned on him.  His father had left Conroy’s house drunk after being plummeted by his son.  It suddenly dawned on Conroy that his father had no business driving a car in that condition and ran down the street to find the car – which he did with his father passed out in the driver’s seat. He studied his father’s face. I realized I would always be serving a life sentence without parole because of the unpardonable cruelty of this one man. Now on this night, my father had proffered his final gift to me – because I had kicked him across the lawn and beat him with my fists, I sat studying him at my leisure, deep in thought on the first night I ever thought of myself earning my natural birthright as a violent man.  I was devastated.  All during my childhood, I had sworn that I would never be a think like him, and here before me, drunken and beaten, was living proof that I was the spitting image of Don Conroy.

As Tolstoy posited “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  I’ve heard of such families (the happy ones), although I’ve rarely met one without some secret lurking.  I think a more benign way of putting it is that some families get along better than others, but all families have their crucibles to bear.  I like Conroy’s way of putting it:  I don’t believe in happy families.  A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.  If a family gathers in harmony for a reunion, everyone in attendance will know the entryways and exits have been mined with improvised explosive devices.  The crimes of a father or the carelessness of a mother can defile the taste of oyster dressing and giblet gravy on the brightest Thanksgiving Day….The pretense of being festive at these events is both crushing and debilitating to me…My parents taught me many things, but they never taught me a thing about faking joy…The happy family is one of the treasured romances of the American epic, something akin to the opening of the West.  Holidays brought out the worst in my own family, hopes ridding high, with no way of scaling those walls of expectations.

Much of the book is devoted to the ironic reconciliation with his father.  I say “ironic” as it was through the publication (and ultimately the making of the movie) of The Great Santini, the main character, "Bull" Meecham being based on his father, that a reconciliation becomes possible.  It was not an attractive portrait, so much based on Don Conroy’s incendiary persona.  Upon publication -- as in the case of Conroy’s literary hero Thomas Wolfe when his autobiographical Look Homeward Angel was published -- there was an upheaval in the family.  But eventually Don Conroy became proud to be known as the “Great Santini,” talking down the unflattering parts as being due to his son’s “over imagination” and playing up the heroic parts.  To Pat Conroy’s credit he accepted this part of the reconciliatory bargain and even allowed his father to participate in book signings, his father becoming sort of a “wingman” to Pat for the rest of his life on those occasions. 

The deaths of his mother (who had divorced his father years earlier) and then the Great Santini himself are movingly described by Conroy.  The affect the family dynamics had on the siblings and particularly his estrangement from his sister Carol Ann (“her talismanic powers over me extended into the deepest realms of self”) and the suicide of his youngest brother (“Tom was born to hurt”) are detailed.  His beautiful eulogy to his father is appended at the end of the book.  

Towards the end of his father’s life, we began a year of submitting to Dad’s whims as he made a final tour of the most significant places in his life.  He planned visits to every person he’d ever considered a friend, paying special attention to my daughters, who had worshiped him ever since they had learned to talk…A hundred new moons would appear in my horizon whenever my daughters had a child.  Because of fate, love was a million-footed thing, and so was hatred.  My father was behind the wheel of his car, urging it down the peripheries of blue highways, and he carried what was killing him as an honored guest in his liver.  He connected himself to Chicago, to Atlanta, and the surprising realm of Beaufort, where his children had planted their own flags of belonging and home.

Finally the end of this cathartic work, Conroy saying “I will not write about you again” to his now dead parents, He also has found peace in his marriage to Cassandra King, a novelist as well.  And they have settled in the low country of Beaufort, a place he loves, a place Conroy can call home in spite of being an army brat and having moved all over God’s creation. I hope for no more non-fiction from Conroy as he promises.  Yes, any future novel he may write may be steeped in the roots of his own life, but that is how it should be.  The book’s dedication is lovingly made to his all his brothers and sisters, a sure sign of healing.

It’s all out there now, other than the parts which, for whatever reasons, he has chosen to keep private.  He again makes reference to his estranged daughter Susannah (he dedicated My Reading Life to her), this time in the Acknowledgments, “…the door is always open and so is my heart.”  But that obviously painful story essentially remains untold.  He is such a powerful, lyrical writer, and now that his memoirs have been put to bed, perhaps he’ll feel freer in future fiction. 

Bob Next to Wolfe’s Shoes

Thomas Wolfe is Conroy’s spiritual literary mentor, both southerners, poetic writers, embracing family history as fiction.  My review of My Reading Life includes a description of a chapter from that book entitled "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe" as well as a number of photographs of Wolfe’s “Old Kentucky Home” in Asheville, NC.  

 We have visited that home, ultimately a boarding house managed by Wolfe’s mother, now a museum, a few times and felt moved and privileged.  I’m sure Conroy felt the same way when he has been there.  And he has the right stuff to fill Wolfe’s enormous shoes, which were bronzed and are part of the sidewalk outside the “Old Kentucky Home.” 

I might also note that I read the hardcover edition of The Death of Santini, beautifully produced by the Nan A. Talese imprint of Doubleday, printed on a cream shade deckle edge paper, and set in the very popular, easy to read Caslon typeface.  It’s hard (for me) to imagine reading this on a Kindle.  Holding the book itself when reading such a moving memoir is a more tactile, spiritual experience.

Dramaworks’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses – Duplicity and Hedonism Abound

I remember seeing some of Molière’s light and relatively harmless farces.   Perhaps I was expecting something along those lines, but Molière wrote a century earlier.  He never would have thought of writing the scandalous subject matter taken on by Choderlos de Laclos who wrote the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses on which Christopher Hampton’s play is based.  It is quite a study in changing mores foreshadowing the downfall of a depraved class. I come to this play with a particular advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) -- I’ve never seen the movie (or the play)! 

The play depicts games of humiliation and deceit, waged by arrogant aristocrats who preen with a sense of invulnerability, using treachery, sexual perversion, and degradation as their weapons.  Are these merely the games of the leisure class, a decadent society that is about to be destroyed in pre revolutionary France or is it a more universal theme?  The fact that Choderlos de Laclos’ novel has endured since 1782, and serves as the basis for a contemporary play, which was then reincarnated into a movie, seems to answer the latter question.  Think of today’s popular culture, the heartless “reality shows,” the treachery played out every day in corporatocracy and government, and the Internet affording abundant opportunities for narcissism and voyeurism, as just some of the manifestations.   Human nature is, well, human nature. 

Maribeth Graham, Harriet Oser, Kate Hampton

Two former lovers, aristocrats suffering from a severe case of ennui, Le Vicomte de Valmont (Jim Ballard) and La Marquise de Merteuil (Kate Hampton), for their own complicitous amusement set out to destroy some lives in their social circle.  Merteuil wants Valmont to seduce a young girl straight out of a convent, Cécile Volanges (Kelly Gibson) to settle a score.  “Too easy” responds Valmont who has his eyes on another more challenging target, the highly principled (and married) La Présidente de Tourvel (Katie Fabel).  Merteuil finally promises Valmont that if he can produce “written proof” of seducing Tourvel, she would have sex with him.  Meanwhile Cécile and her music teacher, Le Chevalier Danceny (Brian William Sheppard) have fallen in love.  And Valmont has learned that Cécile’s mother, Madame de Volanges (Maribeth Graham), has written to Tourvel calling him a “pervert.”  He now seeks revenge by bedding Cécile, Merteuil’s original intended target.  So the stage is set.  Merteuil and Valmont devise a scheme to trick Danceny and Cécile into their confidence.  From there the rest of the plot unfolds almost from its own internal energy, imbued with intrigue, deceit and sexual maneuverings.  And the actions of our villains have consequences in the end, circling back to them. The guillotine awaits them all!

Jim Ballard and Katie Fabel

Central to the play is the sexual, competitive tension between Ballard and Hampton pulling the strings of the other players, frequently with soap-operatic overtones.  Ballard plays his part with an arrogantly superior and disdainful demeanor but with a hint of humanity and, ultimately, vulnerability, while Hampton is the more malevolent predator.  In fact, Hampton’s Merteuil strikes me as a sociopath, whose verbal interactions can out maneuver any of the play’s characters, including Valmont who excels in persuasive rhetoric when it comes to bedding a woman.  Hampton comports herself with an untouchable imperiousness, and her power over the other characters is absolute.   She also gives voice to feminist rage -- after all, this was a society that was male dominated, and Merteuil seeks revenge on that score as well. One tell-tale exchange between she and Valmont seems to sum up her entire being, after Valmont asks I often wonder how you managed to invent yourself.  Merteuil replies I had no choice, did I, I’m a woman.  Women are obliged to be far more skilful than men, because who ever wastes time cultivating inessential skills?  You think you put as much ingenuity into winning us as we put into losing: well, it’s debatable, I suppose, but from then on, you hold the ace in the pack.  You can ruin us whenever the fancy takes you:  all we can achieve by denouncing you is to enhance your prestige.  We can’t even get rid of you when we want to: we’re compelled to unstitch, painstakingly, what you would just cut through.  We either have to devise some way of making you want to leave us, so you’ll feel guilty to harm us; or find a reliable means of blackmail:  otherwise you can destroy our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words.  So of course I had to invent:  not only myself, but was of escape no one else has ever thought of, not even I, because I had to be fast enough on my feet to know how to improvise.  And I’ve succeeded, because I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.

The Dramaworks production is ambitious, twelve actors in a relatively small space with multiple scene changes, but the theatre company is up to the challenge.   The Director (Lynnette Barkley), the costume designer (Brian O'Keefe), the scenic designer (Victor Becker), the lighting designer (Jerold R. Forsyth) and the sound designer (Steve Shapiro) bring this period piece to life.  Barkley has a specific vision and coming from an extensive background of musical theatre and choreography, this production benefits from that skill.  (I loved the opening sequence of all the actors briefly posing “tableaux vivants” before the action begins, like a big production number of a musical.) There are eighteen scenes (too many, but that is what the play calls for) and Barkley tries to minimize interruptions of the action -- no blackouts and minimal moving of furniture -- so the many scene changes are as fluid as feasible, enhanced by Becker’s clever scenic design, and Forsyth’s lighting, moving from “sensual” to “cold and angry” and Shapiro’s selection of musical interludes for those changes – “to keep the energy going.” 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Set

The details of costumes and scenery are extraordinary.  Ninety percent of the 18^th century furniture on the stage is original, not replicas.  The elaborate gold leaf railings and balusters were all welded in the Dramaworks shop.  There are 26 costumes for 12 actors and as the play takes place over three months, the changes are designed to connote the passage of time. Brian O'Keefe's costumes are spectacular!  (And kudos to the wig designer, Omayra Diaz Rodriguez.) Finally, there is a revolving staircase to assist with the multiple scenic changes.  It is a formidable undertaking for a regional theatre.

But essentially Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a cerebral play – and a long one too, clocking in at almost three hours including intermission --  and although hearts are broken on stage, and there are several redeeming comic elements such as the scene where Valmont dictates a letter intended for his love, Tourvel, while he is having sex with his courtesan, Emilie (well played by Nanique Gheridian, a founding member of Dramaworks) with double entendres abounding, it is a play which may fail to capture the audience’s heart.  (Do we really care about these characters?) My lovely wife, Ann, is away right now, and I usually judge the poignancy of a play by the number of tissues she goes through.  By that anecdotal metric, this probably would be a zero tissue play.  Nonetheless, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is well worth seeing for the costume pageantry and the script’s barbed wit alone.