PAT CONROY: OUR LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP
by Bernie Schein
I first read Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini when I was the young wife of a Marine Corps pilot. The book had just come out and I wasn’t aware at the time of Conroy’s earlier books, The Boo and The Water is Wide. The Great Santini was taken from the author’s own life as the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who drank to excess and regularly and brutally beat up his wife and children, both with his words and with his fists. The story took my breath away, because, unfortunately, I could relate to a bit of that all too well. I fell in love with the writer who had buried his pain and rage for so many years until he finally felt compelled to fictionalize it in a tender, funny, agonizing, and beautifully worded novel.
I fell more deeply in love with Pat Conroy after I read his next book, The Lords of Discipline, as he once again turned his past, this time his school years at The Citadel, into a novel depicting the beauty, brutality and racism he experienced or witnessed there. Through these two books, I learned how a man so deeply damaged and flawed by his past could still retain a love of words, of place and of honor, a man who didn’t think living these ideals made him less of a man. Sadly, I hadn’t ever really known that a male could be this way until, through his words, I met Pat Conroy. So in a way, he changed my life, or at least the way I viewed an essential part of it.
I continued to read, through the years, all his novels, and I learned more and more about the man through his writings. The Prince of Tides is probably my favorite in terms of the beauty of his language. Conroy could take a location, a thought, a feeling, and meld it into something so beautiful that the words would simply take your breath away.
It’s probably needless to say, after all this, that he is my favorite writer. And most especially, my favorite Southern writer. He loved his South, his Lowcountry, so much that he could make anyone else love it, as well. However, I also know that the demons of his past still weighed heavily on him, and every novel he wrote reflects that in some way. It’s one of the great sorrows of my life that I never got a chance to meet Pat Conroy before he died a few years ago, but that fact brings me to how much I wanted to read this book by his best friend, Bernie Schein. (“Yes, finally, at last we get to the book review,” I’m sure you’re thinking.)
This is a good book about Pat Conroy. Not a great one, but very good. I learned so much more about him, his relationships with others, including his family, and the sorrow and joy they provided him, and that he, in kind, gave to those he loved or met.
The book gives a lot of detail about Pat’s marriages and children, rifts and broken relationships, tenderness and reparations. It explains how some of Pat’s stories hurt family members who saw themselves in his characters. Yet, at no time did I sense that the book was gossipy or a tell-all. Pat himself had been honest through the years about the darkness in his life, and he laughed at much of it. He was honest about his father, about his beautiful mother and the grace and passion for words that she instilled in him. This is a deeply emotional book by a friend who still loves Pat dearly and wants the world to know him, his humor and his selflessness, and who knows just as Pat did that all of his pain made his writing more exquisite and relatable to the many readers who fell in love with him as I did.
The one thing that kept me from thinking that it’s a great book about Pat, is that Bernie Schein spends many pages talking about himself. To his credit, usually all those pages, at some stage, point back to Pat and the friendship between the two. Bernie also seems to love Bernie quite a bit, as well. I overlooked some of that, because he’s funny and just because I know Pat cherished him so much, but it did tend to get annoying when he seemed to be promoting himself here and there as the best, the brightest, the funniest, in all the world.
I’m glad I read this book. It was a wonderful tribute to Pat Conroy, a man whom I believe more than any other writer I’ve read, excelled in reaching down into our hearts to find truth and beauty among the bruised baggage that we’re so often afraid to lift the lid on in the light of day.
Thank you to NetGalley and Skyhorse and Arcade Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Reviewed May 2019
House of Black and Blue 