My Reading Life—A Review
Published in Southern Humanities Review, Fall 2011
Pat Conroy, by his own estimate, devours two hundred pages of fiction every day. He has been doing so since a freshman in high school, at that time attempting to ready himself for the writing life that his mother, Peg, foresaw for her son fifty years ago. There is a sense in these pages that the young man literally saved his own life by seeking the sanctuary of the classics during that period. Conroy writes about both these topics and a fascinating variety of others in his latest foray into nonfiction, My Reading Life.
For Conroy fans and newcomers alike, there is much to like about this work. Its literal and figurative heft reminds me of the physique and substance of the author himself: five feet ten and somewhere around 220 pounds, a heavyweight. Whether he’s discussing his favorite reads or covering new territory about his tumultuous youth with his abusive father, Marine pilot Donald Conroy—the Great Santini himself—the writing is typical Pat Conroy: voluptuous, cogent, breathtaking, sometimes over the top.
Though he sees himself in many of these fifteen chapters as a smiling, affable, approachable kind of guy, Conroy doesn’t back off from an argument, and one he returns to in this work is his running battle with the intelligentsia of the writing world, especially literary critics. He champions the legitimacy of story combined with style in novels, suggesting that many of the literati do not, preferring instead more esoteric qualities. Gone with the Wind, for instance, a novel his mother read aloud to him when he was five years old (and “made a fetish of rereading" every year), became a book that changed both of them forever. He calls the work “The Iliad with a Southern accent, burning with the humiliation of Reconstruction,” and notes that although it is one of the books “that make up the canon of our nation’s literature,”critics have been denigrating the book from the outset. He is practicallly giddy that Mitchell's tome became become one of the best-selling books in America and concludes by declaring the novel “has outlived a legion of critics and will bury another whole set of them after this century closes.”
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that there is a chapter in My Reading Life titled "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe." Conroy was introduced to Look Homeward, Angel in his teens by Gene Norris, his revered high school English teacher in Beaufort, South Carolina. "The books's impact on me," he writes, "was so viscerally powerful that I mark the reading of [it] as one of the pivotal events of my life," adding that it "took full possession of me in a way no book has before or since.” He especially loves what he calls the book’s “knock-your-socks-off first page.” Wolfe’s style, Conroy confesses, “so polluted the efforts of my high school and college years that they border on self-parody,” because the young writer emulated Wolfe’s “windiness” but could not master his “ecstatic singularity.” Look Homeward, Angel made Conroy realize that when he reads, he wants to b e transformed into “a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem.”
As much as Conroy admires Margaret Mitchell and Thomas Wolfe, his greatest love is for the Russians, especially Count Leo Tolstoy. After decades of readintg many of the world's masterpieces, he calls War and Peace “the finest novel ever written,” though he allows that when he first purchased it as a student at Gonzaga High School in the early 1960s, he was showing off for one of his English teachers. He made up for that posturing by rereading it in his thirties, and then again later, attempting to “plunder the riches of Tolstoy’s art.” That third reading he counts as his most rewarding, the time he discovered the “serene self-confidence” of the writing and “a world that seems miraculous in its inclusiveness and its nobility of effect and even its strange lightness on its feet.” His second-favorite novel is Anna Karenina.
Conroy mentions scores of other authors in this work. His favorite Americans include Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Poe and Ambrose Bierce, Faulkner and Henry James, Whitman and Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, and the novelist/poet James Dickey, under whom Conroy studied. He says that Dickey's poetry, specifically Poems 1957-1967, "changed forever how I thought about writing." In typical Conroy hyperbole he writes, “I don’t care if James Dickey slept with a thousand women or the entire football team at Clemson. . . .” Having thus dismissed the importance of Dickey's behavior in favor of the man’s work, Conroy concludes: “When Dickey is writing at his best, it is like listening to God singing in cantos and fragments.”
Conroy’s appetite for literature ventures far beyond the shores of America, of course. Include in his list, then, such luminaries as Nabokov and Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare and Dante, Marquez and Gibbon, Calvino, Keats, Borges, and the Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. The roster goes on and on.
Musings in this work are not confined to the author's reading life. There's a humorous and trelling anecdote about Conroy's year of teaching on Daufuskie Island. Another chapter revisits the author's heady stay in Paris in the late 1970s, a time full of writing (The Lords of Discipline) and adventure, loneliness and unlikely friendships. In the chapter "Why I Write," Conroys sets the pages on fire with his passion for what he considers the sacrament of writing and demonstrates his dazzling love affair with the English language. Everyone for whom reading or writng is an essential life experience--akin to breathing--will embrace this chapter.
My Reading Life is an enlightening and inspiring work created by a son of the South who I feel is underappreciated, a writer who tells us that he is “often called a ‘storyteller’ by flippant and unadmiring critics.” He actually revels in that designation of storyteller, and a legion of Conroy devotees are delighted that he does.
Conroy, Pat. My Reading Life. New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2010.