The unfinished boy & his pain

...When my mother married a Conroy, whose family originated in the Irish county of Roscommon, she thought she was being true to the spirit of her heroine O'Hara...

...That is all and it is enough...

...The suicidal Mary Anne, sister of the hero Ben in The Great Santini, in a sense reappears here, more fully formed, as Savannah, the sister who has escaped to become a successful poet in New York (the South is death, she tells us, for women who don't choose to hide their intelligence...

...It is not exactly everyman's story, for the hero is of a certain Appolonian type: intuitive, duty-bound, vacillating, his own worst critic, and given to either/or choices that will prove his courage or cowardice...

...e are not surprised to find that this father, Colonel Bull Meecham (affectionately known to the children as Godzilla, King Kong, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon), is an arrested adolescent whose message to his children is "Never enough...

...Both of us have similar responsibilities...

...It draws on Conroy's experience of plebe hazing and "four years of fear" as a cadet at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, from which he graduated in 1967...

...nor is there any fancy postmodernist narrative fragmentation or sudden interruptions of the author telling you this is a fiction...

...This despite the fact that, in this as in the other novels, the young hero's childhood has been "one long march of fear...

...it is part of him, runs in his blood...

...One has no trouble accepting the verdict of surviving Wingo brother and sister that"our life in the house by the river," however scarring, has been "relentlessly interesting"--and "somehow magnificent...

...The church and the Pentagon are alike in that respect...

...That "arsenal of metaphor" fortifies all his pages, and puts us on notice that the story is a passion narrative in which nothing less than a soul's loss or gain is at stake...

...I am teacher and coach...

...The stories, then, are romances in the medieval sense, adventure stories, tales of DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., a former associate editor at Commonweal, is an associate editor at America...

...The church is the structure wherein laws are administered...

...He does have that power...

...As he testifies: I left the church but she has not left me...

...It is high time for the social malady to end, for every neighbor to unbuckle the bridle and spit out the bit, instead of cud-loving that metal rod in the mouth...

...As she lay dying of leukemia in 1984, Conroy's mother asked him if he was writing about her, "to make me beautiful...

...But underneath his bravado and defensive sarcasm lies the selfdoubter s inevitable Yes, but...

...The theme of the The Great Santini is courage...

...his is exactly the condition that Conroy faces in The Prince of Tides with Tom Wingo, who regales us with the saga of a "family with a fatal attraction to the extraordinary gesture...

...His overweight, sometimes suicidal daughter Mary Anne is invisible to him...

...Conroy doesn't hoard or save anything till later, but, as Annie Dillard advises, spends it all, right away, every time...

...But these refusniks do not know so well how to say yes...

...Her amnesia and schizophrenic collapse will propel her twin brother Tom to remember their troubled growing up at the hands of a violent but weak father and a powerful mother, Lila Wingo---whose character, here fully rounded, is shaped by Conroy's own mother, the woman he credits with having given him "the gift of tongues...

...young knights errant braving the odds on the playing field, outwitting giants, rescuing damsels in distress, or taking on the lost causes of put-upon Jews and blacks...

...In a sense what these tales track is but a single life, one boy's rough rite of passage--through the betrayals of high school, college, first job, and marriage--to an adult ethic of honor and loyalty...

...Along the way he is aided by wisdom-figure sisters or respected male mentors, usually coaches or imaginative teachers of English or history...

...Nor does he appear to want a complete cure...

...Behind all the striving to become independent, a shaper of one's own destiny rather than a passive object of fate, Becker argued, lies the terror of death--symbolized by the engulfmg world of mothers, vulnerable flesh, and the earthly...

...Can girls be real Meechams...

...Forgiveness, a recognition of a coincidence of opposites ("I hate you, I hate you" meaning the reverse), is somehow a standard Conroy finale...

...The contretemps provides Conroy fans with the usual outrageous entertainment (and includes a moving testimony to the vocation of coaching...

...But if Tom is a sample, when on leave from a war they do close down, shut their Sallies out, and retreat into bitterness and selfpity...

...It celebrates the wonder of male bonding, a boy's first love (she, an upper-crust damsel in distress, shamelessly jilts him), and his enduring affection for the most beautiful of Southern cities...

...So Gone with the Wind became the King James Version of her own reclamation and remaking of herself in the image of Scarlett O'Hara...

...No Southern man will ever understand himself," he adds, "until he learns how the South cripples its women...

...The many anecdotal digressions make The Prince of Tides Conroy's most richly textured family saga to date...

...Yet the ending here is melodramatic and doesn't quite work...

...Yet the real issue is that Ben, though he can defy his father on someone else's behalf, cannot express anger or act on his own behalf...

...and] friends whose faces did not change yearly...

...The poet in him comes again to the surface, which for him means roots, his connection to a particular place, the "Southern part of me which is most quintessentially alive," that is both wound and anchorage...

...and "If anyone gets in your way, you run him down...

...I loved the ceremony, the adherence to tradition, the astonishing continuity of it all...

...Having habituated himself to suspect the motives of the authorities, whoever they are, he turns that suspicion against himself in the form of self-loathing...

...the answer is no...

...What emerges, as Ernest Becker claimed, is something fight out of Kierkegaard: a dread-filled vacuum, the sickness unto death...

...But Catholic antibodies run in his blood, feed his imagination, in much the same way that the palmetto groves, tidal creeks, and salt marshes of his boyhood Georgia and South Carolina low country do...

...Conroy's first, self-published book, The Boo, was a memoir of a tough but colorful college teacher...

...As Conroy explains in an Atlanta Journal article: My pretty mother had been hurt because she had been born poor...

...The last word in Lords of Discipline, as the hero Will McLean graduates, is his crediting "the system" for proving to him that "I was not one of them...

...The widowed mother here--who belongs to "that taloned species who speak with restrained and self-effacing drawls.., and rule their families with a secret pact of steel"--has sent her son off to a paranoid's delight, the kind of place where catastrophic expectation is foreordained...

...Thanks to his violent father, he admits, "Rebellion came naturally to me...

...You are Marine kids and can chew nails...

...We do understand: The endurance of male friendships under adversity...

...He is scourging himself for not being what his fanatic older brother was...

...His first novel and in some ways my favorite, The Water Is Wide, is a roman h clef a thinly disguised account of the author's year (1969) teaching eighteen impoverished black grammar school children, fifth through eighth grades, on Daufuskie Island (called Yamacraw in the book) off the South Carolina coast...

...Bull has eyes only for his eldest son Ben, whom he has fully programmed to "drive out the softness" in him, his mother's legacy, and teach him the "killer instinct...

...I never saw the cunning strategies she employed...as she turned me into a Southern male with her seal of approval stamped along the high margins of the packaging...

...He did...

...In any case, come the cessation of hostilities, they do not seem any better off than (or different from) the grisly old despots they have defied--wounded, impotent Fisher Kings all...

...them, at this juncture doesn't work so neatly...

...I believe it did bring me to manhood: the Institute taught me about the kind of man I did not want to be...

...Moat Rudbeck Stanko Thoughts from a Rocking Horse It would be interesting to live with an unlocked jaw, when truth would not be interpreted as treason...

...I want you to understand why I hate the school with all my power and passion...

...I have the soul of a collaborator...

...If there is a spiritual path here--and there is--it is Percival's quest for the Grail, the way of the free-lance warrior/adventurer, which relies on the choice of worthy oppo22 February1991:127 nents...

...Conroy's is the Catholic version, juiced by devils, angels, and a good deal more laughter...

...His wife Sallie, whom he has put through medical school on his teacher/coach salary and is now making a hundred grand a year, doesn't need rescuing...

...The theatrics of youth are over...

...I am Commanding Officer of [Squadron] 367...

...I felt I had a power," the boy almost shouts, "I could put myself in the place of others and ask myself how I would feel if I were in their place...

...The church equipped me with a limitless arsenal of metaphor...

...God tells the pope what He wants done and the pope lays down the law...

...And, as a nomadic military brat himself, Conroy surely knew young Ben's longing "for a sense of place, of belonging, and of permanence...

...And that opposition makes him feel alive, checks his grandiosity, gives coherence and weight to the mercurial dreamer, the eternal youth in him...

...I could probably still be with the Yamacraw kids had I conquered my ego...

...I am Southern made and Southern broken, Lord, but I beseech you to let me keep what I have, Lord...

...of the universe...

...On top of all that, he sees his mother, whom he both admires and fears, in all the women he has ever slept with...

...Lila Wingo's campaign to seduce a local land baron is worthy of a Douglas MacArthur...

...This seems to be the universal condition of ex-Catholics...

...It can take years to get an honest statement from anyone, and even then such audacity is regretted, retracted, and swallowed hard...

...In remembering the noble savage, his brother Luke, he recalls something else: that precious animal element, a certain call of the wild that is indistinguishable from the summons of the creator and is answered to in the gut...

...The emerging self typically strikes bad bargain, building up character armor and trading off feeling, sensitivity, and wonder at the vast, numinous universe (the"softness" of Conroy's heroes) in return for an identification with some cultural project that falsely promises to guarantee one's own immortality...

...A good-natured Rambo, more bra~n and pure instinct than brain, he's the perfect athlete and martyrfora-cause that Conroy's central heroes are not...

...He is off his horse, on foot--a prince still, but unguardedly human...

...At first [says Will McLean], I thought I had wasted my college years, but I was wrong...

...God's the commanding officer and the pope is His first sergeant...

...And we (and they) mistrust their daredevil bravado for what it conceals about their hearts...

...But to date all of Conroy's hero-narrators have been Catholic, and in a Bible Belt milieu of red necks and scions of "old families," this makes them eccentric outsiders...

...It means dropping out, quitting--and as we learned in Lords of Discipline, that's forbidden...

...Never recovered indeed...

...In fact, the diversions--various escapades of the siblings (like placing a dead loggerhead turtle in a local patrician's bed), grandmother Tolitha's funeral arrangements, grandfather Amos's water skiing stunts and Good Friday "way of the cross," and finally the riveting horror story of a giant rapist by the name of"Callinwolde" who twice terrorizes the family (the second time to his bloody regret)--are alone worth the price of admission...

...Peter's in Rome") of the college president, General Bentley Durrell, and his sadistic cadet minions, a kind of secret Ku Klux Klan within what is called the South Carolina Military Institute...

...It is the tyrant's most valuable gift...

...A Vichy government has set up headquarters in that soul...

...I am not Santini," cries Ben at the close of Santini...

...He fears his own emptiness, vacuity, boredom, "the death-in-life of the middle class," and doesn't know who he is or what he wants...

...The Prince of Tides reads like a hymn, a celebration of ties that no longer bind, or of Wallace Stevens's line that "The imperfect is our paradise...

...The healing love affair with Susan represents new territory for the hero and the author, Conroy's first bid at portraying a mature sexual relationship...

...130: Commonweal I never read Conroy without thinking of him as illustrating Ernest Becker's now classic rendition of the Oedipal struggle in The Denial of Death (1973...

...Few signs of modernist anomie are to be found in Conroy country...

...The film version, titled Conrack, starred Jon Voight...

...Reunited at the end with his ex-con father, his wife, and daughters, Tom Wingo does not break out into a warrior's song...

...I had come to this moment with my family safely around me and I prayed that they would always be safe and that I would be contented with what I had...

...128: Commonweal (Though Hollywood loved it, with Robert Duval playing the title role...

...she asks...

...Belonging does not come easily but must be earned by trial and ordeal...

...O Lord, make me worthy of the squadron I command and please give me the chance to kill Castro...

...All of Conroy's heroes, indeed, exhibit an exquisite sense of injustice, of the potential abuse of authority--and a reluctance to assume it themselves...

...He will count on the constancy of returning tides...

...They become W.B...

...The satire of CCD classes, notably the nuns' lectures on sex and how they made a boy feel--that the Prince of Darkness has staked a claim to his loins----obviously comes from one who has been there...

...In retrospect, Will senses something phony, compulsive, in his outlaw's rescuing operations...

...The young hero, Will McLean, takes on the role of protector of the school's first black student, and consequently finds himself up against the "refrigerated intelligence" and ego (it would "fit snugly in the basilica of St...

...It presents a classic Oedipal struggle, the tale of a boy ("the son as challenger, the son as threat, the son as successor, the son as man") pitted against an overbearing, Marine pilot father--whose favorite book is the Baltimore Catechism and whose drill-sergeant theology runs to parody: Good Catholics make good soldiers, he thought...

...In time their collusion with bureaucrats from the Atomic Energy Commission will destroy the children's beloved island home and their town by the river...

...the hero must test the weight of his youthful idealism, his loyalties, loves, and hopes--his theological virtues--against various adversaries: a tyrannical father (The Great Santini), a conspiracy of military school bullies (The Lords of Discipline), institutionalized poverty and racism (The Water Is Wide), or the betrayals of his mother and his own heart (The Prince of Tides...

...He is thirty-five years old and grieving for his dead brother, out of work, "bushwhacked" by the women's liberation movement, "sick of being strong, supportive, wise, and kingly," and haunted by "the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start...

...Fleeing death, we "partialize" ourselves, construct our own prisons...

...Of course Conroy's men-in-the-making are unwilling to make this lethal trade-off and the high drama of his books consists in the non serviam, "their great refusal to become the Man of Iron...

...The Institute was the most valuable experience I have ever had or will have...

...Don't be fooled...

...His stylistic mentor is the flamboyant Thomas Wolfe...

...Ambiguity is anathema...

...And finally (since the mother, like Wagner's Fricka in the Ring, upholds the union of church and state), he must learn to respect and forgive his father...

...I loved Gregorian chants, the sight of nuns at prayers on Good Friday, the Sanctus bells, the covered forms of saints during Lent, the drum roll of the Confiteor with all the sadness and elegance of a dead language filling the church and entering my bloodstream at the ear, and the sunburst of gold when the priest raised the monstrous chalice at the Consecration...

...Papa goes to jail and Mama (divorced now) gets her mansion and phony pedigree, but her uncompromising, too-good-to-be-true son Luke, an ex-Green Beret who remains true to the quixotic Southern code of lost causes, will secede from the Union...

...Nor did I notice the distinctive moment my mother began the long, curious process of turning me into a Southern writer who would tell my mother's story to the world...

...At the close Tom is still unemployed, still dreaming of the gorgeous "Lowenstein...

...D When we first meet him, Tom is anything but happy...

...Water tells what it was like (engrossing and harrowing) to teach children whom the twentieth century had passed by...

...Same with Catholics...

...The next novel, Lords of Discipline, focuses on the meaning of honor...

...Unlike his brother who never once failed, he is not innocent...

...I hear that his next book will be on the Holocaust...

...Most of them had never left their island, didn't know what country they lived in, couldn't read or count, didn't know the Atlantic Ocean lay beside them, thought the Civil War was fought against the Germans and Japs, hadn?t heard that JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., were shot, and still believed the earth was the center of the universe...

...To become his own man--which means only one thing, he thinks, to become his mother's "gentle" defender--Ben has to overcome his fear of the law, his "elaborately structured sense of self-preservation," and learn to fight his father, say no to him--in matters more important than beating him in one-onone basketball...

...Unless he finds a proper enemy or an underdog to defend, energy and action fail him...

...In a school full of cracker patriots, Will has a "negative attitude," is a guilty, knee-jerk liberal, and opposed to the war in Vietnam...

...As a family we were instinctive, not thoughtful...

...We could not outsmart our adversaries but we could surprise them....We functioned best as connoisseurs of hazard and endangerment...

...And that issue is left unresolved and barely touched, except by the wise sister--who sees that her brother's "piety," his cooperation with his mother's program.ruing, can hurt more than their father's temper...

...Real men don't quit...

...Taken unawares, they are also thus poised for a leap of faith, at the threshold of what Becker called "legitimate foolishness...

...Choosing sides, us vs...

...Indirectly in this novel, he began to tell his mother's story with the seemingly benign Lillian Meecham, "Santini's" wife, who sees only what she chooses to see and subtly reinforces the code of her tyrannical husband--whose prototype is clearly Colonel Donald Conroy, U.S.M.C...

...we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation...

...During her whole life, she burned to be what she could never be...

...The line is familiar by now...

...9 ut there are really two main stories here, one D of a damaging but magic childhood, the other 4 of the adult narrator's odyssey in New York...

...Dramatic high points come with moments of glory on the basketball court or football field--marvelously described--where the young athlete, till then a cipher in the crowd, acquires "a face, a name, and an identity...

...The opportunity is provided by Susan Lowenstein, his sister's therapist...

...Yeats's "unfinished man with his pain, brought face-to-face with his own clumsiness...

...Conroy's emerging educational philosophy: "Life was good, but it was hard...

...I lacked diplomacy and would not compromise," he admits...

...So the second story woven into The Prince of Tides is the one of Tom's comeback, his resurrection from the dead, and his acceptance of limits and ambiguity...

...The free-lance adventurer, the man of action he thought he was--who is clearly differentiated in this book as Tom's naive, Silvester Stallone-like, and celibate brother Luke--has returned from the chase, settled into cooking perfect souffirs, and feels "tamed by mortgages, car payments, lesson plans, children, and a wife with more compelling dreams than my own...

...The setting: South Carolina's barrier islands, whose magic beauty Conroy lets us smell and taste...

...What is said, these days, is slick and garbled, tongues working fast around a firm thing which carefully divides and directs each word...

...I have never recovered from the vividness of its imagery, from the daze of its language...

...I have never had a single day when I wished to be Catholic again," he has said...

...I never knew a woman who lusted so openly for gentility, for the grace and prestige of a family history she would never have...

...But he does not quite see the ocean of fear he swims in, only the cost of his disobedience...

...We were not truly happy unless we were engaged in our own private war with the rest of the world...

...But he seems to accept, however ambivalently, that he has no duty to pretend that he was made in the image of his martyred brother...

...Then I want you to forgive me for loving the school...

...The soldier has to obey his commanding officer without questioning his orders...

...And if you want the theology that charts this sort of maturity, for this type of person, read Paul Tillich's Courage to Be again...

...At the same time Conroy's heroes are firmly rooted in the ethos of the Southern tidewater of their birth, in their families, and in the peculiar traditions of their faith...

...His descriptions of epic battles with school superintendents ("not evil men...just predictably mediocre"), and what he did with these pupils, exposing them to classical music and taking them to Washington, D.C., made me wish I'd had him as a teacher at that age...

...Becker's thesis was that the modem autonomous self--the grail of Conroy's young heroes--is a"vital lie," a denial of our creatureliness...

...This vast and venerable world is a barnyard of corrals, stalls, stanchions, and tack rooms, the f'mal resting place for fear which rides nowhere, the invisible tyrant fastened by a weathered strap to each withered will and unassertive brain...

...both parents are heralded in the dedication as "grandest of fathers and Marine aviators" and "grandest of mothers and teachers...

...Through rigorous hardness, I became soft and learned to trust that softness...

...He is also an archetypal male chauvinist pig who beats his wife when drunk, and considers daughters valuable only as "fine pieces of tail for their husbands...

...ndoubtedly, a large slice of Conroy's autobiography feeds into these stories...

...That relationship, one is led to believe, would not have bloomed if a new man hadn't already been rising from the closed tomb of Tom's despair...

...To be sure, it's hard to bear a permanent grudge against a father who rescues you from the town bully or gets up on the roof on Christmas Eve, even when his kids are teenagers, and pretends to be a reindeer...

...Instead, he reowns the regenerative sea...

...God is the C.O...

...He also made her a force to be reckoned with: a common shrimper's wife but also a superb gourmet cook, and a kind of Cumean Sybil who discerns the dreams of animals, wears many masks, and spins deadly webs...

...We all wish we had foes as coldly monstrous...

...It is clear, at least well through this novel, why "good soldier" Ben, early in his childhood, lost faith in authority...

...Which is just where we find Tom Wingo in this novel...

...You might anticipate that young 22 February1991:129 Will, if he turned up in another Conroy novel, would be moving ahead by fits and starts, with the debris of unfinished projects all around him--unhorsed, swamped, plagued by doubts...

...Girls without jump shots...

...The book will be on celluloid soon...

...No minimalist he...

...Unmistakably, one also hears the author's personal history in his next book, The Great Santini...

...However lyrical he is at this point, this is still the prayer of a man who is sure he dwells in a fearfully unsafe world...

...22 February 1991:131...