Poetry
Stanko, Mary Rudbeck
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). Becker's thesis was that the...
...it is part of him, runs in his blood...
...22 February 1991:1313...
...What is said, these days, is slick and garbled, tongues working fast around a firm thing which carefully divides and directs each word...
...At the close Tom is still unemployed, still dreaming of the gorgeous "Lowenstein...
...Fleeing death, we "partialize" ourselves, construct our own prisons...
...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 we (and they) mistrust their daredevil bravado for what it conceals about their hearts...
...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...
...He is scourging himself for not being what his fanatic older brother was...
...Which is just where we find Tom Wingo in this novel...
...I have the soul of a collaborator...
...The contretemps provides Conroy fans with the usual outrageous entertainment (and includes a moving testimony to the vocation of coaching...
...I am Southern made and Southern broken, Lord, but I beseech you to let me keep what I have, Lord...
...On top of all that, he sees his mother, whom he both admires and fears, in all the women he has ever slept with...
...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...
...Instead, he reowns the regenerative sea...
...I am teacher and coach...
...The opportunity is provided by Susan Lowenstein, his sister's therapist...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...That is all and it is enough...
...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...
...He will count on the constancy of returning tides...
...Taken unawares, they are also thus poised for a leap of faith, at the threshold of what Becker called "legitimate foolishness...
...It can take years to get an honest statement from anyone, and even then such audacity is regretted, retracted, and swallowed hard...
...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...
...Reunited at the end with his ex-con father, his wife, and daughters, Tom Wingo does not break out into a warrior's song...
...But these refusniks do not know so well how to say yes...
...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...
...I am not Santini," cries Ben at the close of Santini...
...Unlike his brother who never once failed, he is not innocent...
...A Vichy government has set up headquarters in that soul...
...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...
...Don't be fooled...
...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...
...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...
...Conroy's is the Catholic version, juiced by devils, angels, and a good deal more laughter...
...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...
...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...
...He is off his horse, on foot--a prince still, but unguardedly human...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...What emerges, as Ernest Becker claimed, is something fight out of Kierkegaard: a dread-filled vacuum, the sickness unto death...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
