Three-quarters of the way through Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, the narrator Tom Wingo describes the death of a relative, lamenting in the process an inability to fully articulate the loss. "The only word for goodness is goodness," he notes, "and it is not enough." Ever since I learned of Conroy's death last month, I've been thinking about that line and a day I spent with him in 2002.
For me, and for many growing up in South Carolina, Pat Conroy was a mythic figure: part documentarian, part poet laureate of the Palmetto State. Through his writing he was able to put into words what some of us innately understand, bound as we are by heat and history. He portrayed the South in full—all its contrasting mystery and ugliness, beauty and brine, laid bare—and did so in a way that made it feel accessible to outsiders and refreshing to those of us who live here. In some ways, Pat Conroy put South Carolina back on the map: on bestseller lists and in Hollywood, but also in the minds of its inhabitants, sensitive as we are to decaying legacy and diminished status.
I met Pat through my mother. A writer herself, she became acquainted with him after a random encounter in the late 1990s. Never lacking for congeniality, she returned from that occasion with a new best friend and a note, addressed to me:
I met your charming mother, who tells me you want to be a writer. A little advice. Read everything, keep a journal and pay attention to the way people talk. Most importantly, marry someone just like your mama.
Four years later, I was 17 years old, sullen, going through many of the growing pains familiar to the young and (creatively) restless. One day my mother—who is inclined toward "growing experiences" and was, perhaps, grateful for any chance to get me out of town and away from my friends—announced a day trip: "We're going to meet Pat Conroy," she told me. And soon enough, we were in the car and headed from Columbia to Beaufort, the coastal antebellum gem that Conroy called home.
We met him at a little restaurant near the water where the purpose of the visit quickly revealed itself: My mother meant for me to spend the day with him, clearly in the hope that he could instill a little inspiration, if only by osmosis. I was game.
Conroy was exactly what you might expect him to be: warm, thoughtful, empathetic, with the right touch of Irish gregariousness. He was the kind of man attuned to whatever it is that sparks internal struggle, and he had no trouble relating to a skinny kid going through a hard time. As one critic wrote of The Prince of Tides: "The characters do too much, feel too much, suffer too much, eat too much, signify too much and above all talk too much." That was probably not far from Pat's own inner workings.
He suggested we take a drive, and off we went on a tour of Beaufort, a city of stately old mansions set against a rural backdrop no longer found amidst the gentrified grandeur of Charleston. As we drove, Pat peppered me with questions about myself, punctuated with his own stories and asides as we passed various landmarks from his childhood.
Occasionally, we would stop outside a house or some particular place: "I put that dock in The Prince of Tides," he would say, or "that house is in The Great Santini."
At one point, we pulled beside a white-columned building that had been a Union hospital during the Civil War; Pat told me the inside was covered in the patients' graffiti. The wounded and their guards, he explained, had taken to drawing on the walls to stave off boredom, and the markings from their lead pencils refused to fade over time. At about two o'clock we stood in front of the grave of the Great Santini—Pat's father, Don Conroy, the subject of so much of his writing. Pat didn't say much, but I remember him speaking about his father's bravery, referring to himself as cowardly by comparison. Surely this wasn't true, I remember thinking; but it was a humanizing moment from a man whose rocky relationship with his father had given him so much to write.
Conroy was enamored of teachers and teaching, which he called "a heroic act," so it was fitting that, after meeting the man who had raised him, I met the man who had inspired him. His old high school English teacher turned out to be a delightful guy, mischievous and mustachioed, who told us about Pat's time in class, and about Thomas Wolfe, another Southern writer with a penchant for finding grandeur in the everyday. Clearly, the young Conroy had found genuine kinship in the classroom, which was probably what he meant to teach me.
It may well be outside my knowledge or ability to write a fitting eulogy for Pat Conroy, whose own gifts were unmatched. I know that he was a brilliant writer, and that his words will surely find literary permanence—lead markings scrawled onto the Southern soul. Beyond that, I can only say that he was kind to me, and that he was a good man. It is not enough.
John Connor Cleveland is a writer in Washington.