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Summary
Summary
In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini , find some common ground at long last.
Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father's behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat's lifeline to a better world--that of books and culture. But eventually, despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as a child.
Pat's great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy's life, he and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son's honor.
The Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how the ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted lines from Pat's bestselling novel The Prince of Tides : "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness."
Author Notes
Pat Conroy is the pen name of Donald Patrick Conroy, who was born in Atlanta, Georgia on October 26, 1945. He received a B.A. in English from The Citadel in 1967. After teaching high school at his alma mater, he accepted a job teaching disadvantaged black children in a two-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. Many of the children were illiterate, unable even to write their own names. He taught them using oral history and geography lessons. His experience on Daufuskie Island formed the basis for his first successful memoir, The Water Is Wide, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award from the Cleveland Foundation and was made into the movie Conrack starring Jon Voight in 1976. His novels include Beach Music and South of Broad. Several of his novels were adapted into movies including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides. He also wrote several works of non-fiction including The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life, My Reading Life, and The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2016 at the age of 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Conroy's memoir chronicles his relationship with his domineering fighter-pilot father, Donald Patrick Conroy, and the lifelong challenges he faced because of this father's emotional abuse, violence, and neglect. The author illustrates the complex intergenerational problems that were created by his father's conduct, including breakdowns and hospitalizations. Conroy himself deftly reads the book's introduction, but narrator Hill shines in this audio edition, delivering the highly emotional material in a way that will leave listeners exhausted by the end. Hill's reading is consistent, and he creates rich characters voices that are distinct and appropriate. A Nan A. Talese hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Conroy has long used his family to great success. The Great Santini (1976) was the portrait of his marine-obsessed fighter-pilot father and Conroy's long-suffering mother and siblings, who had to endure the violence, numerous moves, and great uncertainty created by his father. Don Conroy was from a Catholic family from the South Side of Chicago. Pat's revered mother, a real southern beauty, played by Blythe Danner in the movie, was the author's literary inspiration. She, as well as strong teachers, taught him the power of literature. His previous book, My Reading Life (2010), expands on these influences. Conroy does some name-dropping as the movie of The Great Santini had its premiere in Beaufort, South Carolina, Conroy's home, and Hollywood's biggest names turned out. In spite of the pain and cruelty, there was forgiveness, and a mature friendship was realized between Conroy and his father before the latter's death. Conroy's eulogy concludes the book and is a fine summing-up of a compelling and readable portrait of a dysfunctional family. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Conroy's many fans will be alerted to his new book by an extensive ad campaign and will welcome it for its honesty, power, and humor.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S A rare memoir that begins by telling you it's been told several times before, but that's the case with "The Death of Santini." The very title of Pat Conroy's latest book, alluding to his novel "The Great Santini," affirms that the abusive fighter pilot at the center of that story and the father mourned here are essentially one and the same. To dispel any lingering doubt, Conroy announces at the outset that the fictions he has spun over his long, celebrated literary career aren't really fictions. They're diamonds hauled up to earth and into the light of day from the dark and bottomless mine of his Southern clan: the tyrannical patriarch, the wounded matriarch, their seven self-destructive sons and daughters. We've met their alter egos and avatars, those of us who've supped contentedly on Conroy's big-flavored prose through the years. In "The Death of Santini," he more or less acknowledges that we'll simply be reintroduced to them by their real names. This admission turns out to be less a questionable sales pitch than a crucial signal, an indication of where the book is headed and what its principal distinction in the crowded genre of family exorcisms will be. Both on purpose and incidentally, "The Death of Santini" explores what it's like to write about loved ones who aren't shy about their reactions and what it's like for them to be written about. Conroy's subtitle, "The Story of a Father and His Son," is misleading, and not just because Donald Conroy disappears from these pages for long stretches, making room for the rest of the tortured clan. It's misleading because "The Death of Santini" is more the story of a son who turns the people closest to him into literary conceits, seeing them in terms of the vivid, florid characters they can become and have become, to their outrage and mortification, their thrill and aggrandizement. The book assumes its reader has traveled to it via "The Great Santini" and maybe also "The Prince of Tides" and "The Lords of Discipline," two of Conroy's other best-known novels. That's probably a safe guess, given how briskly they've sold, but it can come across as a self-flattering one, considering the way Conroy sometimes takes the measure of his oeuvre. Referring to the Citadel, the military academy that appears repeatedly in his work, he says, "I've ended up writing about my college as much as any writer in American history." That's one far-reaching statement. Conroy tends to paint in extravagant strokes, and "The Death of Santini" instantly reminded me of the decadent pleasures of his language, of his promiscuous gift for metaphor and of his ability, in the finest passages of his fiction, to make the love, hurt or terror a protagonist feels seem to be the only emotion the world could possibly have room for, the rightful center of the trembling universe. There's something quintessentially Southern about this, and Conroy is indeed a child of the South. Its mischief and melodrama are in his blood. Everyone in his world is larger than life, himself included. "In the myth I'm sharing I know that I was born to be the recording angel of my parents' dangerous love," he says toward the start of "The Death of Santini." His father, he writes, "thundered out of the sky in black-winged fighter planes, every inch of him a god of war." His mother, Peg, "could camouflage the blade of beauty in the folds of a matriarch's cape." Their marriage is violent and ugly, and it teaches him this about love: "It was a country bristling with fishhooks hung at eye level, man-traps, and poisoned baits. It could hurl toward you at breakneck speed or let you dangle over a web spun by a brown recluse spider." After that the writing is usually, but not always, less ornate, as "The Death of Santini" settles down to describe Conroy's escape from the battlefield of his parents' relationship to that of the Citadel, as well as his first efforts as a writer and his determination, with "The Great Santini," to capture and purge Donald Conroy's abusive dominion over his wife and kids. Its publication and transformation into a movie starring Robert Duvall are covered in the first quarter of the book, and they make for engrossing reading because the real-life Santini's shifting response to his son's public vivisection of him both conforms to and utterly contradicts what you'd expect. He's a complicated despot. BLYTHE DANNER IS assigned the screen version of Peg Conroy, and I mention this because it's clearly important to Peg, and to Pat: his mother is given the glamour she always wanted. Still she craves more, and toward the end of a grueling scene that describes the physical ravages of her leukemia, she implores Pat never to render her so ugly on the page, adding, "I'd like Meryl Streep to play the role." It's a funny, sweet and slightly creepy moment, overshadowed by what Pat quotes himself saying to her, supposedly aloud: "Oh, Mama, oh, mother of mine, you who opened up the universe for me with all the stuff of language, I'll make you so beautiful. Because you made me a writer and presented me the tongues and a passion for language, I can lift you off that bed, banish the cancer from your cells forever." He's promising her literary immortality, in dialogue that suggests he's taking certain liberties with the word-for-word truth. His self-consciousness can bleed into self-righteousness, as when he digresses to observe: "I trained myself to be unafraid of critics, and I've held them in high contempt since my earliest days as a writer because their work seems pinched and sullen and paramecium-souled." Adding that he vowed never to assume a critic's role himself, he says that "no writer has suffered over morning coffee because of the savagery of my review of his or her latest book, and no one ever will." Is it all that much kinder, though, to bring suffering to family members who can - and do - see enough of themselves in his novels to worry that the world is gaping at them? And to trot them out for yet another exhibition in "The Death of Santini"? He's grandly contemptuous of his sister Carol Ann, though if she's one-tenth as narcissistic as his description of her, she's earned it. She's certainly prime material. So, in a heartbreaking way, is his brother Tom, who at one point vanishes into the woods and plunges into some sort of trance, remaining so still, Conroy claims, that "deer used the sweat from his body as a salt lick." Some details defy belief, but Conroy's conviction pulls you fleetly through the book, as does the potency of his bond with his family, no matter their sins, their discord, their shortcomings. For a long while I was frustrated by the failure of "The Death of Santini" to illuminate precisely why, despite the wreckage Donald Conroy has wrought, and despite his continued cursing and insults, Pat keeps letting him through the door. But this puzzle is arguably the point of his book, which takes Santini to the bitter end, shakes off the ghost of him and recognizes that while fiction calls for lucid explanations and a certain tidiness, life resists both. FRANK BRUNI, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, is writing a book about sons and fathers.
Kirkus Review
One of the most widely read authors from the American South puts his demons to bed at long last. One doesn't have to have read The Great Santini (1976) to know that Pat Conroy (My Reading Life, 2010, etc.) was deeply scarred by his childhood. It is the theme of his work and his life, from the love-hate relationship in The Lords of Discipline (1980) to broken Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides (1986) to the mourning survivor Jack McCall in Beach Music (1995). In this memoir, Conroy unflinchingly reveals that his father, fighter pilot Donald Conroy, was actually much worse than the abusive Meechum in his novel. Telling the truth also forces the author to confront a number of difficult realizations about himself. "I was born with a delusion in my soul that I've fought a rearguard battle with my entire life," he writes. "Though I'm very much my mother's boy, it has pained me to admit the blood of Santini rushes hard and fast in my bloodstream. My mother gave me a poet's sensibility; my father's DNA assured me that I was always ready for a fight, and that I could ride into any fray as a field-tested lord of battle." Conroy lovingly describes his mother, whom he admits he idealized in The Great Santini and corrects for this book. Although his father's fearsome persona never really changed, Conroy learned to forgive and even sympathize with his father, who would attend book signings with his son and good-naturedly satirize his own terrifying image. Less droll is the story of Conroy's younger brother, Tom, who flung himself off a building in a suicidal fit of schizophrenia, and Conroy's combative relationship with his sister, the poet Carol Conroy. It's an emotionally difficult journey that should lend fans of Conroy's fiction an insightful back story to his richly imagined characters. The moving true story of an unforgivable father and his unlikely redemption.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Best-selling author Conroy, whose ten previous novels include The Great Santini (1976), The Prince of Tides (1987), and My Reading Life (2010), revisits the complicated relationship he had with his father, Don, in this intimate memoir that continues to explore the Conroy family history. Early fans of his work will recognize the repeated confrontations between father and son; Don was known as the Great Santini for his feats as a pilot in the U.S. Marines. The intention here is to offer readers the final chapter on Conroy's relationship with his parents and his own late-found peace, which came at a high cost. Verdict Conroy's work has influenced many younger writers and remains in top form. The author succeeds admirably with this memoir, which is sympathetic without being sentimental, offering stories with wry humor and heartfelt affection.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER 1 * The Promise On June 4, 1963, I walked off the graduation stage of Beaufort High School without a single clue about where I was attending college next year or if I'd be attending one at all. My parents had driven me mad over this subject and neither would discuss it with me further. I had planned to get a job at the tomato-packing shed on St. Helena Island to earn some money if my parents somehow managed to enroll me in a college. But my father received orders to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, for the following year. I didn't want to leave Beaufort, and I sure as hell didn't want to move to Nebraska, a place where I didn't know another human being. I wanted to go to college. My father had the car packed and ready when I turned my graduation robe in to my teacher Dutchen Hardin, hugged my other favorite Beaufort High teachers and classmates, then fled in tears toward my life in Nebraska. Before I entered the car, I composed myself, dried my eyes, and got in the shotgun seat. The motor was running and Dad threw me a map, saying, "You're the navigator, pal. Any mistakes and I whack you." Before a single graduation party had begun, we were already crossing the Savannah River into Georgia. Our journey took us on back roads and through scores of towns that we hurtled by in their sleep. It was the age before interstate highways were common, so most of our trip would take us through the rural South and the farmlands of the Midwest. To my shock, Dad planned to make it a straight-through shot to Chicago, pausing only for pit stops and gas. "Dad, you sure you want to do this?" I asked. "Hey, jocko, you a detective?" "That's a lot of driving. It might be too much for you." "That's why you're on guard duty, pal," he said. "I start nodding off, you rap me on the shoulder to keep me awake." During the twenty-four-hour drive, my father fell asleep three times, and I knocked his right shoulder, hard, three delicious times. Once in Indiana, he had failed to follow the curve of the highway and drove the station wagon over a cow guard and into a field heavily populated with Black Angus cattle. When I punched his shoulder, he woke suddenly, dodging fifty cows on his way back to the highway. "You'd get a court-martial for that one, navigator," he said. "I kept all of us alive, Dad. This is getting dangerous." We arrived at Uncle Willie's house on Hamlin Drive, where my mother had flown to the day before with her two youngest sons. Willie lived in a Polish neighborhood that looked like an elaborate card trick to me. The houses going up and down the street from Willie's were exact duplicates of one another as far as the eye could see. Variation was forbidden, and this neighborhood stretched for miles in all directions. You could sleepwalk out of Willie's house at night and find yourself lost as you tried to find your way back through a labyrinth that seemed to run on forever. It was an ugly house, as charmless as a Rubik's cube. The Conroy kids were sent to the basement, where Uncle Willie had put pillows on the carpet and mattresses all around so we could camp out during our two weeks there. It turned out to be a deadly long visit, with tension breaking out unintentionally between my mother and grandmother, who lived nearby. Grandma Conroy was a harsh-voiced, unstylish woman who could have played a walk‑on shrew in some of Shakespeare's lesser comedies. I never saw her wear makeup or try to prettify herself, and her dresses all looked like she had bought them from castaway bins at the Salvation Army. To her Southern grandchildren, she seemed to be yelling at us all the time. "Don't do that. Get out of the way. Go back to the basement," she would say to us. It became a joke to my brothers and sisters that Grandpa and Grandma Conroy had no idea what our names were and little curiosity in remedying this lack of knowledge. My father and his brothers played pinochle every day, then went out to catch a Cubs or White Sox game in the evening. My mother was left behind with her seven kids. Since she was terrified of getting lost in Chicago traffic, she could not use the car. When she asked my father to take her and the kids to the art museum, he refused. A fearsome argument broke out and I could feel Mom's fury rising as each day passed. Dad's neglect of Mom and her kids and his abandonment of his family by night and day were not sitting well with our pretty mother. The claustrophobia alive in that sad household was turning into a troubled, living thing. It was Uncle Willie who set off the fuse. I had always liked my uncle Willie, because he was a schoolteacher and had no problem being around kids. He was the smallest of his brothers by far and looked like half a Conroy man as he stood in the middle of his platoon of tall brothers. His nose had been broken so many times in street fights that it gave him the appearance of a harmless bulldog. He was a droll man with a great sense of humor and we'd become golfing buddies on his visits to Beaufort. But Willie had a deep fear of my father that I could sense whenever Dad turned prickly. In his own house, Willie ignored my presence and barely spoke to me. When I offered to go golfing with him, he shrugged his shoulders and said he'd think about it. Three days later he took Dad golfing with some high school buddies of my father's, but didn't ask me to come. I never thought the same about Uncle Willie again. But Willie did ask the combustible question that I think helped to get me into college. I was lingering after dinner as my grandfather and uncle were arguing about Chicago politics. Carol Ann had already joined the kids watching television in what she called "Dante's Inferno" in the basement. There was much talk about Mayor Richard Daley and the efficiency of his machine. My grandfather was a block captain for Mayor Daley and told a story of a man on his block who balked about promising to vote for the mayor in the next election. "He called Mayor Daley a corrupt Irish son of a bitch," my grandfather said, laughing at the memory. Grandpa Conroy reported it to the mayor's people and the man received no garbage pickup for three straight weeks. After his neighbors complained about the stench of his garbage overflow, the poor man appeared on the doorstep to beg for my grandfather's intercession with the mayor. He even added a small contribution of twenty-five dollars for the mayor's reelection campaign. His garbage was collected the following day, compliments of Mayor Daley. "What a great story, Grandpa," I said. "Dad used to tell us about the great Daley machine, but I never knew how it worked." "Are you interested in politics, Pat?" my grandfather asked. I was grateful he knew my name. "Yes, sir, I sure am. I'm interested in everything," I replied. Uncle Willie asked the question that ignited my parents' unspoken rage at each other yet again. "Where are you going to college, Pat?" "That's a really good question, Willie. Where is Pat going to college next year?" Mom said in a voice that was pure acid. "Shut up, Willie," my father growled. "It's none of your beeswax." "None of my beeswax?" Willie echoed, not interpreting the signal flares of war lighting up my father's eyes. "Hell, college starts in two months' time, Don. If he's not enrolled in college now, he's not going." "Drop it, Willie," my father warned again, but now my mother was in the middle of it. "Pat hasn't even applied to college because the great wise one over there hasn't allowed him to do so," she said. "Is your kid a dope, Don?" Willie said, studying me for signs of imbecility. "You can still get him into trade school." "Shut your yap, Willie, or I'll shut it for you," Dad said. "Shut my yap about what, Don?" Willie yelled back. "I teach school for a living. Pat should've been applying to colleges last fall. Our parents didn't have shit, and they sent all nine of their kids to college. Don't those Southern idiots have college counselors in their shitty schools?" "We've got college counselors, Uncle Willie," I said. "You shut the fuck up and get downstairs with the kids where you belong, asshole," Dad said to me. "Let me know how the college search goes, Mom," I said. "I told you to shut up," Dad said, then slapped me as I walked by. "I will, Pat. That's a promise," Mom said. Dad slapped her in her face as my grandfather watched in wordless silence. That night a fight between my parents rocked through the whole house. Five of us kids were watching TV in the basement when the screaming commenced. I went over and turned the TV off, then turned the lights out and said, "If Dad comes down here, pretend you're asleep. Otherwise, he'll start hitting." The shouting ended thirty minutes after it began; then the door opened at the top of the stairs and Dad turned on the lights and came halfway down the stairs. When he satisfied himself that we were all asleep, he shut the door noiselessly, so as not to wake us up. The next day, we left Chicago for Iowa as the end of my boyhood moved insanely on. Dad drove his family to the blue-collar town of Clinton, Iowa, where another of his brothers, Fr. Jim Conroy, served as chaplain in the local Catholic hospital. Uncle Jim was a gregarious pink-faced man who grew temperamental when he was tired and was rumored to pick fights with every bishop he served under during his embattled career as a priest. He became famous for saying the fastest mass in the Midwest, and Catholics flocked to his services when he took over Holy Family parish in Davenport at the end of his career. In my lifetime of listening to lusterless sermons by Catholic priests, I knew Uncle Jim was famous for being the worst public speaker in the Iowa diocese. I never trusted him after he'd slapped me around for a nightmarish six weeks when I went on a fishing trip with him to Minnesota, and I made sure that none of my brothers went anywhere near him. But I rode with Uncle Jim from his hospital to his home on the Mississippi River that would be the Conroy family home until our quarters were ready for us to move into at Offutt Air Force Base. Uncle Jim confessed to me that his brother Willie had called and begged him to get those seven kids out of his house. "You guys really got on Grandpa and Grandma Conroy's nerves," Father Jim said. "They were driving Willie crazy complaining about the mess you were making." Uncle Jim drove across the Mississippi and turned north on a country road that paralleled the river, carrying us through beautiful Illinois farm country. We rode for twenty miles before he turned off to a dirt road, passed several farms, then pulled into the driveway of an insubstantial shack that looked both isolated and forlorn. The house sat on a hill above a tributary of the great river completely clogged with lily pads. You could fish all day and not get your hook wet. When my mother toured the house, she erupted into another argument with Dad. "This is just great, Don. You're going to leave your wife and seven kids in this run-down dump with three beds, one toilet, no air-conditioning, no car, no stove, in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Real good thinking, Don. Great planning," she said, unhinged and wrathful. "There is no TV set, no radio, not a toy for the little kids to play with, not a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread or a jar of peanut butter. Jim, what were you thinking, having us here?" "Not much, Peggy," Uncle Jim said. "I've never had a family. I just didn't think it through." Dad said, "Okay, kids. Attention to orders. Start getting this place polished up. There'll be a formal inspection at fifteen hundred hours." Of all the disconsolate summers the Conroy family spent following our Marine from base to base, everyone agrees that our summer on the Mississippi River was the most soul-killing of all. We sweltered in a summer heat that was brutal, and the house was so small and inadequate for our tribe that we stumbled over one another and got in each other's way from morning till night. In the mornings, we woke with nothing to do, and went to sleep because there was nothing to do at night, either. Uncle Jim was solicitous and as helpful as he could be and provided our only lifeline to civilization and to groceries. Several times a week he would take us all for a swim at a public lake in a nearby town. It was the summer I thought my mother's mental health began to deteriorate, and I think my sister Carol Ann suffered a mental breakdown caused by that ceaseless drumbeat of days. Carol Ann would turn her face to the wall and weep piteously all day long. Mom appeared sick and exhausted and slept long periods during the day, ignoring the many needs of my younger siblings. The days were interminable and Mom grew more weakened and distressed than I had ever seen her. I asked what was wrong and how I could help. "Everything!" she would scream. "Everything. Take your pick. Make my kids disappear. Make Don vanish into thin air. Leave me alone." In July I got a brief respite when I took a Trailways bus on a two-day trip to Columbia, South Carolina, to play in the North-South all-star game. I'd not touched a basketball since February, was out of shape, and played a lackluster game when I needed to have a superlative one. After the game, Coach Hank Witt, an assistant football coach at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, came up to tell me that I had just become part of The Citadel family, and he wished to welcome me. Coach Witt handed me a Citadel sweatshirt and I delivered him a full, sweaty body hug that he extricated himself from with some difficulty. In my enthusiasm, I was practically jumping out of my socks. By then, I'd given up hope of going to any college that fall and had thought about entering the Marine Corps as a recruit at Parris Island because all other avenues had been closed off to me. My father never told me nor my mother that he had filled out an application for me to attend The Citadel. I danced my way back into the locker room below the university field house and practically did a soft-shoe as I soaped myself down in the shower. In my mind I'd struggled over the final obstacles, and there were scores of books and hundreds of papers written into my future. Because I'd been accepted at The Citadel, I could feel the launching of all the books inside me like artillery placements I'd camouflaged in the hills. The possibilities seemed limitless as I dressed in the afterglow of that message. In my imagination, getting a college degree was as lucky as a miner stumbling across the Comstock Lode, except that it could never be taken away from me or given to someone else. I could walk down the streets for the rest of my life, hearing people say, "That boy went to college." And then it dawned on me that the military college of South Carolina did not preen about being a crucible for novelists or poets. Hell, I thought in both bravado and innocence, I'll make it safe for both. Excerpted from The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
