Happy belated St. Patrick’s Day! We celebrate it as a holiday here at America, which cuts down on unexcused absences every March 17. And though this column comes a day too late, it is a fitting occasion to recognize an author of Hibernian descent who always considered himself more Southern than Irish: Pat Conroy.
No, not that Pat Conroy, the Jesuit priest who was chaplain to the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2021 (with a brief lacuna after being fired and then reinstated by House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018), but Pat Conroy the author of The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides and The Water Is Wide (all of which were made into movies as well), along with a dozen other novels, memoirs and nonfiction books. Several of his novels were New York Times bestsellers, and Conroy sold over 20 million books in his lifetime. In a 2018 essay, the writer Jonathan Haupt called him “arguably the most beloved American writer of his generation.”
Born in Atlanta in 1945, Conroy was the oldest of seven children of a former Marine Corps fighter pilot (memorialized memorably if unflatteringly in The Great Santini). His parents’ marriage was an unhappy and tumultuous one, and his family’s colorful dysfunction is a theme in many of his books, fiction and nonfiction alike (“If Pat’s family didn’t have tragedy and sorrow—if Pat did not fight demons—his writings would never have been read,” said the priest at Conroy’s funeral). He later estimated the family moved 23 times in his childhood, eventually ending up in Beaufort, S.C.
After finishing high school in Beaufort (with a year at Gonzaga High School in Washington, D.C.), he attended The Citadel, the venerable South Carolina military college, as a basketball recruit, an experience recounted in his memoir, My Losing Season. His first book, The Boo, was a short 1970 collection of stories and anecdotes about The Citadel.
Conroy’s time at The Citadel, including his experiences with hazing, racism and a culture that he described as stressing conformity above all else, became the basis for his 1980 novel The Lords of Discipline. Though the book was well-received critically and Conroy also praised many of his teachers at the school, the novel caused a rift between Conroy and many alumni and students of The Citadel that was not repaired for many years. In 2001, Conroy received an honorary degree from The Citadel and served as its commencement speaker.
Conroy had been raised Catholic, but he experienced a crisis of faith at The Citadel. “When I was in college, there was this opening up of the Church that I just found magical. I thought, ‘this is gonna be great!’ But then it all fell apart,” he remembered in a 2009 interview. During his senior year, he became a daily communicant to try to fight off his doubts:
Nobody else was doing it, so that poor priest had to show up just for me. Every single day. And he stuck with me. It didn’t quite work. I still struggle. But you can’t stop being a Catholic. There’s no question this thing is strong within me. I love the language, the prayers, the chants, the beauty and majesty of it all. I think I’m the kind of writer I am today, in part, because of it.
Conroy bristled at Catholicism’s moral strictures—he once told an interviewer that Irish Catholic guilt “helped ruin my life”— and what he saw as a retrenchment of the church from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. But in a 1974 essay, “Confessions of an Ex-Catholic,” he wrote that “Just as I always will be American and Southern, I will always be Catholic. I left the Church but she has not left me.”
After graduating from The Citadel, Conroy returned to Beaufort and became a high school teacher at his alma mater. In 1969, he got married for the first time and moved to Daufuskie Island, S.C., several miles off the coast of South Carolina, to become a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse; almost all the students were descendants of slaves. Though he lasted just a year before being fired for clashes with administrators and unconventional teaching practices, the experience became the basis for 1972’s The Water Is Wide.
1976 brought Conroy’s breakthrough book in the fiction world: the aforementioned The Great Santini (later made into a movie starring Robert Duvall), a fictionalized account of Conroy’s own childhood and abusive father that caused significant friction in his own family, a pattern that would repeat itself several times in his life.
Four years later came The Lords of Discipline, and six years after that The Prince of Tides, the story of a Southern high school teacher who moves to New York to care for a suicidal sister. (Fans of “The Sopranos” may remember that Tony Soprano liked the movie version, starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, in large part because of scenes between the protagonist and his therapist.) Conroy received an Oscar for adapting his book for the movie.
Two more novels—Beach Music and South of Broad—followed, along with a number of memoirs and nonfiction books, including My Reading Life and 2016’s A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life.
America reviewed several of Conroy’s books over the years, including The Water Is Wide, and in 2011, literary editor Raymond Schroth, S.J., offered a tribute to Conroy after perusing My Reading Life. In “Readings: A Great Book is Like the Eucharist,” Schroth noted that Conroy’s own love of literature was also inspired by his Gonzaga High School English teacher, Joseph Monte, who had given his students a list of the 100 books they needed to read before going to college: “Pat worked through David Copperfield, The Peloponnesian War, The Sound and the Fury and Crime and Punishment; but buying War and Peace was ‘as though I had taken my first step on a newly discovered continent.’”
In 2018, Jay Hooks reviewed Katherine Clark’s My Exaggerated Life, an edited transcript of over 200 hours of one-on-one conversations between Conroy and Clark, for America. The author described it as a chance to convey “the voice, the character, personality, and the humanity of Pat Conroy and the amber of his own spoken words.”
Conroy died on March 4, 2016, of pancreatic cancer. He was 70 years old. His funeral was held at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Beaufort, S.C., with an honor guard of Citadel cadets and several thousand mourners in attendance. “The beauty of Pat Conroy and his writing,” said the Rev. Ronald Cellini in his homily at the Mass, “is truly a foretaste of the beauty we call heaven.”
In a 2016 tribute to Conroy by his former editorial assistant, the writer Margaret Evans, she mentioned his fascination with “The Inklings,” the group of English writers that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. In particular, she wrote, he found their engagement with faith compelling. She quoted Conroy:
For those guys, the question of God was always on the table. Maybe you struggled with the idea of God. Maybe you rejected it altogether. But the question was always on the table. It mattered, and it mattered a lot. So many writers I know today don’t even address the question. They’re not even God-curious. I still think that’s the difference between a great writer and a merely good writer. Great writers—whether they’re believers or not—are God-haunted.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Organist,” by Laura Trimble. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
Catherine Mowry LaCugna's feminist theology of the Trinity inspired a generation
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
