Newest collection captures the ‘Heart’ of Pat Conroy’s writing
A Lowcountry Heart is an unusual — some might even say odd — literary compendium. Subtitled Reflections on a Writing Life (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 300 pp., eeeE out of four), the book reprises blog posts that popular author Pat Conroy ( The Prince of Tides, The
Great Santini) wrote for his website before his death. Also included are several articles about him, some speeches he made, a couple of interviews and a few pieces others wrote about Conroy after he died of pancreatic cancer in March at age 70.
The blog posts are the most meaningful (even though they probably are not new to most of his ardent fans).
The blogging started in summer 2009. Conroy’s health was failing rather rapidly, in no small part due to decades of too much drink and rich food, he acknowledges more than once. There had been a crisis or two. He was aware he might not have much time. His writing in these pieces, though mostly resplendent, is pierced with wisps of the sort of melancholy that often settles upon people of a certain age when they write or talk about relationships or events of the past.
Often when sharing a recollection of a friendship or an encounter, Conroy expresses some regret — which one imagines he had probably only recently begun to feel as age settled heavily upon him — that he wasn’t closer to this person or more open to what he or she could have taught him, or more giving, or more present. These moments are all the more poignant knowing what we know now, that two years, or nine months or five months after writing these words, he would be gone. He ruminates about childhood friends and favorite authors. He admits to self-doubts, quite a passel of them. He writes charmingly of his fitness trainer and his nutritionist, women with the sort of skills he had spent a lifetime avoiding but that he suddenly found use for in his later years. As always, his storytelling, word choice and rhythm are gorgeous, almost lyrical; his descriptions are gloriously unexpected. He writes of Joan Didion’s “mermaid dark eyes” that can “turn into a cobra’s with the slight rise of an eyebrow” and about “men of a lock-jawed generation (who) lacked a specific language to communicate in the deepest places those hardest of things.”
The writing is as smooth and satisfying as a wedge of chess pie, most especially when he dips into memories of his childhood and his adventures as a young writer.
Fans who have missed his voice will find comfort in knowing that, even as a blogger, this is distinctively, precisely, willfully the Conroy whose books they loved.