Reading Pat Conroy for the First Time

A week or two ago, I picked up The Great Santini on my DVR. I search for upcoming movies and set them to record so I’ll have something to amuse me during meals and when I have the birds out of their cages.

I’ve seen the movie many times. Years ago, cable movie stations had very few offerings, so when something appeared in the lineup, you were likely to see it 15 times before it went away.

If you haven’t seen it, I can bring you up to speed. It’s from a book by Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. It was inspired by his own upbringing. He was the son of a World War Two marine pilot, Don Conroy. In the movie, Robert Duvall plays the dad part. His character is Wilbur “Bull” Meechum. He’s an abusive alcoholic.

Meechum is extremely arrogant. He is controlling. He humiliates his kids. He can’t stand to see them grow up and outdo him. He drinks heavily. He provokes his superiors with sophomoric behavior. At one point, he comes home drunk and threatens his wife physically.

Michael O’Keefe plays the Pat Conroy part. He’s Meechum’s oldest son, Ben. The movie focuses on things that happen during his last year in high school, in the town of Beaufort, South Carolina.

While I was watching the movie, I felt a sudden need to buy the book.

I was watching a scene in which Bull Meechum gets angry because Ben is beating him in a basketball game. The family is watching while they play. Everyone is rooting for Ben. They’re even talking smack about Bull, but they’re careful not to go too far. At one point, they realize things are getting out of hand. One of them says Bull is getting “that look.” They expect bad things to happen.

If you’ve lived with abuse, you know what that means. Abusive fathers are like dormant volcanoes. Most of the time, you can sit by a volcano without worrying, but once in a while, signs of an upcoming eruption appear, and you have to do something. If your dad is abusive, you have seen him blow up many times, and you are familiar with the signs.

You can’t always predict an abusive event. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, and they pull the floor out of your stomach. But any kid or wife who has a brain will learn to pick up on any signals that may be available, in order to be ready for the times when it’s possible to prepare or escape.

I guess it’s cowardly to say it, but it’s a relief to be outside the room when the explosion comes. Learning the art of the quick, silent exit is very helpful.

Abusive fathers are like volcanoes in another way. When a volcano goes off, you can’t do anything to stop it. It doesn’t care what you do or say. It has to run its course. When an abusive father blows up, he won’t be interested in appeasement or apologies. Say you’re sorry a hundred times, and he’ll just get mad at you for apologizing. There is something inside him he wants to release, and you’re trying to interfere.

I watched that scene, and then I looked for the book online. I found out it was fiction, and then I learned there was a nonfiction version. It’s called My Losing Season. It’s about his senior year on the basketball team at the Citadel. It covers much of the ground the novel is based on.

I deleted the movie the same day I watched the basketball scene. I didn’t watch any more. It’s a depressing movie, and while I enjoyed it when I was young, I now think it’s overrated. The story isn’t stitched together well, and a lot of the dialogue is clumsy. Duvall is perfect in his role, and he gets all the good lines, but Michael O’Keefe is not a good actor.

I’ve been reading the book for a while. I have to say that I’m disappointed in Conroy. I never wanted to read his work before, and although I may possibly read The Great Santini in the future, I have no interest in looking at his other books.

Conroy is not a gifted writer. He doesn’t string words together well. He has no feel for the language. He can’t be funny or witty. The quality of his work is reminiscent of the stuff career ghostwriters do. You can tell writing is hard work for him. That may be the worst thing you can say about a writer.

It’s disappointing. Conroy is held out to be a gem among southern writers. That’s not true. He’s no Carson McCullers or Truman Capote. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m not sure he’s not all that southern. His dad was from Chicago, and he was a marine brat, raised in a number of different places. His mother was from Alabama, but that doesn’t make him James Dickey.

Why has he done so well? I think it’s because he was something of a leftist. His work appeals to leftists. He succeeded very early in life when his book The Water is Wide was turned into a movie. The theme was one that leftist moviemakers can’t stay away from: idealistic white man descends from white heaven and teaches poor black children. How many times have we seen that? Write a book like that, and you’re practically guaranteed to get film offers.

Such movies are, by their very nature, condescending. They exemplify the soft racism of low expectations. If you’re a black kid, and you want to succeed, find yourself a white liberal Jesus to tell you about Shakespeare, Beethoven, and basic personal hygiene. The implication is that black people will never be able to do anything for themselves. Somehow that is lost on the people who make the movies.

Moviemakers are crazy about teacher movies. The Dead Poet’s Society. Lean on Me. Teachers. The Principal. To Sir, With Love. The Man Without a Face. The Miracle Worker. Stand and Deliver. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Blackboard Jungle. I’m going to run out of space.

At least To Sir, With Love broke with precedent. The teacher was black, and the students were hopeless white kids.

Leftists are in love with teachers because they compete with ministers and parents and turn kids against God and capitalism. Leftists generally think belief in God is a serious problem, like blindness or cystic fibrosis. They see it as something that has to be treated. That’s the spirit of antichrist.

Conroy has almost no talent at all, but that’s okay, because sometimes what you have to say is more important than how you say it. My Losing Season is still interesting to me. He voluntarily gave the world a window into the world of an abused and neglected son, and I wanted to read it in order to feel less exceptional.

The Santini novel and movie are gentler than reality. In real life (if Pat Conroy can be believed), Donald Conroy was worse than Bull Meechum.

I’m not all that far into the book, but Don Conroy has already done a lot of vile things. More than once, he has hit his son in the face, hard, with no warning. He has told his son he’s a sissy and a loser, but he didn’t use the word “sissy.” He has bet his son his basketball team will lose. He has sucker-punched his son to the floor at a school event, in front of a crowd. He has thrown a glass of iced tea at his son’s face, opening up his eyebrow to the point where it had to be stitched.

I saw some and heard some very bad things when I was a kid, but Don Conroy is on another level. He truly wanted his kids to fail. I can’t say my situation, or my sister’s, was as bad as Pat Conroy’s. His dad gave his kids prolonged beatings. My sister and I didn’t have to deal with beatings or injuries. My dad was never out to destroy us; he hoped we would amount to something. I don’t think it pained him when we enjoyed ourselves. I don’t think he ever came home looking forward to tormenting us in order to blow off steam. Some people have had things worse than we did.

Don Conroy’s sowing produced quite a harvest. One of his sons was schizophrenic, and a daughter was institutionalized. You may believe a parent can’t make a kid mentally ill. I disagree. I think anyone can be abused into insanity, if you start early enough. Even during breaks from the abuse, an abused person suffers the lingering effects of the inner bruising. The echoes don’t die down the minute the mistreatment stops.

Pat Conroy himself suffered from depression, and he tried to kill himself at least once.

Abusers listen to demons. They don’t know the Holy Spirit. They have no one to counterbalance or run off the evil spirits that rule them. Many abusers don’t care. They don’t examine themselves. They feel no guilt. Spirits use them to torment their families, and that helps other spirits get into their spouses and kids. Secular therapists talk about “cycles of abuse” and so on. It’s all nonsense. Spirits follow families, and spirits that run your relatives will try to run you, too.

A good father helps his children to know the Holy Spirit and to increase his influence in them. If you’re not for the Holy Spirit, you’re against him. As Jesus said, there is no neutrality. A bad father helps demons gain control of his children.

Wikipedia says Don Conroy reformed, and that he and his son became close. Is that encouraging? No. The answer is no. It’s better than not reconciling, but the damage was already done. Forgiveness is wonderful, but it’s not restitution. When you’ve ruined decades of someone’s life, there is no way to make up for it.

If you’ve abused your kids or your spouse, there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can make the future much better than it would be had you not repented, and you have an obligation to do that, but you can’t pull healthy childhoods and marriages out of your ear and hand them to the people you hurt, to be inserted in the places of the experiences they actually had.

You can’t say, “Presto! Now you had normal relationships in high school and a wonderful prom. Presto! Now you graduated from college at 22 and didn’t quit because I drove you crazy. Presto! Now you married your college sweetheart at 23 and had three great kids. Presto! Now the cops never came to our house. Presto! Now you’ve never seen your mother with two black eyes.”

Think about this. If you change when you’re 60, and you become the best dad or husband on earth, what are you really giving your family? You’re giving them what you already owe them. You don’t deserve a medal for getting back on course and doing what you were already supposed to be doing. No matter what you do, you will die deep in debt, with nothing to be proud of and plenty to be humiliated about.

You have to change. No question about that. You have to seek forgiveness. You have to patch things up as well as you can. But don’t delude yourself. You still come up way short.

Redemption is magnificent, but it can’t compare to doing the right thing in the first place. Like God says, “Obedience is better than sacrifice.”

I don’t know if I can recommend the book or not. A lot of it is about basketball, and those parts are so boring it defies description. I don’t care who set a pick on whom in a playground in 1957. Even if I didn’t find basketball itself boring, I think I would find reading Conroy’s sports recaps tedious.

The way Conroy writes about other athletes is a little off-putting. There is a lot of description of other men’s bodies and movements. “Bobby Feeny’s supple form arched through the air as his soft hands cupped the worn Spalding, and I foresaw giving him a firm pat on his talented fanny after his successful jump shot.” I’m exaggerating, but only a little. You can write about a ball game without making people want to close the door and give you your privacy.

I have a feeling all of Conroy’s books are depressing. I’ve read a little about him, and he seems like a depressing person. I don’t think I’ll create a collection.

Be good to your kids. If you can’t manage it, leave and pray your spouse remarries. Your children will remember everything, and your actions will leave marks whether you can see them or not.