Liberal, Southern, white, fallen-away Catholic males who come of age during the Vietnam era are always at the heart of Pat Conroy novels. That is undoubtedly the case because, in the long-standing writing tradition of "write what you know," Pat Conroy himself is a liberal, Southern, white, fallen-away Catholic male who came of age during the Vietnam era.

     In his book, The Prince of Tides, Conroy chronicles the evolution of family in the South, headed by an abusive, conservative, staunchly Catholic, Marine Corp father and a manipulative, opportunistic, social-climbing mother. Those themes are all recurring ones in Conroy's books. In The Great Santini, Conroy follows the parallel relationships between a father and son. The father, Bull Meecham, is an abusive, Marine fighter pilot. Despite the fact that Bull is a physically and emotionally abusive man, Conroy manages to make his readers understand and even like him; while at the same time, we see Bull's eldest son, Ben, struggle against his father's autocratic and violent grip. Santini is the one book that is a departure with regard to the family matriarch. Lillian is the diplomat who keeps Bull from ever going too far; she is the reason that the family has survived as long as they have; Lillian is the only maternal figure from Conroy who is not eventually loathed and mistrusted by her children.

     In Conroy's latest book, Beach Music, the main character, Jack McCall, is different from the rest of Conroy's characters in that he comes from a family where, though the father is an abusive alcoholic, he is also wealthy and educated, instead of the "white trash" image portrayed in the rest of his novelizations. Instead it is Jack's best friend, Jordan Elliot, whose father is an abusive, Catholic, Marine Corp fighter pilot.

     The one novel in which there is an actual absence, for the most part, of a father is The Lords of Discipline -- though the few scattered comments about his father leave no doubt that Will feels about his father the same way the rest of Conroy's character's feel about their fathers. Discipline follows Will McLean and his classmates as they journey through the violent and fanatical halls of The Carolina Military Institute. The experiences, in large part, and the environment of the school were taken directly from Conroy's experience at The Citadel, as told in Conroy's first book, The Boo. The Boo and The Water is Wide are Conroy's two published non-fiction books, and they give a stark insight into the man who created the enthralling fictional tales: The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music.

     In The Boo, Conroy relates a tale from his plebe year at the Citadel in which upperclassmen force a freshman ("plebe") who is allergic to tomatoes to drink twelve glasses of tomato juice, landing him in the infirmary and nearly killing him. That same story surfaces again in both The Lords of Discipline and Beach Music.

     In his other non-fiction tale, The Water is Wide, Conroy recounts a year he spent as a school teacher on Yamacraw Island, off the coast of South Carolina. Though the story is primarily set around the difficulties he faced trying to teach illiterate children in astonishingly primitive conditions and a fundamentally racist institution for the year, we get several glimpses into the personal history of Pat Conroy as a man -- especially with regard to issues of politics.

     Battles of equality -- for men and women, blacks and white, Christians and Jews -- is a recurring theme in every one of Conroy's books. All of Conroy's protagonists are feminists, and they all take a tremendous amount of grief for it, from both men and women. In The Prince of Tides, Tom's sister is bisexual, and her best friend and neighbor is a gay man -- also a good friend of Tom's. But more than any other specific issue, the one most prevalent in Conroy's works is that of race relations in the American South.

     In The Prince of Tides, the Wingo twins, Tom and Savannah, and their older brother, Luke, are high school seniors in the early sixties, at the beginning of integration. Tom, the main character, tries to slip through the turbulent time silently and without making any waves on any side. Unfortunately for Tom, however, his twin sister is 100% liberal rebel, and she breaks from the hard line of the Southern "rednecks" who oppose integration, and attempts to befriend the school's new, and immediately ostracized, black student, Benji Washington. In a scene typical of Conroy's fabulous sense of humor and gravity, we see the following exchange between the Wingo twins and a local bully, regarding Savannah's attempts at helping along integration (pp 373-374):

     Then Savannah called from the back of the room. "Hey, Tom. Bring your books back here. Yoo-hoo, Tom. I see you. It's me, Savannah. Your loving sister. Get your ass over here."
     Furiously, knowing there was no use arguing with Savannah in front of a roomful of people, I obeyed and brought my books to the back to the room as the entire class watched.
     "Hmmmmph!" Oscar snorted. "I wouldn't let no girl talk to me like that."
     "No girl would want to talk to you, Oscar," Savannah shot back. "Because you're stupid and you got more pimples than the river's got shrimp."
     "You don't mind talking to black niggers, though, huh, Savannah?" Oscar cried out.
     "Why don't you go down to the guidance department and try to break into double figures on an IQ test, creep," she said, rising out of her seat.
     "I don't mind, Savannah," Benji said softly. "I knew it would be like this."
     "Nigger, you don't know what it's going to be like yet," Oscar said.
     "Why don't you get a job selling zits to young teenagers, Oscar," said Savannah, approaching him with her fists clenched.
     "You nigger-loving bitch."
     My cue and I entered that arena cautiously, filled with dread and praying for the arrival of Mr. Thorpe, a notorious late-arriver from the teachers' lounge.
     "Don't talk to my sister like that, Oscar," I said weakly, sounding like a postoperative eunuch.
     "What're you going to do about it, Wingo?" Oscar muttered at me, grateful to have a male antagonist at last.
     "Tell my brother Luke," I said.
     "You ain't big enough to fight your own battles?" he asked.
     "I'm not as big as you are, Oscar. You'd beat me up if we had a fight. Then Luke would come hunting for you and rearrange your face anyway. I'm just skipping the step where I get beat up."
     "Tell your big-mouthed sister to shut up," Oscar ordered.
     "Shut up, Savannah," I said.
     "Kiss my ass, Tom," she replied sweetly.
     "I told her, Oscar."

     The theme of integration is again addressed in The Lords of Discipline, where, again as a senior, the main character faces an all white school, hostile to the inclusion of a single black student. This time, however, Will McLean is less passive about his feelings. Enlisted by the Commandant of Cadets to ensure the safety of Cadet Tom Pearce, Will inadvertently finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that not only changes his life forever, but one which also nearly gets him killed. Unlike Tom in Tides, in Discipline Will is vocally in favor of integration. He is the sole liberal in a school of military conservatives during the Vietnam era. As such, Conroy relates yet another universal theme in his fiction -- and it is one of the most compelling reasons that Conroy never fails to touch me personally -- loneliness.

     In Beach Music, an old high school friend, and a women who would eventually become Jack's second wife, Ledare, asks: "Do you think Jordan is lonely, Jack?" To which Jack McCall answers: "I think loneliness is a central part of his life" (p 323). Jordan, a priest underground in Rome, hiding because of war crimes committed in South Carolina during Vietnam, parallels, in many ways, the main characters in all of Conroy's books. His profound loneliness is why he and Jack became best friends; it is the same type of loneliness which ensures subterranean feelings of isolation, no matter how large the crowd, or how many loved ones are present, experienced by Will in The Lords of Discipline, Tom in The Prince of Tides, and Ben in The Great Santini as well. Perhaps Conroy's greatest gift as an author is the ease with which the reader is drawn into that feeling. He very craftily demonstrates the isolation of his main characters. Often there are blatant factors which, on the surface, seem the cause: his main characters are always liberals surrounded by conservatives; they are always religious heretics, surrounded by the devout; they are always sensitive and emotional, surrounded by the practical and pragmatic. Initially these reasons always seem to be the cause for the protagonist's loneliness, yet eventually we are led to suspect that, in fact, to be backwards. The protagonist is not lonely because he is different; he is different because he is lonely. Conroy very subtlely hints at an underlying truth: rebeliousnessness is designed to hide something fundamental and inescapable in a person, and allow the rest of the world to focus on the surface, while never leaving the rebel open to the pain of rejection, because the rebel has already rejected everything and everyone.

     That is especially true of Will in The Lords of Discipline. Easily my favorite of all of Conroy's books, Will McLean is the one literary character through whom I have learned the most about myself. Will's self-admissions always strike a hallowed and sometimes shameful chord within me, as Conroy hold this character up to me like a mirror.

     Within Discipline, Conroy's capacity to capture the nuance of friendship between emotionally awkward young men is astounding. He can describe the brutalities of The Plebe System with horrifying and brutal detail, and yet he makes it very easy to understand such deep friendships can be born out of a time and place of such violence and cruelty.

     Another theme that surfaces in Discipline, and then again in Beach Music, is betrayal. Betrayal by its nature is surprising and painful, but in both cases it nearly destroys the life of the protagonist and his closest friends when one of their own turns his back on the people who love him most by doing something which could easily be considered unforgivable.

     One of the themes, taken most directly from Conroy's real life, is mental illness. In real life, it was Conroy's youngest brother, who eventually committed suicide on August 31, 1994 (Dedication, Beach Music), who was mentally ill. In his novels that theme surfaces in both Beach Music and The Prince of Tides. In Tides, Tom's twin sister, Savannah, is mentally ill. It is her final attempt at suicide that shakes Tom out of his unhappy life in South Carolina to embark on a new one in New York, in at attempt to help his sister -- and ultimately himself. The strongest presence of mental illness, though, is in Beach Music, where both Jack's youngest brother, John Hardin, and his beautiful wife, Shyla, are mentally ill. Ultimately Shyla kills herself and nearly destroys Jack's life at the same time.

     Beyond all others, the single most pervasive theme in each and every one of his books is the graphic and artistic illustration of his complex feelings for the American South. His love/hate relationship with his home is central to each and every one of his characters -- each born in the South, yet none truly "Southern." Each character loves his home because it is his home, but hates it for its soft violence. In Beach Music, Jack McCall recounts:

     "The flight to Europe was my attempt to place the memory of both Shyla and South Carolina permanently in the past. I hoped I would save my life and Leah's from the suffocation I was beginning to feel in the place where Shyla and I had come of age together. For me, the South was carry-on baggage I could not shed no matter how many borders I crossed, but my daughter was still a child and I wanted her to grow into young womanhood as a European, blissfully unaware of that soft, ruinous South that had killed her mother in one of its prettiest rivers. My many duties as a father I took with great seriousness, but there was no law that I was aware of that insisted I raise Leah as a Southerner. Certainly, the South had been a mixed blessing for me and I carried some grievous wounds into exile with me" (p 7).

     To ascertain a single "main plot" in any of Conroy's books is nearly impossible. There is so much story packed into his novels, it is entirely possible for two people to read the same book and have completely different ideas about what the "main plot" really was. With the exception of The Great Santini, in each case Conroy follows his characters through a specific time in their adulthood, all the while flashing back to their childhood.

     In The Lords of Discipline, the front story is about Will's senior year at the Carolina Military Institute. During his senior year, he helps the Commandant protect Tom Pearce, the newly integrated black plebe; he falls in love with a mysterious socialite with a secret; he finds himself and his roommates ensnared in a conspiracy larger and more dangerous than they could ever imagine; and he suffers a profound betrayal that shakes the bottom out of his world. Yet during the unfolding of the front story, Conroy flashes back to the previous years of school at the Institute, primarily his plebe year.

     In The Prince of Tides, the front story is about Tom coming to New York City to help his twin's psychiatrist understand their childhood in an attempt to save her from yet the latest in a series of suicide attempts; he is also trying to escape his failing marriage, to rediscover his humanity, to come to terms with his brother's death, and to learn to love again. As is most common in Conroy's novels, Tides is also at least half flash-backs to a troubled and painful youth -- one that explains a great deal about the Wingo children's ascension into adulthood.

     Beach Music's front story is set in 1985, when Jack McCall is jolted from his quiet Roman life, to which he escaped after the suicide of his wife. Fleeing South Carolina with his young daughter, Jack sets about to raise her, away from what he considers the two most destructive forces in his life: the South and his family. It is only in 1985 that his American life begins to intrude on his expatriot existence, when, in search of a supposedly dead childhood friend, Jordan Elliot, another friend from youth has Jack followed in order to find out where Jordan is actually hiding. At the same time, his dead wife's sister arrives in Rome to see Jack and try to convince him to let his daughter know her family in South Carolina. Yet it is only when Jack gets a cable announcing that his mother has leukemia, a disease which she had previously faked for the benefit of her children, that he acquiesces and returns home to see the dying Lucy McCall. Beach Music is the Conroy book which has the greatest scope of flashbacks. From the American South to World War II concentration camps, the histories of his family and the history of his Jewish wife comprise the majority of The Book.

     The Great Santini is the primary departure in this string of multi-leveled plots. Santini is actually two parallel stories of father and son, over the course of one year. Also riddled with flashbacks, Conroy cleverly uses the insight into both Bull and his son Ben to help us understand how a son can both love and hate his father, while leaving us to feel the same way about this violent and abusive man. The use of the parallel plots in Santini is done through yet another departure: Santini is the only Conroy novel told in the third person.

     Unlike his other fictional accounts, in Santini, Conroy has to use the third person in order to help to understand both characters equally. In each of his other stories, Conroy makes the most of the first person in order to gain extremely deep insight into his characters. The use of silent admissions and confessions is central to what the reader learns about the protagonist. It is only in the inner recesses of the character's heart and mind that many of the most important personal revelations are uncovered.

     The single most constant theme in Conroy's works, however, has nothing to do with content; it is pure style. Pat Conroy is in love with words. The English language is the altar on which he has gleefully sacrificed himself, and anyone who loves wordy prose cannot help but love Conroy's use of verbose imagery and stylistic long-windedness. A man in love with food, Conroy often resorts to basic terms of the culinary arts to convey emotion; a man raised in and around the military, he often falls back into tactical terminology when discussing the interior of his own psyche; a man raised Catholic and Southern, he describes both the origins of himself and his family, as well as the faith they practiced, in terms of the sweetest, most lethal and seductive poisons.

     In all of this verboseness, however, Conroy manages yet one more signature characteristic indicative of his prose: humor. Irreverent, cynical, dark, sarcastic, self-effacing, well-timed humor is the mark Conroy leaves on each and every story he tells. In The Lords of Discipline we see the following exchange (pp 13-14):

     "Good afternoon, Colonel," I said to Colonel Thomas Berrineau, the Commandant of Cadets.
     "How did you know it was me, Bubba?" he asked, coming into my field of vision.
     "I'd recognize that high-pitched castrato voice anywhere, Colonel. How was your summer, sir?"
     "My summer was fine, Bubba. I could relax. You weren't on campus. I didn't have to worry about my niece's virtue or plots against the Institute. Where did you spend your summer, McLean? The Kremlin? Peking? Hanoi?"
     "I stayed home knitting mufflers for our boys in Vietnam, Colonel," I said. "It was the least I could do."
     "You son of a Bolshevik," he whispers softly as he drew his face nearer to mine. A cigar hung from his pendulous lower lip, and its ash glowed brightly inches away from my right cornea. I had never seen the Bear without a cigar in his mouth. I could have more easily imagined him without a nose or ears. You could often smell his approach before you saw him. Your nose would warn you of the Bear's quiet scrutiny before he unleashed that voice so famous among cadets.
     "McLean, I bet you were plotting the overthrow of this country, the assassination of all the members of the House, and the imprisonment of all military officers."
     "You're absolutely right, Colonel. I was lying. I spent a jolly summer in the Kremlin studying germ warfare with Doctor Zhivago. But one thing you got wrong. I would have nothing to do with the imprisonment of all military officers. I voted to line them up against a wall and let them have it with Yugoslav-made flame throwers."
     "Who would be the first American officer to meet such a fate, lamb?" the Bear asked rhetorically. The cigar ash was on the move toward my eye again.
     "Why the most fierce fighting man in the history of the United States Army, sir. The man with a soul of a lion, the heart of a dinosaur, the brain of a paramecium, and the sexual organs of a Girl Scout. The first to be executed would be you, sir."
     "You god-blessed fellow traveler Leninist," he roared, smiling.

     Pat Conroy is the only male author who has ever been able to create male characters to whom I can personally relate, and he has done it repeatedly. Every aspect of his characters' insights into themselves strikes a very personal chord with me, while never once failing to entertain. Pat Conroy is, first and foremost, a story teller, and there is no other author from whom I have learned more about my own writing -- in terms of both content and technique. Often getting swept up into grandiose tales, he weaves together characters, plot, timing and symbolism in such spectacular color that falling in love with every character is impossible to avoid. His tales and characters are larger than life, and yet still manage to be knowable and easily understood. Sensitive, compassionate, political, liberal, idealistic, passionate and rebellious, Conroy's characters never fail to strike a chord within the hearts of romantic idealists. And, at heart, that is what Pat Conroy is: a romantic idealist -- and that is a fact which makes his novels uplifting and joyous, no matter what trials his characters have to face.

• Conroy, Pat. The Water is Wide. New York: Bantam, 1972.
• Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini. New York: Bantam, 1976.
• Conroy, Pat. The Lords of Discipline. New York: Bantam, 1980.
• Conroy, Pat. The Prince of Tides. New York: Bantam, 1986.
• Conroy, Pat. Beach Music. New York: Bantam, 1995.

     The above essay was written for academic credit for English Literature at The University of San Francisco. Author retains all rights to essay and duplication is strictly prohibited. If you have any questions, please contact the author directly.

     Examples cited from Conroy novels are used for academic purposes only, and no copyright infringement is intended.