AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT CONROY about BEACH MUSIC

Doubleday
There has been much speculation over the autobiographical nature of your fiction. For example, in The Great Santini you write of a young man growing up as the oldest of several children in the household of a violent father--a Marine fighter pilot--which describes your childhood rather precisely; in The Lords of Discipline you write of an idealistic young man attending the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, which you attended as well. Will we see much of you in your new novel Beach Music?

Pat Conroy
I made a mistake early in my career by saying that my books are autobiographical. I've had people meet my father today and say to him "you can't be him, you're dead," remembering that the father died in The Great Santini.

The truth is, much of what I've written I've made up. Certainly I use myself as a standard bearer in the beginning of each book, in all my novels. The narrator Jack McCall in Beach Music may be an alter ego of some sort.

The impulse to write Beach Music came from the death of my mother, and there is no question that when I get to the death of the mother, that I'm writing about the death of "Mom." I'd be lying to tell you any other thing. So while I use life as a springboard, I also have a very vivid imagination. I use that imagination when I write these books.

I remember when Eugene Norris, my English teacher at Beaufort High, gave me Look Homeward Angel to read and took me to see Thomas Wolfe's home in Ashville, NC after I'd read it. I said "Mr. Norris, I wish I had interesting parents. This guy had a stone cutter and an artist as a father, and his mother was a miser who ran a guest house--you can imagine how many stories came through that place; I just have mom and dad." Later I thought, my God, I was raised by one of the most beautiful, Macheivellian and craftiest women ever to come out of the South, a woman who had a family history she continuously lied about. My mother was the first fiction writer in the family. She made up her history as she went along and it was always very difficult to tell with mom what was real and what was not real. I had a father who was a Marine Corps fighter pilot who was checked out to carry nukes; the same year I read Look Homeward Angel, my father took a squadron of Marines into Cuba. If we had gone to war with Cuba that year, it was his job to clear the air of "migs." It was only much later that I came to realize that I had been blessed as few writers had ever been blessed: by larger than life parents handed out by some Satanic forces in my life. These were huge characters and because of their hugeness there is a little overdonness about my books and about my writing.

DD
In Beach Music you travel rather far afield from the lowlands of South Carolina, in this novel to Italy, even Poland. In the past you have been known to your readers as a patriot of a single geography . . .

PC
The idea that I am the product of a single landscape is actually false. I was with dad recently and he pulled out an address book and he said "son, would you like to hear where you've lived?" Before I was fifteen we had twenty- three addresses. We lived in trailers, in garrets, in huts. When we came to Beaufort I said "OK that's it, no more. I said "Mom , I don't have a friend in the entire world," and she said, " But you make friends easily son." Military kids have great personalities: Hello, good-bye.

"Mom," I said, "I don't know anybody, Nobody writes to me, I don't write to anybody, I've never dated anybody."

So when I got to Beaufort, I was like a flounder that goes into the sand. That was it for me. I hooked into my teachers, I finally made some friends. I had decided that I had never had a home at all. But the part that I denied was that everywhere is my home. My feelings of home that came across me in Beaufort were to compensate for the feeling that I didn't belong anywhere.

Actually, I found it easy in Beach Music to write about these other places. I lived in Rome for three years, I adored Rome. So actually there are no strange geographies to me. When I write about being a Pole in Warsaw, as I do in Beach Music, I try to feel like a Pole; when I write about a Jew in Poland, I see Poland differently . . .

DD
Jack McCall, the narrator in Beach Music, is living in Italy to escape his past in the South, while practicing his trade as a cookbook author and travel writer. You write quite passionately about food and markets and meal in Beach Music. Is cooking something you enjoy?

PC
I love to cook. I grew up with a mother who was a terrible cook; I was able to turn her into a good cook in The Prince of Tides. I was with my brother Mike recently and I opened his freezer and found it was filled with fish sticks. I said, "Mike, I used to think that fish all came in the shape of a rectangle," because that's all we ate. We ate fishsticks in Beaufort, SC which is a port town--we had fresh fish all around us and we ate fish sticks.

DD
Vietnam is a one of several themes in Beach Music. How important was that war in shaping you and your generation?

PC
It shaped me in a tremendous way. Vietnam was the first time I could rebel against my upbringing. I looked at myself differently because I was a Southerner, I was a military kid, I came from the Citadel. If Vietnam did not work for me, who was it working for? If people like me questioned the war, who did they think they were going to get to support it? Everything about my background should have lead me to support the war. Six of my classmates died in the war. But I started questioning it while I was still at the Citadel. I graduated in 1967. I went to anti-war demonstrations in South Carolina. They were not big, but if they were happening at all in SC, I think that says something. I loved that the head cheerleader at Beaufort High was in the SDS and became one of the leading radicals in the antiwar movement. If it could happen in SC, it could happen anywhere. I wanted to examine the war and write about the effect it had on a group of kids who grew up in the face of it.

Our war in Vietnam has always bothered me. It is something that has divided us as a nation. I feel exactly the same now about Vietnam as I did then. I'm sorry that Clinton didn't handle this better in the last presidential campaign. I'd say, "Look, I didn't like it, didn't believe in it and didn't do it. Got a problem with that? Too bad . . . " He's taken too much grief from the military over that war.

DD
You and William Styron, both Southerners, have now written major novels using Holocaust material, an area most non-Jews avoid. Is there something that draws Southerners to these stories?

PC
Styron was smarter in one way and that is because his main character in Sophie's Choice was not Jewish. I'm keenly aware of how difficult it is for a non-Jew to write about the Holocaust. This is not material you walk into lightly. I've tried to read everything I could about it; I've interviewed survivors, done a lot of research, count many surveyors among my friends.

I think the first reason I got involved in this material goes back to my mother who was absolutely Holocaust obsessed. Much of her early reading was on this subject. She read Anne Frank to us as children and like most little boys who encounter Anne Frank, I fell in love with her. She looks so nice in that photograph, her dark eyes, smiling. And I remember when she finished reading Anne Frank I asked her what happened. "She died in a concentration camp." "What? Who came and got her?" "The Germans" "Why would they kill Anne Frank?" I simply could not get over that they would kill a nice girl like Anne Frank, and my mother's answer to this all the time we were growing up was that she wanted to raise a family that would hide Jews.

She believed the whole thing about taking care of your neighbors and being Christ-like and she was stunned by what happened in Europe. There could not be a book published on the Holocaust that she didn't read; she developed an affinity for Israel, and I was raised to share that.

One summer during my vacation I traveled to Europe with a friend, went to Amsterdam, visited Anne Frank's house, went to Munich and visited Dachau. This was a very big thing for me during college. I had many Jewish friends, I eventually married a Jewish woman. I joined the Jewish Community Center in Atlanta and I would shower with men who had numbers on their arms. I met a Jewish woman who later committed suicide. Her parents had both been survivors. She was the first to tell me that she didn't like Christians even talking about the Holocaust, she didn't believe they could understand; six months later she shot herself. Her suicide triggered something in me.

DD
Is that when you began to write Beach Music?

PC
I had already written the first few lines of my new book with the suicide of Shyla Fox and I really didn't know exactly where it came from or where it was going. One afternoon I walked into the Peachtree Rotary meeting and a woman started talking to me. Her name was Martha and she had a soft Southern accent and talked in a way that led me to believe she was from a society family. She said, "Pat, you've got me wrong. I'm Jewish, and I'm not only Jewish, my parents both survived the Holocaust." I said, Martha, you and I are about to become best friends. The first survivors I interviewed were her parents. I attended family funerals and weddings. They were very important to me and their stories entered deeply into the writing of this book.