Charleston, S.C., home of perhaps the most insular upper crust in the U.S., likes to tell this story about itself:
It seems a woman complained to her south-of-Broad neighbor that she’d been shunned, even though she was born in Charleston.
“My dear,” answered the old-line Charlestonian, “my cat had her kittens in the stove, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.”
That’s Charleston: blue-bloods there make Boston Brahmins look like hang-loose hippies. And nobody knows about such exclusion better than military brat Pat Conroy, an outsider even among the outsiders during his years in Charleston as a cadet at The Citadel.
Though his latest novel, “South of Broad,” offers glimpses of the Charleston types who attend the St. Cecilia ball, lunch at the yacht club and live at tony south of Broad addresses, it is more concerned with outsiders, losers and dysfunctional families — characters familiar to those who’ve read “The Great Santini,” “The Prince of Tides” and “Beach Music.”
Along with its potboiler ingredients — suicide, incest, rape, pedophilia, serial murder and the like — “South of Broad” is a coming-of-age tale, with threads that link football, integration in the 1960s, AIDS in the ’80s, and Hurricane Hugo. Mostly, it’s an extended love letter to the Lowcountry landscape.
Considering how much is crammed in, one is boggled to imagine what was excised from the first draft, which climbed above 1,000 pages.
“I’ve always needed editing,” Conroy confesses, calling from his Fripp Island home. “It’s hard, but necessary.”
His first novel since 1995’s “Beach Music,” “South of Broad” is the subject of a major publicity push by Doubleday, including an appearance on “Good Morning America” and an 11-city tour that brings Conroy to a sold-out engagement at the Carter Center on Wednesday.
Not all the attention has been flattering. Newsweek called Conroy the “Prince of Bromides” and said his purple prose in “South of Broad” “swamps everything in a homogenizing bath of sickly beauty.”
Which brings us to our first question:
Q: Do you read reviews?
A: I usually don’t, but here’s what happens: Your best friend will tell you what the review says, word for word. My father memorized a New York Times review word for word, and we’d be at a party in New York, where you could hear my father’s voice crooning, “The New York Times sure didn’t like my little boy’s book.” Then he would recite from memory.
Q: So you didn’t see the “Prince of Bromides” comment from Newsweek?
A: That is a little harsh. But I have noticed that Newsweek gets a little smaller every week.
Q: So far you’ve set eight books in South Carolina. Do you feel a need to explain South Carolina to the world?
A: I don’t think South Carolina is explainable anywhere. When I got to Beaufort [where he attended high school], I would hear stories, and I would think “My God in heaven!” People would tell these stories and not know how wonderful and bizarre it made the state seem. The first time I was there, two Marines put on frogman gear and swam out to rob a guy on an island in Bluffton. He shot them and killed them both. He was in his 80s. I thought, “Holy God!” I was taking a boat out to one of the islands, and in the fog there’s two giraffes looking at me. Off the same island a herd of bison came swimming in front of the boat. I thought, “What the hell is that?’” It turns out there’s a man who keeps exotic animals on the island. ... South Carolina has never let me down.
Q: You’ve packed a lot into this book. What got left out?
A: Things that were my personal favorites. There was a columnist for the Post and Courier, Lord Ashley Cooper, which was the pen name for Frank Gilbreth, and I worshipped this guy. In the book as I originally had it, there were three chapters [featuring an Ashley Cooper character]. When it gets to New York, they’ve never heard of Lord Ashley, they’ve never heard of nothing. That was one of my own darlings that had to go.
Q: Charleston is pretty much a closed society. How do you write about a world that never speaks of itself?
A: Over the years I’ve met people from that milieu. Eventually things reveal themselves. One of the most interesting parts of Charleston is that eventually people ran out of money. People had trouble keeping those houses. Now the tragedy of Charleston is that people from everywhere else have bought those houses south of Broad. You can walk down those streets at night and three out of four houses are dark. No one lives there. ... It’s turned into Williamsburg.
Q: What was it like to get an honorary degree from The Citadel?
A: First of all, it was the greatest surprise of my natural born life. ... I was delighted when they approached talking peace.
Q: “Lords of Discipline” was seen as an attack on The Citadel, but isn’t it also a pledge of allegiance? It starts out “I wear the ring.”
A: From the time the book came out, what surprised me was I got letter after letter after letter from kids going to The Citadel who went there because of “The Lords of Discipline.” My cousin was one of them. He called me up one day and said, “Cousin Pat, I’m your cousin Ed. I’ve read ‘The Lords of Discipline’ a few times, and I think I want to go to The Citadel.” And I thought, “What is this? A learning disability?”
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