To tell his story, Tom Wingo, the scarred but proud hero of Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, must go on a journey -- a literal, geographical journey to New York from his home on the South Carolina coast that leads to a psychological journey from the present to the past, to a virtual prison of memory. What he finds there is both terrible and liberating, for him and for his whole broken but remarkable family. Ambitious and intoxicating, The Prince of Tides is Conroy's biggest and most popular novel, a lushly evocative but riveting tale of redemption and renewal. Tom Wingo is a high-school football coach, temporarily out of a job, living with his wife and children on the South Carolina coast, where he has always lived. He learns that his twin sister, Savannah, a troubled but successful feminist poet, has made yet another suicide attempt in New York. He goes to New York to take care of her, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, ask him to help in reconstructing Savannah's past. Tom stays in New York for several months, submitting to intensive therapy in the hope of helping his sister, while becoming closer to Dr. Lowenstein. Savannah had been a fragile creature since childhood, given to hallucinations and suicidal impulses, but Dr. Lowenstein leads Tom to discover that the reasons are dark and violent, involving the whole family, and that he is their victim as well. Published in 1986, The Prince of Tides is dedicated to Conroy's entire family. It is not about his family, though inevitably elements in the story resonate with his own experience. What is important is the conviction with which he demonstrates the powerful grip of a family's pathology -- something most readers can recognize, on some level, and one of the reasons for the novel's great success. The character of Tom Wingo is among the author's finest creations, a good man who very badly wants to make things right -- like most Conroy heroes, a man in a bad situation, struggling to find an honorable way out. Conroy tells Tom's sprawling story with skill and abandon, and with a fearless reach for the most lyrical and heartfelt expression of a man, seemingly, learning to breathe again.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab dean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family's table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river. When I was ten I killed a bald eagle for pleasure, for the singularity of the act, despite the divine, exhilarating beauty of its solitary flight over schools of whiting. It was the only thing I had ever killed that I had never seen before. After my father beat me for breaking the law and for killing the last eagle in Colleton County, he made me build a fire, dress the bird, and eat its flesh as tears rolled down my face. Then he turned me in to Sheriff Benson, who locked me in a cell for over an hour. My father took the feathers and made a crude Indian headdress for me to wear to school. He believed in the expiation of sin. I wore the headdress for weeks, until it began to disintegrate feather by feather. Those feathers trailed me in the hallways of the school as though I were a molting, discredited angel. "Never kill anything that's rare," my father had said. "I'm lucky I didn't kill an elephant," I replied. "You'd have had a mighty square meal if you had," he answered. My father did not permit crimes against the land. Though I have hunted again, all eagles are safe from me. It was my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals. Before we went to bed at night as small children, she would reveal to us in her storytelling voice that salmon dreamed of mountain passes and the brown faces of grizzlies hovering over clear rapids. Copperheads, she would say, dreamed of placing their fangs in the shinbones of hunters. Ospreys slept with their feathered, plummeting dreamselves screaming through deep, slow-motion dives toward herring. There were the brute wings of owls in the nightmares of ermine, the downwind approach of timber wolves in the night stillness of elk. But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life. We knew that bees dreamed of roses, that roses dreamed of the pale hands of florists, and that spiders dreamed of luna moths adhered to silver webs. As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed. Each day she would take us into the forest or garden and invent a name for any animal or flower we passed. A monarch butterfly became an "orchid-kissing blacklegs"; a field of daffodils in April turned into a "dance of the butter ladies bonneted." With her attentiveness my mother could turn a walk around the island into a voyage of purest discovery. Her eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness.

 

Pat Conroy's dark novel exposes a terrible family secret behind recollected Carolina pastorale. The middle-aged protagonist, with the help of a sympathetic female psychiatrist, confronts that repressed horror. The film was directed by Barbara Streisand and starred Streisand and Nick Nolte; the novel like all of Conroy's work was a best-seller.

The novelist Pat Conroy's life and personal experience are so inextricably bound up with his writing that, at first glance, it might seem that he is merely retelling the story of his life, again and again. The truth is, as usual, far more complicated and interesting. Significant elements and characters in his novels are obviously drawn from his life, a choice that apparently has created tremendous tension in his family. But these facts are merely points of departure for the author, who has a gift that is perhaps the most desirable and elusive of all for any novelist -- the ability to spin an unforgettable story.

Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta, the eldest of seven children and the son of Col. Donald Conroy, a man not unlike the hero of "The Great Santini." He attended The Citadel, the South Carolina military academy that inspired the setting for The Lords of Discipline, and briefly taught school on an island off the South Carolina coast, an experience recounted in The Water Is Wide. The fallout from his life with his family seems to have inspired Conroy to create deeply compelling stories of vivid characters searching for love and fulfillment. These tales are invariably rooted in the infernal complexities and often dark realities of Southern tradition, notably in The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The death of his mother -- a crafty Southern woman who chose to be called Peggy, after the author of "Gone With the Wind" -- led him to write his most recent novel "Beach Music."

Though Conroy's books have created publicized rifts within his own family, they stand on their own with the public and most critics, having been embraced by a faithful and ever-growing readership and inspiring popular film adaptations. "Misfortune," Garry Abrams wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "has been good to novelist Pat Conroy."

 

 

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
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