Pat Conroy, the most famous Southern author of the last 50 years, died on March 4.
Where to begin? Pat was a liberal outsider from a military background, a non-outdoorsman who wrote haunting and beautiful prose about the Lowcountry landscape, a writer beloved equally by men and women, an athlete, a gourmand.
As the owner of a bookstore in downtown Charleston, S.C., I feel extremely lucky to have had four book releases with Pat in six years. He may have been a charming raconteur who wrote in longhand on legal pads, but he was also a go-getter. Pat was a military brat and a point guard at the Citadel, and his industrious spirit carried over into his career, where he touched just about every aspect of the publishing world.
Pat started out self-published. After graduating, he put out a collection of anecdotes about Lt. Col. Thomas Courvoisie, the Citadel’s well-known commandant of discipline. He drove around the South, selling copies of The Boo out of his trunk. “I was humiliated,” he said. “I must have been a ridiculous, loathsome figure. I couldn’t understand why they would not just take the book and sell it.”
I have to admit, if the next Pat Conroy walked in my door today, I don’t know if I would take his first book. We used to sell self-published books on consignment, but they became too challenging to track. (Pat once signed our first edition of The Boo—it later sold for $2,000.) When offered a $1,500 advance for his second book, The Water Is Wide, a memoir about teaching on Daufuskie Island that was eventually published in 1972, his first reaction was to turn it down, saying, “My last book cost me way less than that.”
Pat was a book-signing beast—not, however, a book-signing machine. He was almost too personal for his own good, moving the line slowly, and talking to everyone. When South of Broad came out in fall 2009, Pat was recovering from a stay in the ICU. For our event, on a cold rainy day in December, he arrived two hours early and signed stock, often interrupted by “close friends” who just had to say hello. At 1 p.m., Pat went out to an unheated wedding tent in the parking lot, where the official signing was to take place. He signed for seven hours. Some fans left crying, overcome, including those who waited till the bitter end. Pat then came back inside, signed more stock, and hit the two-lane road for Beaufort on a rainy night.
“That’s the second time this year I thought I was going to die,” Pat later said. We learned our lesson for future signings; we cordoned him off and guarded the door.
Pat was also a blurb dynamo. His legacy of helping other authors extends past his life: our store has two events this spring with books he touted. I know of one successful Southern author who solicited a blurb by offering sexual favors (in jest, we hope). He blurbed her anyway; their relationship remained platonic.
Pat was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay for The Prince of Tides. Five movies were based on his books; Jon Voight and Nick Nolte were among the five actors who portrayed him. His backlist is still in print in hardback. The reprints are published by the Old New York Book Shop Press, a joint venture between him and Cliff Graubart, his old bookseller friend from Atlanta.
Pat’s writing was not for everyone. He’s been called wordy, and worse. His work was lyrical, but also at times dark, nontraditional, grotesque, and I don’t think people who don’t live in the South will ever really understand his full, complex appeal, or just how big he is here. He has a singular presence in the South. Southerners want The Water Is Wide—the original cover with the written transcript of Pat in the classroom—on the shelf next to their grandmother’s Gone with the Wind and their mother’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
At our last event with Pat, he gave a talk at a nearby venue, and afterward I led him through a back way to the bookstore. We turned a corner and came upon a groom’s party, standing on the sidewalk putting their tuxes on. They recognized him, he posed for pictures, and then I pulled him along as he wished the groom “great love.” Of several regrets I have about Pat, one is that I was always moving him along.
Pat was a giant, a deeply generous person in so many ways, and we will miss his great love.
Jonathan Sanchez is the owner of Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, S.C., and the executive director of Yallfest, Charleston’s young adult book festival.
