Understanding Pat Conroy by Seltzer Catherine;Wagner-Martin Linda;

Author:Seltzer, Catherine;Wagner-Martin, Linda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Beach Music

The Prince of Tides was completed during a period of significant change for Conroy; his next novel, Beach Music (1995), published almost nine years later, was written during a period of great physical and emotional upheaval. After leaving Rome he settled in Atlanta, but he soured on the city after becoming embroiled the cultural melee surrounding the firing of Atlanta Journal and Constitution editor Bill Kovach and moved to San Francisco in 1989 at his wife Lenore’s urging.1 California was not the refuge that Conroy had imagined, however; by his account, Lenore quickly “got caught up in the whirlpool of high society,” and Conroy found his writing time regularly interrupted by social obligations.2 Balance from the “baronial” qualities of life in San Francisco was provided by an old Beaufort friend, Tim Belk, who was living in the city and had been diagnosed with AIDS.3 Belk had played an important role in encouraging Conroy’s intellectual development during his early years in Beaufort, and the move to San Francisco had appealed to him in part because he saw an opportunity to help his friend. Through Belk he soon learned about the despair and suffering the AIDS epidemic had wrought within San Francisco’s gay community, and Conroy felt himself called to reach out to those who had no other advocate; during his time in San Francisco, “Tim and I made it our mission to hunt out southern boys abandoned by their families, disgusted by their homosexuality, and left to die alone.”4 While Conroy would fictionalize this experience more directly in South of Broad, his contact with men suffering from loneliness, shame, and fear—as well as the immediate physical consequences of AIDS—certainly informed his work on Beach Music.

The anguish Conroy encountered in his work with Belk was also echoed in his domestic life: his troubled marriage to Lenore was nearing its end, and their separation would bring about a lasting estrangement from his daughter Susannah; his stepdaughter, Emily, who was living with the Conroys in San Francisco, made a series of suicide attempts; and in his final year in California, Conroy was hit by a car and laid up for months with excruciating back pain. These stresses were aggravated by the extraordinary pressure he felt to finish Beach Music, now several years overdue. Conroy was aware of Doubleday’s significant investment in the book, and in fact he was experiencing his own financial strains.5 In addition Conroy was also understandably anxious about the expectations that were being placed on his work: when asked by an interviewer how he approached writing after the enormous success of The Prince of Tides, Conroy replied, “Tremblingly. It was scary for a while, and it remains somewhat scary.”6 Given these overlapping emotional, physical, economic, and artistic pressures, it is not surprising that Conroy suffered another nervous breakdown in 1993, and he left San Francisco—and his marriage—to seek treatment once again from the therapist who had helped him work through previous depressions, Dr. Marion O’Neill, in South Carolina. He

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