Pat Conroy. The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son.
New York: Doubleday, 2013.
As reviewed bt Ted Odenwald
Pat Conroy claims that he has written about his family more than any other American writer. His family probably does not see much to celebrate in that claim, for his works focus his fury upon several members of the family. “I’ve felt like I was born in a prison yard and would never be eligible for furlough or offered safe passage into a cease-fire zone. My family is my portion of hell, my eternal flame, my fate, and my time on the cross.” His primary target, particularly in The Great Santini, was his father, Marine Corps pilot, Colonel Donald Conroy. According to the author’s portrait, his father was an egotistical, abusive, heartless bully, who inflicted great psychological harm on his wife and children. This theme is repeated with variations in The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. The Death of Santini is nonfictional—a mixture of therapy, exorcism, and re-evaluation—leading to the author’s promise that he will “ give [his] parents’ spirits a rest…one that will last forever.” Eulogizing the Colonel at his funeral, Pat revealed that he had moved from the contempt expressed in his earlier works, and had gained understanding—if not total forgiveness—of his father’s character. “There should be no sorrow at this funeral because the Great Santini lived life at full throttle, moved always in the fast lanes, gunned every engine, teetered on every edge, seized every moment, and shook it like a terrier shaking a rat.”
Those who have read Conroy’s novels will be surprised to see that the author’s feelings about his father have moved from abject contempt to awe, perhaps even admiration. This autobiography/memoir tracks the volatile familial relationships, particularly the uneasy, painfully slow rapprochement that developed between father and son. These relationships, all shaped (or distorted) by the Colonel’s mishandling of his wife and children, three of whom, including the author, suffered severe mental or emotional issues. Pat is careful to separate fact from the events fictionalized in his novels. While the horrifying spirit of his tormented childhood echoes in this memoir, Conroy details the embellishments or twistings of fact as presented in the novels.
While continually hurling insults and accusations at his father, Conroy seemed to back down, to soften as he saw a gentler side to the Colonel. The chokehold of contempt may have first loosened for the author when he observed how deeply moved Don was by damning scenes in the movie “The Great Santini,”—scenes in which Robert Duvall portrayed the officer as a monstrous sociopath who sadistically toyed with the emotion and psychological frailties of the family, causing the son’s accusations to ring true. Another moving moment for the author was when he witnessed the deep depression of his father as the Colonel’s ex-wife (and Pat’s mother) suffered horribly through terminal cancer. The violent suicide of Tom, Pat’s brother, who had suffered for years with mental illness which was exacerbated, if not cause by the family turmoil, brought out deeply hidden feelings of guilt in the father, and led him to the realization that he needed his family.
The Colonel’s realization led to a major change in his behavior; though Pat continually poured nasty abuse on him: “I shamed myself with my own immense capacity for a murderous litany of the crimes he committed against his family. To his credit, Dad absorbed the daily attacks with patience and alacrity…. Though I was trying to unleash dark secrets he carried inside him, I was letting myself display a bloodletting portrait of the scar tissue covering my own soul…offering irrefutable proof that I was his most violent son.” In Don’s final years, the two grew much closer, especially after Pat understood more about his father’s “blue-collar crudeness” and about his being “the most grotesque of Irish Catholic males” raised in Chicago. The son was constantly at the father’s side as the retired officer suffered from congestive heart failure and cancers of the colon and liver.
Pat also spends a great deal of time discussing his mother and his maternal grandmother, both of whom dedicated their lives to separating themselves from their origins. For them, “… Piedmont was a branding iron of shame, a stormy-blooded omen, an underbelly of the Deep South, and as a place to fly way from. Piedmont lit fires of the deepest shame in their bloodstreams.” The women lived their lives as if they were among the elite–the grandmother marrying frequently and even abandoning her children in attempts to elevate her social status; and the mother constantly trying to work her way into the acceptable society of her military and social environments, while maintaining emotional distance from her children.
Conroy has not come to terms with all of his demons. His education at The Citadel remains a nagging wound within his character. The school was the home of “ferocious abuse,” a place where the cadets howled and brutalized and starved the plebes.” The plebe system taught him “nothing about leadership and everything about humiliation.” As a novelist, he felt blessed by this education, for it “…gave me a wider knowledge of the nature of atrocity and mankind’s capacity for infinite cruelty…it gave me a narrative of darkness that I could move through my life’s work.”
Conroy’s autobiographical writing is as powerful as his novels—perhaps because so much of his fiction is the reflection of various stages of the progress of a tormented soul—one which appears to have come to understand his background and himself.
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 44 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.