Book review: Friendship with talented, troubled Pat Conroy

"Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship"

Author: Bernie Schein

Arcade, 272 pages, $25.99

Through the writing of Bernie Schein, author, teacher and lecturer, you will understand who author Pat Conroy really was. We knew Conroy’s father in a book Conroy wrote called, “The Great Santini.” The man beat his child and was often cruel to him in other ways. Conroy spent many of his childhood years caring for his mother, brothers and sisters. He had to be the adult. He didn’t have a childhood.

The son of this violent man, a soldier whom his children had to tiptoe around in peacetime, Conroy wanted to become a kindly, temperate and well-meaning man who didn’t turn into his father. All his life Conroy wondered why, when he was “a nice boy” his father beat him. He never could predict when “… the tongue of Santini would strike.”

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Author of “The Water is Wide,” “Beach Music,” “The Lords of Discipline,” “South of Broad” and many others, Conroy wrote this at his writing desk: “I struggle every day with the little boy I once was.” He always felt responsible for his father’s brutal treatment.

As a young child he couldn’t or wouldn’t write at all, so while his friends were in classes, he was put in a closet and made to stay there until he wrote. Later, when Conroy was ready to write a book, he told people aloud the stories he wanted to publish. It was only after many oral readings to friends that the author made his work permanent. Following that he never read a book review or anything about his writing, according to Schein. Conroy handed over the first 300 pages of “The Prince of Tides” to Schein, which he read in one gulp. He writes, “I found the book “so wondrous that in losing myself in it, I soon forgot my own world.”

Schein and Conroy’s friendship was an odd one. He needed Schein 24/7. The comfort of having him around was essential to him … until their 15-year rift. After a falling out they stopped talking to one another. Bernie lived through Conroy’s worst depressive moments, near-suicides and bouts of drinking. From the age of 27 on, Conroy drank a fifth of liquor a day. His alcoholism nearly killed him. He was 71 when he died of pancreatic cancer.

Schein knew Conroy for 50 years and misses “… his excitement, his inspiration, the depth of his feeling, the breadth of his joy, his uncommon stupidity.” Schein felt, "The more Pat Conroy found success in the world, the more he found failure in his personal life, his family.”

Another view of the author can be gleaned from Conroy’s wife, who recently wrote in her memoir “Tell Me a Story” about her husband and the life she lived with this loving if imperfect man. The two books by Bernie Schein and Sandra Conroy provide meaningful bookends with their sometimes conflicting observations of Conroy.

Mims Cushing lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and has written three books.