Story and language brought me to the craft of writing; then passion and my childhood provided both the structure and the details. When I was busy growing up on the marine bases of my youth, my mother cast a spell on me that I found all but unbreakable. Peg Conroy was rough-born and Southern-shaped, and I heard the stories of her Depression childhood so often that I have never been able to throw off the belief that I’ve known poverty inside and out from a very early age. I still hear my mother’s voice, lovely beneath soft lamplight, whenever I sit down with a pen in my hand. She told me she was raising me to be a “Southern writer,” though I have never been sure that she knew what that meant. My sister Carol listened to that same voice, heard those same stories, and became a poet as a result. Part of my childhood that is most vivid was being the chief witness to the shaping of an American poet in the bedroom next to mine.
My father was Chicago-born, and he brought the sensibilities of Augie March and Studs Lonigan to the cockpits of the fighter planes he flew over target areas along the coastal South. He was a pure man of action; he thought books made handsome furniture, but I never saw him read one. He raised me to be a fighter pilot like himself, and that is what I had planned to do before I was waylaid by literature. Yet my books have the feel of some invisible though embattled country, where the field artillery is always exchanging rounds between chapters. Like all battlefields, my novels fill up with smoke and noise and the screams of the wounded and the answering calls of medics low-crawling through the blasted, cratered fields with their canteens and their morphine ready. My father taught me the way of the warrior at the same time my mother was turning me into a wordsmith.
My parents taught me everything I needed to know about the dangers and attractions of the extreme. Even today, the purely outrageous to me feels completely natural. My novels reflect absurdity and the exorbitance of a house in which the fully unexpected was our daily bread. My father once wiped out a dozen tanks working their way toward marine lines in Korea, and my mother’s hobby was collecting poisonous snakes. It is not my fault I was raised by Zeus and Hera, but my books mirror the odd, hothouse environment of my astonished childhood. All writers are both devotees and prisoners of their childhoods, and the images that accrued during those early days when each of us played out the mystery of Adam and Eve in our own way. My mother’s voice and my father’s fists are the two book-ends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.
If my father’s birthplace had been rural Georgia, and my mother had come up in South Chicago, I am positive that I would be known as a writer out of the Chicago school today. My mother was multiformed, hydra-headed, an untamable shape-shifter whose love of miscellany was a kind of genius. The women in my books all share an air of mystery, an unwinnable allure that I trace back to my inability to figure out what made my mother tick. When I try to pin down her soft, armor-covered spirit, when I fix it on a slide beneath a microscope, I can feel it all becoming immaterial before my steady gaze. The colors rearrange themselves and the cosmetology of her womanhood reverses itself. My hunt will always be for my mother. She could not give me herself, but she gave me literature as a replacement. I have no idea who she was, and I write my books as a way of finding out.
My mother turned me into an insatiable, fanatical reader. It was her gentle urging, her hurt, insistent voice, that led me to discover my identity by taking a working knowledge of the great books with me always. She wanted me to read everything of value, and she taught me to outread my entire generation, as she had done hers. I believe, and I think fairly, that I have done that—that I have not only outread my own generation of writers but outread them in such a way that whole secret libraries separate us. I have tried to read two hundred pages every day of my life since I was a freshman in high school, because I knew that I would come to the writing of books without the weight of culture and learning that a well-established, confidently placed family could offer its children. I collected those long, melancholy lists of the great books that high school English teachers passed out to college-bound students, and I relied on having consumed those serious litanies of books as a way to ease my way into the literary life.
Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the necessary discipline for a novelist who burns with the ambition to get better.
Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer’s heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food and drink, because a writer has possessed me, crazed me with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.
When an author sets the table right, there will be no need to pass either the foie gras or the barbecue because the characters will grab me by the collar. They will spring to life so fully developed, so richly contained in the oneness of their own universe, that they will populate the cafés and verandas and alleyways of a city I will never want to leave. Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever, from that day forward, is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
All through my life I have told myself—no, ordered myself—to read more deeply, read everything of consequence, let the words of some new writer settle like the dust of silica into the ledges and sills of my consciousness. When I find myself engaged in the reading of some magical, surprising book, I ask myself these questions: Can I match this depth? Can I incorporate this splendid work, ingest it whole into my bloodstream, where it can become part of my thinking and dreaming life? What can this writer do that I can’t? Can I steal the genius of this writer and learn all of the unappropriated lessons, then turn them into something astonishing that flows out of me because I was moved by the originality and courage and eloquence of another writer? Very early on, I set up for myself the endless task of reading and incorporating books of large and exuberant vision. By reading these luminous works, I learn the shy secrets of my craft, but I also gain some idea of the novel’s fertility, its free-flowing immensity.
When I first sat down to write, I had to teach myself how to go about it. I called upon that regiment of beloved writers, living and dead, who had written the books that had changed the way I looked at myself and the world. I wanted the atmosphere of the novels to feel like the ones I had breathed in as a boy when I found myself in the grip of a mother-haunted imagination to which I owed both fealty and homage. I demanded living trees with actual names, flowers growing in their proper seasons, characters who spoke their minds, who lived as free men and women outside of my jurisdiction. My city of made-up people would live their own complex lives without my permission or my intrusion into their sovereignty. I wanted my fictional world to feel like the one I had grown up in, with no whitewashing of the horror that stood in the doorway of any given human moment. All my rivers had to be clean enough for the cobia, the herring, and the shad to swim upstream to spawn, because I was going back to my own sources to find the secrets of the world. I desired to be one of those writers who always followed the creek bed to that source, that clear pool where the mother’s roe floated in still water above the glittering pebbles.
I promised myself nothing lazy would ever enter my books. Writing is both hard labor and one of th
e most pleasant forms that fanaticism can take. I take infinite care in how a sentence sounds to me. I rise out of the oral tradition of the American South, and words have to sound a certain way if they’re to come out right.
In my first years, my identity as a writer was drawn toward amplitude, fullness, and extravagance. I worshiped writers who made me feel sated, coddled, spoiled with all the excess that too much attention and love can provide. The overreachers called out my name, and I responded with great zeal. I longed for writers to take me to the absolute crests and limits of their talents. I did not want them to leave out the grand tours of the abysses and spiritual Death Valleys they encountered along the way.
But since I have tried to read everything, I have also found that exactness is a virtue in even the most word-possessed writer. There is enormous power in stating something simply and well. Action sequences always require the straight line in the presentation, the most solid, sequential phrases, and the punchiest, most telling Anglo-Saxon sentences. Action brims and stirs. There is delicacy, craft, and restraint in all this, as in the making of a dry martini. But sometimes a lot more is required. Then you must go inside yourself to find the liftoff into the dark side of language’s many rooms. When you have made a new sentence, or even an image that works well, it is a palace where language itself has lit a new lamp. It is why a writer sits alone, fingering memory and shaping imagination during the lost, solitary days.
As a writer, I have tried to make and remake myself over and over again. I try to notice everything, and if I take the time to write it, I would simply like to write it better than anyone else possibly could. If I am describing the Atlantic Ocean, I want to make that portion of the high seas mine forevermore, and I do not want the reader daydreaming about Herman Melville’s ocean while getting a suntan on poor Conroy’s. I try to be athletic and supple with my talent. I train it, urge it on, drive it to exceed itself, knowing in my bones that I need to be watchful about slippage, weariness, and running on empty. The safe writers have never interested me, do not excite a single shiver of curiosity within me. I can read five pages and know I am in the hands of a writer whose feet are cunningly placed on safe ground. Safety is a crime writers should never commit unless they are after tenure or praise. A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who does not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead. The idea of a novel should stir your blood, and you should rise to it like a lion lifting up at the smell of impala. It should be instinctual, incurable, unanswerable, and a calling, not a choice.
I came to the writing life because my father’s warplanes took off against me, and my mother’s hurt South longed for her special voice. Nothing is more difficult for a writer to overcome than a childhood of privilege, but this was never a concern of mine. To experience a love that is too eloquent sometimes makes for a writer without edges. I have drawn long and often from the memory book of my youth, the local and secret depository where my central agony cowers in the limestone cave, licking its wounds, awaiting my discovery of it. Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.
I have used my books as instruments to force my way into the world. It was with surprise and wonder that I discovered that the same elemental, dangerous chemistry that moves through the volcanoes of the earth also moved through me. Through the words, I learned that life and art can be raised to a fever pitch, but the secret is in knowing when to reach for it. I want always to be writing the book I was born to write. A novel is my fingerprint, my identity card, and the writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself. You watch for the black wings of fighters writing messages in the skies over the South. Your mother plays with snakes and poison and raises you to tell the stories that will make all our lives clear. It all congeals and moves and hurts in the remembering.
I can ask for nothing more.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CITY
I have built a city from the books I’ve read. There are thousands of books that go with me everywhere I go. A good book sings a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts and balconies and theaters that thrive within that secret city inside me. I can walk the pleasure-giving streets of that illuminated, sleepless city anytime the compulsion strikes me, day or night. Some of the streets are flyblown and unsafe, with chamber pots emptied on them by the housewives and butlers whose thankless labors allowed royals to be royal throughout the long reign of the printed word. If you follow me closely, I can guide you to alleyways of quartz, amethyst, and sunbaked rubies. I’ve developed a soft spot for overgrown, ruined gardens that offer safe nesting sites for vireos and orioles and tanagers. Ospreys dive for mullet in palm-lined lagoons, and a Serengeti plain allows the migrations of wildebeests through rivers teeming with crocodiles and hippopotamuses, with lions and warthogs and flamingos gathering at water holes in darkness. My city has bright aquariums, and the harbor linking it to the oceans of the world is heavy with the traffic of ships as a great white whale moves toward the setting sun; as Caesar makes up his mind about crossing the Rubicon; as Jesus of Nazareth blesses the bread and wine of his final seder feast; as an Icelandic poet composes a saga out of the primitive savagery of ice; as a cattle car is loaded in the train yards of Poland; as Rumi enters a trance of ecstatic life in Damascus. The stars whirl above in their ancient scrimmage of light, and everyone in my city notices their astonishing arrangement that lends a note of both order and chaos.
In the writing room of my Fripp Island house, there is a chapel of ease with my library rising in terraces and shelves all around me. For several months I’ve done little but think about the books I’ve read and collected over the years, the ones that have changed and challenged and elated me—along with the ones that disappointed in their execution or in some failure of conception. I require a solid judgment of good books to lead me to those unmarked lairs and secret bonfires that will clear the way to my own path of enlightenment. Ever since I was a child, I have read books to make me savvy and uncommon, and to provide me some moments of sheer divinity where I can approach the interior borderlines of ecstasy itself. Reading and prayer are both acts of worship to me.
My mother promised that reading would make me smart, and I found myself recruited in Mom’s battle over her own lack of a higher education. She distributed books to me as though they were communion wafers or the tongues of fire that lit up the souls of the disciples with Pentecostal clairvoyance. Mom would point her finger to a wall of books and tell me she was showing me the way out of a shame that was unutterable. I took whatever book she put into my hand and made it part of me. I made it the life of me, the essence of my own tree of knowledge. With each book, I built a city out of what my heart loved, my soul yearned for, and my eyes desired.
Some of us read to ratify our despair about the world; others choose to read because it offers one of the only safety nets where love and hope can find comfort. The subject of all writers is the terrible brightness that wards off the ineffable approach of death. I write a poem in hopes that my name will lie fresh on the tongues of language lovers a hundred years from now; I write a novel in case a poem is not enough. I create a city of fiction because I want to leave an entire, considered world behind me. When I open a window in a town that I’ve made up in my head, I want to make a world that readers can approach in wonder.
Reading great books gave me unlimited access to people I never would have met, cities I couldn’t visit, mountain ranges I would never lay eyes on, or rivers I would never swim. Through books I fought bravely in wars of both attrition and conquest. Before I’d ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony
, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago’s Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary—I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books.
I learned how to be a man through the reading of great books. Give me the courage of Prince Andrei as he dresses for the Battle of Borodino. Let me have one shot glass of the courage that Robert Jordan displays at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Give me the curiosity and resiliency of Garp, and a quest so great that I would ride as a sidekick to Don Quixote. Allow me to deliver the St. Crispin’s Day speech before the battle of Agincourt or secrete myself into the wooden fretwork of the Trojan horse. Give me a father like the one who raised Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory, or one with the integrity of Atticus Finch, or the courage of Colonel Aureliano Buendía as he faced the firing squad in the immemorial first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Permit me to see the Lake Isle of Innisfree through the eyes of Yeats, or the infinite glories of Fern Hill through the sensibility of Dylan Thomas; the beaches of Chile as Pablo Neruda courted a gorgeous woman with a Spanish language that soared above them on a condor’s wing.
I’ve always wanted to write a letter to the boy I once was, lost and dismayed in the plainsong of a childhood he found all but unbearable. But I soon discovered that I’ve been writing voluptuous hymns to that boy my whole life, because somewhere along the line—in the midst of breakdowns, disorder, and a malignant attraction to mayhem that’s a home place for the beaten child—I fell in love with that kid. I saw the many disguises that boy used to ward off solitude, hallucination, madness itself. I believe that the reading of great books saved his life. At any time, I could take a sudden departure from the fighter pilot’s house and find myself drifting through the tumult of Paris described in a book by Balzac. I could find myself on Whitman’s river-shaped Manhattan or be in Daisy Buchanan’s arms when I woke up with a hangover in The Great Gatsby. I’ve used books to take me on journeys all over the world, to outer space, and to forbidden planets beyond. I’ve crossed the Arabian Desert with T. E. Lawrence; refreshed myself on an oasis in Morocco with Paul Bowles; gone up a treacherous African river with Joseph Conrad; lived deeply in Atlanta’s Peachtree Road with Anne Rivers Siddons. I’ve traveled through Iraq with Freya Stark and … I could write like this forever. My city of books seems immeasurable and inexhaustible, and I can feel the others jumping up and down with their hands raised, demanding my attention, insisting that their voices be heard and their ballots counted.