"Many people have asked me why I want to attend college at 52, and why at an Ivy League institution like Yale? Well, based on my upbringing in the military, I associated a difficult vetting process with quality and opportunity. I was correct in that guess. More importantly, I simply want to be a better human being.

“Are there other places to get a great education? Of course, but I chose Yale."

from James Hatch's My Semester with the Snowflakes

Evans’ Rag

Vol 2 Issue 2

Writing about Broken Families

Someone I greatly respect, listening to my running on about The Prince of Tides novel by Pat Conroy, said she didn’t think she could read a story about broken families and broken people, being that it hit too close to home for her. Fair enough. Conroy never hid his own backstory of his father’s abuse–it was a motivation undergirding his writing–a moral, if you will. Eventually, we’re all broken, one way or another by this life, and we either find sustenance in reading of other tragedies, or avoiding what they remind us of, and it’s totally OK either way.

When your nerve ends remain raw from the damage, sometimes the best thing for it is to crawl into a cave and shelter in place.

During my own times in the barrel, I was surprised by triggering events–one that stands out was a NY Times article during the buildup to the Iraq War about a New England family traveling to witness their son’s graduation from Parris Island. They were proud yet puzzled as to why he volunteered, not coming from a military background–not being ‘that kind of family,’ as his father said. Knowing their eighteen-year old would be in Fallujah as a Marine–tip of the spear–made me wince. Were his parents that innocent? All I could think of was what might lie ahead, having just lost my own son, Ryan. It was a very visceral reaction, and it generated another poem–my best excuse for surviving those years.

But Conroy doesn’t dwell on the origins of his characters’ pain, only the crippling results.

I’d be willing to offer a condensed summary of the single violent scene in Conroy’s book, so the friend I care for can skip those pages; she’s keen enough, and she doesn’t need the specifics to know the origins. The pain in The Prince of Tides is like a slow moving sheet of black water made opaque by its depths.

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; its afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

”Though our bodies would heal, our souls had sustained a damage beyond comprehension. Violence sends deep roots into the heart; it has no seasons: it is always ripe, evergreen.”

from The Prince of Tides

A rape violates memory. As destructive an evil as one human can do to another on this blue and battered rock. In this scene, the damage is inflicted on women and men, young and old alike. That’s all my friend needs to know.

Chapter 22, pages 489 to 495. Covering six pages in the paperback version. This far into the novel, a reader already knows enough to recognize these characters are all survivors of same tragedy–if they are indeed survivors.

The Sound and Fury might be a comparable story in many ways, but Faulkner’s unrelieved grimness isn’t Conroy’s. The Prince of Tides wasn’t written by Faulkner.

In The Prince of Tides, sardonic humor is Tom Wingo’s survival engine (with dark jokes and Southern sass). Unlike Faulkner’s impressionism, Conroy’s style is mainstream storytelling–what isn’t is the length to which Conroy goes in the telling. At Faulkner’s core lay ambiguity, and at Conroy’s specificity. Faulkner wrote almost clinically detached from his stumbling characters; Conroy very much was related to his.

Both Faulkner and Conroy wrote vivid stories about believably real people; the difference being Faulkner’s characters remain unredeemably broken, and Conroy holds out hope for his, limping yet living.