The Lost Prince Page 12

  “Are you saying the women’s marathon didn’t move you?”

  “Not half as much as your novel. I wrote you a letter about Year of the Gun. But I didn’t know where to send it. I’ll mail it to Pittsburgh and have Linda carry it to you. Meanwhile, I salute you, as they say in the Corps, hand to helmet.”

  Weeks later, in Rome, I read Pat’s letter, the longest response to one of my novels since William Styron’s critique of the fledgling manuscript I wrote as a grad student.

  “I cannot tell you if I loved the book because I love you, or if I love the book because I love Rome. Lenore moaned with pleasure as she read the book. I moaned orgasmically for the book sang with little moments that make a writer happy to be alive and writing in the English language. I mostly felt sad that we were not in the same city together. You made a good book wonderful. You made a city live on the page which has always seemed to me the highest precinct of art. It hurt me to see how fabulously you wrote about the city we both revere. I was proud and filled with awe. I wished that I had written every word of the book and you had lived in St. Louis. I can’t believe a better book will ever be written about the city of Rome and my jealousy is praise . . .

  “Atheneum [the publisher] does not get high marks . . . the book was reviewed long before it was available [in stores]. The jacket also stank and was unexciting. The advertising was negligible and not inspired. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you have not already noticed but all these publishing companies, Mike, seem to treat your fiction as though it were on a flight pattern over the Sudan. They treat it as though it was not important, not essential, or an event to be celebrated. Since the industry will always remain a mystery to me, I can’t claim to be surprised but I can claim to be disturbed. Have you wondered what you can do to break out of this cycle of neglect, Michael?”

  This wasn’t an unreasonable question, even if it did abrade the raw spot that Mom always aggravated by asking why I couldn’t produce a bestseller. I read on, hoping Pat had an answer.

  “I have come up with nothing that will not cause you to reach for a vomit bag, but I have studied the American scene with uncommon repulsion since we returned to the States and I will offer you some of my observations. I think that you write well-crafted novels, Mike, that fall between the two twin Alps of mediocrity in American publishing. There is the Alp of Shit, the bad novel, which makes the most money and sells the most books because of the incomparable shallowness of the American reading public. You cannot join the expedition to the Alp of Shit because you are incapable of writing a bad sentence. These are the books of Leon Uris, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Trevanian, etc. They have ridiculous story lines, Velveeta characterization, moaning plots, international locations (you have that too, but at your hotels the plumbing never works) and sex which causes tidal shifts across the planets. (In your sex scenes the women always have small breasts and can never come. Great breasts and orgasms in women, followed by douches of Lafitte-Rothschild are de rigeur in the Alp of Shit lexicon.) Now I think your novels lie in the long desolate valley between the Alp of Shit and the Alp of Significance. Gore is a genius in maintaining his condo on the Alp of Significance. So is Bill Styron. Look at Gore’s last two books. Creation—about a Persian who tells the story of Greece as it should have been told if Herodotus wasn’t a flak. Then Lincoln, a historical novel about the most glorious American created by God during America’s severest test as a Republic. Bill wrote Sophie’s Choice—about the Holocaust and its bitter aftermath when a young Southern writer meets a girl who lost her teeth at Auschwitz. Before that there was Nat Turner, slave psychic commanded by Yahweh to set his people free. Notice, Michael, that we are dealing with large themes, all of which can be summarized in a single line of ball-clutching advertising prose. These men write about giants who die grandly.”

  Pat neglected to break for paragraphs, but I broke to ponder how much of this applied to me and Year of the Gun, and how much represented an attempt to strategize as he completed The Prince of Tides.

  “Yes, I know this is repulsive,” he continued, “and alien to any good boy who learned to parse Latin at DeMatha High School. But when I read that light shit ad for Year of the Gun, so timid as to be invisible, I tried to figure out what could have been done to lift your novel out of the Valley of Neglect and balloon it up to the Alp of Significance. Finally I had it. The Pope had to be kidnapped, only not just any Pope. The first American Pope. The keys of St. Peter’s had to be in the pocket of the guy who sat on the board of Chrysler. Who would do the kidnapping? Aha! The Red Brigades claim credit and demand that the church sell every painting and fresco in Rome to obtain his release. The Israeli secret service could have a hand in it, angered after the Pope had embraced Arafat in a group photo shot. Or a rightwing cabal of Cardinals who find out that the new Pope plans to allow priests to marry and sully their pee-pees on the happy pasturage of vaginas around the world. South African Commandos. Libyan expatriates. IRA dissidents. The list is endless and my profession makes me sick.”

  But not so sick that he didn’t ramble on. “With every book I’ve ever written, the advertising department of Houghton Mifflin has asked me to come up with a single line describing what my book is about. I never can do it and am always jealous of writers who can. The one-line, I think, is absolutely necessary to scale the Alp of Significance . . . I’m wondering, Mike, if you and I should try it.”

  Pat was being disingenuous. He had already produced novels of the requisite bestseller size and complexity and raised himself far above the Valley of Neglect. But I cringed to think how he would react—how any publisher would react—if I presented a one-line synopsis of Blackballed, my novel-in-progress. It was about a Tuareg tribesman who conquers the tennis world, winds up in jail on bogus charges, then mounts a comeback wearing Islamic regalia.

  “I’m worrying about myself in this letter,” Pat finally confessed, “and in the back of my mind I’m trying to come up with a snappy one-liner to describe my new tome. Shrimping family, buggered by ex-cons, are removed from their ancestral lands by the Federal Government who wants to build a Nuclear Power Plant. Already I’m in trouble. Who gives a shit about a shrimping family? But if I said Southern Peanut Farmer who becomes President loses his ancestral lands because of the wily machinations of his Republican successor—I have mounted the Alp of Significance (or Shit) in a single bound.

  “Anyway, these are the thoughts I’ve been thinking . . . since I read Year of the Gun and realized Atheneum was going to let the sucker slide. It’s a terrific book and it deserves better than it seems to be getting.

  “In my next letter I will deliver another sermon, a hysterical cautionary tale about not coming back to America to appease your children’s lust for Burger Kings and Little League. But for now, I love you both and miss you terribly. I am proud of you, Michael. You done good. I return now to my toehold on the Alp of Shit.”

  I read and reread Pat’s letter. Like a jeweler studying a stone through a loupe, I held it up to the light and turned it this way and that. Although written tongue in cheek, his remarks seemed far more than mere jokes. A good deal of thought and energy had gone into it. Coming from a different friend, his advice might have sounded offensive, but Pat had the saving grace of humor and a disarming knack for empathizing as he criticized.

  For a while Pat let Lenore communicate with us while he finished The Prince of Tides and tended to his mother. Impatient with the Italian postal system, Lenore took to telephoning, and because of the six-hour time difference between Atlanta and Rome, she often called after Linda and the boys were in bed and I was up late reading. Lenore regarded our talks as therapy sessions and dubbed me Doctah, a nickname that stuck.

  She phoned on November 17 to say that Peggy Conroy had died and Pat was crippled by grief. He remained incommunicado until December 26, 1984, when he wrote, underlining the date and stressing, “Fuck this year.”

  “This will be another whining report in mid-passage,” he started off, but s
oon descended into self-mockery, reporting that his Christmas gift from Lenore was “some snappy Yves St. Laurent underwear designed for men half my weight, but blessed with twice my genital burden. Speaking of weight, I’ve lost ten pounds and now weigh what a smallish professional wrestler weighs. When next you see me, I’ll look like a jockey and I’ll shop for those neat Italian suits worn by svelte pimps.

  “I bought for Lenore (and me) a ticket to Rome on June 10. Naturally all of you will have moved to Bonn or back to America and we will enter a strange city with no connections or prospects, but we plan to stay at least a month and will decide if we’re going [to move back] or not. I’m glad I was back here when Mom died. The end was hideous but I had a whole year to make my peace with Peg. The last thing we did together was to attend a family reunion in Piedmont, Alabama. All my relatives had tried out for the banjo player in Deliverance. The kids were in a state of shock when they contemplated the ghastly gene pool in that room, but all of us came away admiring my mother for the giant step she made out of Piedmont. The funeral was very lovely and very moving. The five sons served as pallbearers and much of the town turned out. She was buried in the same cemetery where they buried Santini in the movie. Something about the whole thing broke my heart. Peg was 59. A kid.”

  It troubled me that Pat felt obliged to be funny about his grief. Perhaps it helped him cope. Maybe the alternating current of humor was all that allowed him to endure his sorrow. As he zigzagged from one emotion to another, he called to mind an ice cube on a stove top, skating as it melted, searching for a spot that wasn’t scalding.

  11

  The 1980s were the heyday of New Journalism and hot magazines. Many a novelist supported his fiction by producing articles, celebrity profiles, and travel pieces. Impressed by my portrait of Rome in Year of the Gun, David Breul, the editor of European Travel & Life, offered me an assignment for the publication’s inaugural issue. He wanted something light yet substantial, factual yet fanciful, writerly yet not overwritten. When I asked him to be specific—what should my first “Letter from Rome” be about?—Breul said, “It should be about two thousand words.”

  With that directive in mind, I banged out “Campari and Complexity at Center Court,” which hailed the Italian Open tennis tournament as a microcosm of the city’s hallmarks: “dazzling color and motion, dense golden light, copious food and wine, high fashion and low comedy, spontaneous friendship and rabid nationalism, grace under fire and ham-handed evocations of a real and imagined past.”

  Breul bought it, cementing a relationship that lasted seven years. When ET&L died, as all fine magazines inevitably do, there followed an even longer relationship with The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, where Sarah Ferrell and Nancy Newhouse welcomed my article ideas, the more idiosyncratic the better. Skiing in Slovakia, exploring an obscure art installation in the Moroccan desert, sampling nightlife in post-apartheid Cape Town, reconnoitering the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara—these and other outré assignments got me off my ass, out of my usual routine, and sharpened my eye for details that fed my fiction.

  Then the Sophisticated Traveler expired, too, but not before it influenced Pat Conroy. Although he never wrote for the magazine, he was a conscientious reader of my articles and he made Jack McCall, the narrator of Beach Music, a freelance Rome-based travel author whose favorite outlets were . . . European Travel & Life and The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler.

  IN THE SPRING OF ’85 Rome experienced a spate of extraordinary weather. Working in the blisteringly cold upstairs studio in fur-lined boots and a ski parka, I watched snow mantle the red tile roofs and snap the fronds off frozen palm trees. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, where azaleas and dogwoods bloomed, Lenore was preparing for a summer visit to Rome. She counted on me to persuade Pat to travel to Italy with her. “I think he stands a better chance of working there (anywhere),” she wrote, “than here. A lot of Pat’s time is taken up giving advice to Cliff [Graubart] and Bernie [Sheine] on their writing projects which is great and generous . . . but not on a constant basis and not at the sacrifice of one’s own writing?”

  In mid-June, Pat showed up along with the rest of the Conroy clan, but overlapped with the Mewshaws for only a few days. The landlady had cajoled us—“cudgeled” is a better word—into vacating the apartment so that she and her daughter could stay there for July and August. Linda, the boys, and I spent those months in the States, in a borrowed flat on the Upper East Side, where the Conroys paid us a visit as they passed through Manhattan on the way home. Pat was ebullient about the movie prospects for The Prince of Tides. Our old friend Andy Karsch had found financing in Hollywood and hired Pat to write the screenplay. This figured to free them of debt and permit them to return to Rome in grand style.

  As much as Pat, like me, was an operatic complainer, constantly decrying that he was trapped in a revolving door of misfortune, a case could be made that he, again like me, flew along serenely under the protection of a guardian angel. The difference between us was one of quantity. Whereas I had just signed a $12,000 contract for my new novel, Blackballed, Pat was poised to make millions from The Prince of Tides. Since I wasn’t immune to human weakness, I should have been jealous as hell. But Pat wouldn’t allow it. He simply wouldn’t let it happen.

  In a hydra-headed strategy of envy preemption that he employed not just with me but with any potential green-eyed demon, he downplayed his success. He maintained that it never made him any less miserable. He was cravenly grateful for crumbs of kindness, never bragged about his accomplishments, and was unfailingly generous with his praise of others. For a guy who had been a great athlete, he buried his competitiveness in almost every sphere except his court battles with Alan Fleischer.

  That night in New York when Pat told us the good news about The Prince of Tides, I congratulated him and said I was happy. But I also couldn’t resist a quip that had “passive-aggressive” stamped all over it. “Every time Conroy writes a letter,” I said, “somebody turns it into a movie. Me, I write a novel and it instantly turns into a dead letter.”

  No one laughed harder than Pat. He liked the line and jotted it down in his journal. Days later, before Linda and I left for Rome, Andy Karsch called to say he had read the galleys of Blackballed and decided to option the film rights. I suspected Pat had put him up to it. Andy denied this and cut me a check for $10,000. A year later, he renewed the option for another $10,000, and although I challenged Pat, he professed to have had nothing to do with it. I thought I knew better. While it may not have been Pat’s money, I think he primed the pump at Andy’s production company.

  ELATED TO BE BACK IN Italy that September, we trudged up the 110 steps to our apartment and discovered that the duplex had shrunk to a monoplex. The landlady had blocked off the upstairs studio and terrace because, she claimed, her daughter had contracted tuberculosis and was recuperating where I had counted on writing.

  Wouldn’t a sanatorium be a better place for the poor girl? I asked. Wasn’t there a danger of contagion?

  The landlady wailed that Americans were heartless. And when I suggested we deserved a reduction in rent since she had cut the apartment in half, she accused us of unconscionable avarice. Still, she agreed to a small discount.

  That fall I worked in the living room in a wicker peacock chair with a lapboard on my knees. My schedule revolved around Sean and Marco’s school day. The minute the Marymount bus picked them up, I began writing. When the bus brought them home, I closed up shop and played baseball with the boys in Piazza di San Salvatore in Campo. From the windows of a madhouse, patients and doctors watched in disbelief as three Americans shagged grounders bouncing crazily off cobblestones.

  Overnight the tubercular girl on the top floor enjoyed a miraculous recovery and moved out, and a French couple moved in. When I complained—no, exploded!—the landlady huffily informed me that since I had forfeited the studio in exchange for a discount, she had the right to rent it to anybody she pleased.

  Appeals to
her fairness and decency failed, and I resorted to guerrilla tactics. I choked off the heat and electricity to the top floor, casting the French couple into shivering darkness. The landlady retaliated by jamming matchsticks into the door locks on the VW Derby, and it cost me $200 to have a specialist undo this slimy trick.

  But that was small change compared to my legal expenses. In Italy an industry had cropped up around rental disputes, and because nothing about our lease was on paper, our attorney, sounding like a medieval casuist, argued for a “faith-based” contract, which depended, like the existence of God, on “evidence unseen.” After months of gutter fighting, the case concluded with a negotiated settlement. The French couple stayed upstairs, the landlady dropped the rent by another hundred bucks, and we consented to relinquish the apartment next summer.

  Marymount’s Christmas pageant showcased Sean as a singing soloist and Marco as a silent shepherd. Afterward, Victor Simpson, an Associated Press editor, congratulated me on the boys’ performance. Victor and Daniela Simpson’s son Michael played soccer with Sean, and their eleven-year-old daughter, Natasha, rode the school bus beside Marco, acting as his surrogate big sister.

  On December 27, the Simpsons were at Fiumicino Airport waiting for a Trans World Airlines flight to the States. Because TWA shared a counter with El Al, passengers headed for New York milled about with people bound for Israel. In the confusion, four Arabs with assault rifles and grenades turned the terminal into a killing field. El Al ticket agents, who doubled as security guards, vaulted the counter, shot three of the terrorists dead, and wounded the fourth—but not before sixteen travelers were killed and ninety-nine injured.

  The boys, still in pajamas, were watching cartoons on TV when the news broke. Simultaneously with the assault on Fiumicino, Hezbollah had attacked the Vienna Airport, killing three and injuring thirty-nine.