PAT CONROY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Pat Conroy is online at the Guardian now, you can link to it here. I expect it will be in the paper paper tomorrow: it got bumped today by Nancy Reagan.

The piece is pretty much as written. It's a complicated story, and Conroy of course told it at great length and many times, in many ways. There was a quote about the divorce from his second wife that didn't make the final cut: 'If she had been a country, I would have married North Korea'. I wonder, but can't say, if that were at the root of his estrangement from his second daughter.

I probably should have noted that although he was named Donald for his father, he went by Pat, his middle name. I could have gone into more detail about his basketball career at The Citadel, and a four-overtime upset of Virginia Military Institute his senior year. I would have liked to write a bit about the guilt he felt for not going to Vietnam like his classmates: I don't know if he were deferred because he'd married a widow with two children, or if he had a high lottery number, or if it were something else, but this fits into a literary strain which runs from, say, Hemingway, through the south via James Dickey with whom Conroy apparently studied. And that he wrote a perceptive introductory essay to a book about the problems of military brats which I had to edit out for space.

I also had a slight connection with the film of  Lords Of Discipline. The black cadet who tries to break the colour barrier at what is supposed to be The Citadel was played by Mark Breland, the boxer. I was working for ABC Sports at the time, and I was assigned the task of trying to keep Mark Breland out of trouble when he came to London. I even arranged a blind date for him with my then-wife's assistant: he was stunned by his night of clubbing with her, which I took to be a good thing.

The film of Prince Of Tides was in some ways better than the novel: more compact and less rambling. Conroy's style was prolix and often melodramatic; he wrote beautifully within that expansiveness. But what was odd were the bright red sharply-pointed almost Fu Manchu fingernails Barbra Streisand wore: something that seemed rather aggressive for a psycho-analyst. There is also a scene where she walks away from Nick Nolte and the camera stays on her legs and swaying bottom as if the director were marvelling that the star still had 'it'. I actually laughed in the theatre. You might say, however, that Conroy's books gave Jon Voight, Nolte, and Robert Duvall some of the best roles of their careers (and it's amazing how much Duvall resembles Donald Conroy).

I'm tempted to call the expansive quality of Conroy's writing something Irish in nature, but his name-checking Ulysses in his final novel merely called attention to the differences. But you get the sense story-telling was Conroy's metier. He told one about being at the doctor in 2011 when heart and lung problems were so severe the doc removed 11 pounds of water-weight from him in just ten minutes. 'I have an idea for a Frank Conroy Diet book,' he said. Although he never could escape those dark memories which were the root of his work, he appeared to somehow relax after that health scare, and his final years may have been more rewarding for him. I hope so. RIP

ROBERT STONE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Robert Stone is online at the Guardian, you can link to it here and it should be in the paper paper tomorrow or soon. It wasn't until I was writing the piece that I realised how deep Stone went into himself to pull his fictions out; the long spaces between books were likely as much recovery as research. There was the sense too, which I didn't put directly into the piece, that Stone lived before (and while) he wrote, in fact, was driven to live. Whereas so much fiction today is written very well but has no life behind it.

The obit is pretty much as written up through Dog Soldiers, which deserves every bit of praise I gave it, and more. I should have mentioned Stone wrote the screenplay of the movie as well (with Judith Rascoe) and that it was titled Who'll Stop The Rain (after a Creedence Clearwater song) because some executives thought people would think Dog Soldiers was an animal movie. The three leads are all spectacularly good, Richard Masur heads a stellar supporting cast: Gail Strickland, Anthony Zerbe, Ray Sharkey, and I think you could consider it, alongside The Gambler as perhaps Karel Reisz's best films (though he didn't necessarily agree when I posed the point to him once years ago).

When I started to explain what made Stone's writing unique, the paper had a problem with a quote from Stone: 'I like big novels. I really admire the grand slam', fearing their audience wouldn't understand what he meant by grand slam (a phrase used in tennis, rugby, golf and bridge as well as in baseball).

I then wrote: 'His friend Kesey's first novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) featured passages of beautifully unfocused prose, mirroring the effects of the hospital's drugs on its patients; his second, Sometimes A Great Notion (1964) was an attempt at the Big American Novel, in more standard prose style.' This, I thought, explained perfectly the idea of the synthesis Stone created in his writing. It was also interesting that Paul Newman directed and starred in the film adaptation of Sometimes and that it was retitled Never Give An Inch.

The paper also lost one of my points by changing 'actress' to 'actor' in the copy. What made Children Of Light so personal was that the schizophrenic character was a woman, like his mother. It's an odd policy, to use a gender-neutral term for actors, but insist, for example, on the gender-specific coinage 'gay and lesbian'.

The controversy over Outerbridge Reach was something I merely mentioned, but Stone was accused of borrowing heavily from a book called The Strange Voyage Of Donald Crowhurst. This is one of the perils of research; the uses Stone made of the story, as the obit implied, went farther and wider than the Crowhurst did. For which I would cut him some slack.

I don't believe any of Stone's novels could be called best-sellers, though they were very favourably reviewed and nominated consistently for major awards. I probably should have made more of his beat connection; his novels sometimes read like beat writing with more sympathy for the mainstream. His mixing of poetry and realism, while not quite magical as the Latin Americans, or his drug-familiar contemporary Tom Robbins, is probably the most thoroughly and painfully American of any major novelist of my lifetime.