The Pat Conroy Cookbook (38 page)

I
n the lucky life I have had as a writer of books, I will never duplicate the astonishment and surprise I felt when Houghton Mifflin introduced the world to
The Prince of Tides
at the American Booksellers Association in New Orleans. I had been content with my career, which was modest but successful; that I could be publishing books in this country, with a background like mine, seemed further proof of the deepest American ideal. I had been caught off guard by the explosive reception to the new novel by the booksellers and the gushing, wide-eyed enthusiasm of my publishing company. Several of my friends had read the book and had delivered lukewarm responses. The novelist Michael Mewshaw read it in Rome and suggested I cut it into twelve novels. Nan Talese told me she liked it a lot, but I thought she spoke from her good breeding and editorial politesse. One friend said I was an anti-Semite and another said I hated the South.

It was only when the best reader of my life, Bernie Schein, checked in that I started thinking that I had hit on something big in this novel. “Goddamn,” Bernie said when I answered the phone.

“You like it, Bernie?” I said. “Tell me the truth.”

“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.”

“You really like it, Bernie?”

“Goddamn, son. If this ain’t a son of a bitch, I’ll kiss your ass on the pitcher’s mound during this year’s All-Star Game.”

All writers need friends like Bernie Schein and neighbors like the lawyers Knox and Carolyn Dobbins. Since we shared a driveway, we became inseparable friends. They would often stop me as I came out of the office I had over the garage.

“Finished yet?” Knox would ask me every time. For years I shook my head no.

Then in 1985, Carolyn asked me, “Finished yet, Pat?”

And I said, “I just wrote the last sentence.”

Carolyn squealed, then ran toward me, and I danced her around the yard. When they finished reading the book, they invited me over to the house for a celebratory drink. They toasted me and predicted great success for the book.

“We both think it’s going to be the main selection of the Book of the Month Club,” Carolyn said.

“No, it’ll never get that. I’ll be lucky to be an alternate,” I said.

Knox said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not a member of the Book of the Month Club and we are. It’s going to be a main selection. It’s a lock.”

“Why do you think so?” I asked.

“Because it’s about everything in the world,” Carolyn said. When
The Prince of Tides
was named the main selection of the Book of the Month Club, I invited Knox and Carolyn to be my special guests at the luncheon the Book of the Month Club had in my honor. I wanted to thank them for their generosity, their openness, and their amazing powers to see into a future that I didn’t see.

But it was the city of New Orleans where I felt the chambers of my fate click into high gear. Everything about that weekend in the spring of 1986 seemed magnetized, lustrous, and fine. In
The Prince of Tides
I had let my passionate love of story loose from the cage after a long imprisonment; it became possible after I read Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and John Irving’s
The World According to
Garp
. Those two marvelous books freed something inside me and made me take note of my own work and realize I was holding back and keeping a tight rein on my imagination because of cowardice and a deep fear of the judgment of critics and other writers. The first sentence of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
dazzled me, and I said out loud to myself, “I don’t know how to write. I couldn’t write a sentence this complex if I had to.” So I pressed myself to get better by growing bolder and more ambitious. I had tired of life among the parakeets, and I was eager to test the hot thermal currents from which the great condors with their immense wingspans surveyed their vast domains. But with all this bold talk and inflated thinking, I was not sure the world was ready for a book that contained the capture of an albino porpoise, a giant rapist who would be killed by a Bengal tiger, and the moving of an entire town to make way for a nuclear power plant. In Atlanta, at a party in Ansley Park before I left for New Orleans, a friend of mine who had read the book yelled at me from across the room, “Hey, Conroy! Who else writes about the birth of a child, only it’s not just a child—it’s twins? And it’s during a hurricane and the river is flooding and the father has just been shot down in Germany and is going to be saved by a German Catholic priest? Have you ever thought about just writing a normal novel?”

No, come to think of it, I never had, but my friend’s send-up of
The Prince of Tides
still strikes me as accurate and hilarious. I was nervous about going to New Orleans and witnessing the novel’s reception among the booksellers of America. But here is what is never disappointing in New Orleans: the wonderful food cooked by some of the most imaginative chefs in the world.

On Friday night, my elegant editor, Nan Talese, picked up my wife and me in a limousine to take us to dinner at a new hot restaurant in the New Orleans suburbs. Writers of the world, it is a good sign when your editor arrives in a limo to take you anywhere. It is a telling sign when she starts booking you into rooms with minibars. By the time we reached the restaurant, I was disoriented and had no idea about where in Louisiana I was. But the restaurant had smells coming out of the kitchen that were heavenly, so it boded well for the evening.

We were seated at a table beautifully set with bone-white china, good cutlery, and a tablecloth you could have performed inpatient surgery on. There were candelabras and chandeliers, and the waiters were well-groomed and well-schooled. The women at the table—I have never seen this done in another restaurant—were provided with small, raised, and inlaid pillows on which to rest their pretty but weary feet. I heard a feminist writer at another table say, “What the hell is this bullshit?”

My two British publishers were already at the table, Mark Barty King, who is known in publishing circles as the handsomest man in the world, and Paul Sherer, the head of the London division of Doubleday Royce Bemis, the Houghton Mifflin rep from Atlanta and my good friend, had brought one of his booksellers from Emory University, a pretty woman named Cassie Fahey All of us studied the menu with sublime happiness as people at tables nearby raved about the quality of the food. When the appetizers arrived, they were hot to the touch and ambrosia to the taste buds. We began sharing one another’s appetizers, plates moving across the table with crab in puff pastry that tasted as though blue crabs had actually been born in the pastry, never needing the armor of their cartilage. There were mussels in a cream and wine sauce that were the best I had ever eaten, as well as an artichoke heart wrapped in aspic.

When the main course arrived, I tasted quail roasted with pancetta and fried oysters nestling in a bed of hollandaise, and a lamb shank that seemed to have been braised in red wine, but there were hints of garlic and peppers and even, I thought, a touch of rich coffee to top off the bouquet. I lingered over my grouper, which for me has always been the tastiest fish that the Atlantic Ocean seems capable of producing. The chef had steamed the grouper in paper, flavoring it with olive oil, garlic, ginger, and wine, and once again, I think, I tasted the pungent salty afterbite of soy sauce. The table toasted the success of
The Prince of Tides
, and I toasted right back and felt like a million bucks as the waiter began to bring out desserts. The crème brûlée and cheesecakes and sorbets, the decadent cakes and sinful pies I tasted that night as the sharing of plates continued were magnificent. I think it would have ranked as a perfect meal, except for its unfortunate finale.

My editor is as proud a woman as I have ever been around, and I grew up in the South. Her grooming is perfect and one could purchase a small used car for the cost of one of her suits. I was sitting beside Nan when she whispered an urgent message in my ear: “This restaurant doesn’t take credit cards! Did you bring any money, Pat?”

“Not a penny, Nan,” I said.

“We need to talk to the headwaiter. Would you come with me? I’ve never been so embarrassed,” she said.

The headwaiter repeated the restaurant policy of no credit cards and no checks and sent us into the kitchen to plead with the chef, who was also the owner. Nan and I entered the hectic atmosphere of a kitchen in full throttle, and a dark flame of a man moved out to meet us.

Nan said, “I’m a New York publisher in town for the ABA, and I’m told you don’t take credit cards. I’ve never heard of a restaurant that doesn’t accept credit cards.”

“Welcome to my establishment, madam,” the chef said. He did impervious as well as any man I have ever seen. This guy carried himself with the sangfroid of Auguste Escoffier and displayed the presence of a field commander in the Marine Corps. “We do not accept credit cards, but my staff and I do wish to be paid for our labors. I hope the meal was adequate.”

“The best I have ever eaten, my friend,” I said.

The chef nodded and said again, “My staff and I simply wish to be paid for our services.”

“This is such a dreadful rule,” Nan said, but she had met her match. Then she began removing her many gold bracelets, soon holding a king’s ransom out to the stern-jawed chef.

“I shall leave my bracelets with you while I go back to the hotel, get the money, and come right back here,” Nan said with some desperation in her voice.

The chef shook his head no and said again, “We wish to be paid for our labors. Nothing less, nothing more.”

“Hey, pal,” I said, “I don’t know you, but I’d take that jewelry and pray this woman never comes back to this restaurant.”

“My staff and I work hard. We deserve compensation for our labors. I suggest you return to your table and tell the others of your dilemma. Someone at the table has the money I assure you.”

So poor Nan returned to the table, told of her utter humiliation by a priggish, dreadful man in the kitchen, and asked to borrow the money to pay for the meal. One of the English editors pulled out a bright wad of traveler’s checks from Barclays and paid the bill in full. I suggested right then that Nan get the chef to write a cookbook and publish it before he got famous, but Nan was miffed and declared she would not publish a word written by that man.

The weekend in New Orleans was triumphant and unrepeatable. It will never happen to me again, but then it never happens once to most people. I am deeply appreciative. I got to hear one of my literary heroes, Walker Percy, deliver a speech, then Houghton Mifflin threw me a party at the house where Frances Parkinson Keyes (one of my mother’s favorite writers) lived and worked. The great Walter Cronkite introduced me to the booksellers, and I spoke to them before the comedian Carol Burnett followed with her speech.

I spoke to the booksellers about my mother’s dream of my becoming a “Southern” writer. I told of my growing up in the household of a fighter pilot and the forces that shaped me as a boy. Then I told them about the publication of my first book,
The Boo
, which I published myself out of ignorance and provinciality. I silenced the laughter when I told them about the death of the mother who had raised me to be a writer. When I sat down, my life had changed forever. There was a huge line when I got to the Houghton Mifflin booth. It was against the rules for a line to form on the convention floor, but the chief of sales, Steve Lewers, said he didn’t give a damn, paid a hefty fine, and let the booksellers line up by the hundreds. The first person in that line was Walter Cronkite, and I have never forgotten that graceful gesture.