It marked the start of an extended process of reconciliation that would take decades to complete. Don Conroy initially expressed both hurt and outrage, denying what he called “these weird fantasies of my oldest son.” But in a surprising turn of events, the elder Conroy soon became his son’s staunchest defender, embracing his newly public role as the real Great Santini. Many relatives resented what they saw as a betrayal of family secrets.
“To make my father human,” he acknowledges here, “I had to lie.”ĭespite this softening, the novel touched off the first of numerous firestorms within the Conroy clan. Responding to an editor’s request to soften his portrait of this hard-edged character, Conroy complied. These kindnesses, though, were the most fictionalized elements in the novel. He was also a genuinely heroic figure given to surprising, if infrequent, moments of kindness. The Conroy/Meecham of the novel was a physically imposing despot who inflicted extreme and inexcusable violence on his wife and children. Brutal, commanding and charismatic, the elder Conroy was a man who legitimized such cliches as “larger than life.” As most readers know, the novel’s patriarch protagonist, Bull Meecham, was a lightly fictionalized version of Conroy’s own father, Col. The public face of that story began with the appearance of Conroy’s novel “The Great Santini” in 1976. On the evidence of his latest book, Conroy may finally have put his endless - and endlessly fascinating - story to rest. It has been his central subject, and he has pursued it with an obsessive’s attention to each recollected detail. Conroy has been writing about his family and their internecine wars for nearly 40 years.
“A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.” In the case of the Conroy family - as colorful and contentious a bunch as you could hope to encounter in either literature or life - those sentiments ring true. “I don’t believe in happy families,” Pat Conroy tells us in his luminous, unsparing new memoir, “The Death of Santini.”
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