Skip to main content

Bloomsday Novels 2009 (American): ‘South of Broad’ by Pat Conroy

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18th of June. Email correspondence with Frances Devlin Glass (FDG) informed some of the discussion here. Some of her remarks are included in the paper.

 

The story of ‘South of Broad’ by Pat Conroy opens on 16th of June 1969 in Charleston, South Carolina. It is the day the narrator, Leopold Bloom King, learns that his brother, Stephen Dedalus King, has inexplicably committed suicide. The reasons for this act are one of the dramatic threads that keep a tight hold on the reader for the next 20 years and 600 plus pages. Here is Leo, Leopold Bloom King’s apologia for his childhood:

 Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid in the American South whose mother had received a doctorate by writing a perfectly unreadable dissertation on the religious symbolism in James Joyce’s equally unreadable ‘Ulysses’, which I considered the worst book ever written by anyone. June 16 was the endless day when Leopold Bloom makes his nervous Nellie way, stopping at bars and consorting with whores and then returning home to his horny wife, Molly, who has a final soliloquy that goes on for what seemed like six thousand pages when my mother force-fed me the book in tenth grade. Joyce-nuts like my mother consider June 16 to be a consecrated mythical day in the Gregorian calendar. She bristled with uncontrollable fury when I threw the book out the window after I had finished it following an agonizing six months of unpleasurable reading.

(Conroy 342-352 ebook)

 Leo is resentful. His exaggerations command rhetorical attention. He is sensitive and messed up. He has no time for his namesake, has a deep resistance to learning, and his learned mother. It comes as no surprise on this evidence that public celebrations of Bloomsday are not evident high profile in Charleston and certainly were not in 1969. Nothing of that sort is described in ‘South of Broad’. Instead, Leo’s mother, Lindsey, carries her belief in ‘Ulysses’ like a one-person crusade in a society that focusses on sport, the star system, and an inerrant faith in the greatness of Charleston’s respectable colonial American past. South of Broad Street is that part of the old city first settled by planters on the peninsula in the 17th century. The city is named for King Charles II and you will be reminded of this from time to time.

 The novel is a family saga in which Bloomsday serves as the origin day of all the tragedies that befall the family. Leo’s mother is an ex-nun. She wrote her Joyce thesis when she was still Sister Norberta in the convent. The 16th of June was the day she entered the convent, also the day each year when her future husband, the admirable Jasper, brought gifts to the community of sisters, pretext for seeing Norberta, his future wife.

 FDG writes: “The choice of names for the boys, Stephen and Leo, is also revealing. Stephen, the eternal youth, vulnerable, susceptible; and Leo who has learnt (from his father, not a Joycean borrowing) how to be available, embrace ethnic difference. Leo has a thwarted love affair, a brief fling, with Molly who is sexually forward, but teaches him sexuality/dance/music. The mother self-consciously raises Leo as a feminist - a ‘womanly man’. Leo’s father is not unlike Bloom in being very accepting of emotional extremes.”

 Lindsey’s, i.e. Sister Norberta’s, thesis is about Catholic symbolism in ‘Ulysses’ and, indeed, the Catholic Church is a target of Pat Conroy’s social analysis, together with other deeply unresolved areas of conflict in Charleston society, which include racism, feminism, gender relations, the AIDS crisis, money and class, Southern snobbery and exclusion, and the thin veneer of celebrity culture. Curiously, almost everyone seems to know what the book Ulysses is, because it’s one of those things right thinking people know about. Few people have read it right through, or know what’s in it.  

 Like characters we have already met, Bloomsday is for Lindsey a private devotion, a hallowed day that cannot be properly shared with those around her. Her dedication is religious, such that she is often found reading her worn-out copy for some new revelation as though it were a book of hours. The planning around the launch of her collected essays on Joyce is delicate, we are led to understand, because such literary exoticism is a specialist preserve of ladies societies; no one else is there to help.

 Like Joyce, Conroy sets out to celebrate a city. Like Joyce with Dublin, Conroy’s love of Charleston is mixed with a more than honest presentation of its negative and self-absorbed aspects.

 FDG comments: “[The book is] a deep immersion in and love song to Charleston, not avoiding its grunginess, especially its racial exclusivity.  Leo is destined to write about it (see Prologue); it’s gifted to him, his patrimony.  The earth of Charleston is Leo’s idea of God. Cf Dublin for Joyce where he says he ‘can sing hymns of praise to it for the rest of my life.’” 

 We see this negative and self-absorbed interest in Charleston played out in the lives of Lindsey’s sons, with a mixture of pleasure and grief, such that one phrase of Conroy’s directs us close to the mood of the whole novel; we find ourselves in “the spectral garden of James Joyce.” (Conroy 2162) It is a spectre originating in Bloomsday itself.

 FDG again: “At the end, one is reminded of the scene in Ithaca in the garden: ‘We have been touched by the fury of storms and the wrath of an angry, implacable God. But that is what it means to be human, born to nakedness and tenderness and nightmare in the eggshell fragility of mortality and flesh. The immensity of the Milky Way settles over the city, and the earthworms rule beneath the teeming gardens in their eyeless world.’  But this may be accidental. I like the earthworms, but it’s not a patch of heaventree.”

 When her husband dies, Lindsey returns to live out her last years in the same convent she had left some decades before.

 FDG observes: “Leo’s father is easily fashioned and manipulated by a persuasive wife. Hints of Molly?  Back to nunnery after his death. She’s a bit destructive; the father is the healer, enabler, source of wisdom but quite self-effacing. There’s a bit more celibacy than one would expect from pulp fiction.”

 

 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because ...

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships. ...

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that delibe...