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.”
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