It’s fairly easy, most of the time, to be honest in general terms; it is in the sticky particulars of interpersonal matters that honesty can become tricky.  

For example, it would be impossible to paint a truly accurate likeness of my father without going into the details of his relationship with my brother-in-law.  In the intricate back and forth of this twenty year relationship you could actually get to see my father at work, his strengths and weaknesses illuminated from many angles.  In fact, I can’t think of another relationship that would show as clearly how my father went about his business, where he drew non-negotiable lines, how he actually operated, the highly practical, yet still uncompromising way he sometimes managed to finesse his discomfort.

Even in this carefully vague outline, you should be able to spot the trouble.  Assuming my sister loved her father, which she did, and assuming she loves her husband, also true, you should be able to imagine her apprehension, about now, if she were reading these words.  I feel like I would have to send anything involving my brother-in-law to him to read before I could ever think of passing it by my sister, let alone sending it out for anyone else to read.  This presents other problems, while portentously adumbrating a host of still other problems.

I take a cautionary tale from Pat Conroy, if such a tale is even needed.  I’d never read Conroy, who I first heard interviewed and reading his wonderful My Reading Life only after his recent death, but I like what I’ve heard.  He seems like a writer of integrity who loved stories and language, wrote directly, and, to hear him tell it, always searched for the deeper truth.  He also fought lifelong battles in many ways similar to the ones I had fighting to overcome years of struggles with my father, though his father practiced his uncompromising version of fatherhood in a much more physically violent form.  A wonderful bite of Conroy, from his website, is at the bottom of this post.

When he published The Great Santini, which portrayed his demanding, violent father quite frankly, his parents got divorced, Conroy’s own wife divorced him and his father’s side of the family stopped talking to him.  Never spoke to him again.  Dead.  His father, a brutally tough Marine who expected as much from his sons as he did from the fighter pilots he trained, and hit them as hard whenever he deemed it necessary, referred to himself as “The Great Santini”.   In that book and movie (neither of which I’ve seen) his brutality and abusiveness is apparently unflinchingly portrayed.  

Conroy’s father, needless to say, was not thrilled about what he heard about the book and didn’t read it for a long time.  He rightfully feared what his first born author son would have to say about him.  My father had a similar reaction whenever my mother told him I’d written something wonderful.  He’d sniff it, read it cautiously, looking for any tell-tale adjective that proved how much I hated him.  

With Conroy’s success as the writer of The Great Santini, and then having his book turned into a successful movie, his father eventually came around, though it took many years.  The making of the movie The Great Santini was apparently an early turning point.  Conroy’s father was greatly mollified when he was called to the set to spend time with Robert Duvall who would play him in the movie.  

“I made Duvall a star,” he used to brag and he played up his Santini persona for the rest of his life, parlaying it into modest fame and a bit of money.  He actually had a radio show in the South where he gave tough advice on parenting, leaning toward unapologetically kicking the child’s ass as needed.  “Spare the rod, you know the rest,” may have been his motto.

Conroy’s success went a long way toward making peace, when they were both adults, with his unforgivably harsh father.  Still, Conroy had a few mental breakdowns along the way, severe enough that he was out of commission and his life seemingly hung in the balance.  

I have had only one breakdown of any note, and while I felt like I was out of commission for a few months, my life never hung in the balance.  It was thirty years ago and I cherish it, in a way, as a very dark, almost fond, memory.  Proof of the sickening old adage “sweet are the uses of fucking adversity.”  I learned a couple of very important life lessons during that dark winter, things I live by to this day.

Honesty is an excellent thing, until somebody gets hurt.  My sister has from time to time done a passable imitation of Jack Nicholson telling a lip-pursing Tom Cruise that he can’t handle the truth.  “You can’t HANDLE the truth,” she would bark at appropriate times. My sister is a very good mimic.  She can do scenes from My Cousin Vinny switching seamlessly between an excellent Joe Pesci and a dead-on Marisa Tomei.  Her Fred Gwynne as the judgmental southern Judge is more than passable too, now that I think of it.

But I digress, which is what I often do.  I digress.  One story leads into another, but the benefit of words on a page is the ease of going to the top and tracing the stories back to see what you were originally on about if anyone gets entangled in the digressions.  I don’t need to do that in this case, I know very well where I started just now, and what I am still tap-dancing around.  

More about this topic another time, when I am not so pressed to leap into some kind of action after a full sedentary day spent reading and writing.   In the meantime, read this Conroy bit, it is beautifully written:

When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning count down to my inevitable death. I’ve come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can’t run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.

The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn’t sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one – and can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be found brother. My personal tragedy lies with my sister, Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored…

I’ve got to try and make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain one final time. Then I’ll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I’ll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I’ll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.

— From the memoir