By Jonathan Haupt
The late Pat Conroy (1945–2016) was perpetually
instructing me to write a novel. But Pat told that to everyone. In his mind,
every person he met held a novel or two just waiting to be written. I always
assured Pat that nothing worthy of a novel had ever happened to me. Conroy,
being Conroy, told me that one day I’d lose something dear to me and what I’d
be left with in unfair trade was an overwhelming compulsion to write a novel—to
try to understand why. That’s a terrifying thought, I told
Pat.
We were both right. Now I’m writing this Microsoft Word
document that keeps trying to convince me it’s a novel, and I’m writing it
exactly for the reasons Pat predicted. In this would-be novel-in-progress,
I needed a particularly vital scene to open with my newly crestfallen
protagonist Charlie pulled from his routine, stranded for an undetermined time
in an unfamiliar place, a setting devoid of any established connections, where
he would be a stranger among strangers. A prolonged layover in the Toledo
Express Airport provided all the above.
In this moment, Charlie could finally break open under the
emotional weight of his dilemma (no spoilers here, gang) and have a
confessional conversation with a fellow stranded traveler. He could tell his
story in way he never would otherwise and to someone he would be meeting for
the first time, without the burdens of shared history or consequence.
The hook of the scene was to be that Charlie, killing time
in a small airport bar, meets a stranger with an uncanny (in the Freudian
sense) resemblance to a character from Charlies’ own book, the
book-within-a-book, leaving open the possibility that this is a moment of
magical realism in which Charlie’s desperate need for a comforting presence
manifests a familiar figure from his imagination. Or it’s coincidence, the
random chance that an archetypal fictional character would have a real-world
counterpart.
I’ve got the scene sorted, I’ve placed Charlie at the
Toledo Express Airport bar, and I’m writing along at a good clip. But when Charlie
turns to greet his new neighbor at the counter, it’s not the character I
envisioned. She has apparently missed her casting call for this scene. Instead,
seated next to Charlie is Kenny Rogers. The Kenny Rogers. The actual Kenny Rogers, The
Gambler.” “The Coward of the County.” “You Decorated My Life.” “Love Will Turn
You Around.” Some 120 hit singles over the span of a phenomenal country music
career. That guy.
But here’s the peculiarity—as if it’s not peculiar enough
as it is. I’m not a fan. I don’t generally think about Kenny Rogers. Or rather,
I didn’t—until the storied Pulpwood Queens Book Club made “How the West Was
Won” the theme of their annual Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson, Texas, this
past January, and threw in a country western artist costume component. In the
guise of “Kenny Roget’s Thesaurus,” I attended the gathering in support
of Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, an anthology
I’ve been honored to co-edit with novelist Nicole Seitz featuring remembrances
by 67 of our fellow writers who had also been mentored, befriended, and
championed by Pat.
In anticipation of Girlfriend Weekend, I revisited the
soundtrack of my childhood and the country artists who had been played most
often in our house—Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Barbara Mandrell, Johnny Cash,
and yes, Kenny Rogers. Looking back on it as an adult, Mr. Rogers’ oeuvre now
seemed curiously complicated and contradictory. For every “She Believed in Me”
there was a “Lucille,” for every “Through the Years” there was a “Daytime
Friends (and Nighttime Lovers).” But what struck me even more was just what an
impressive body of work his duets had been, most notably with Dottie West and
Dollie Parton, but also Lynda Carter, Sheena Easton, Kim Carnes, and others.
In that context, let’s get back to our distraught
Charlie in the bar in Toledo. (Ah, yes, the “bar in Toledo, across from the
depot” …or in this case, across from the food court Subway.) Kenny
Rogers dropped in, unexpectedly but perfectly, in this moment because his
experiences as a duet singer, and particularly his transformative role as a
kind of platonic soulmate to the late Dottie West, had imbued him with the
wisdom Charlie most needed in this scene. And the absolute oddity of being
seated next to a happily retired Kenny Rogers in an adorably small airport bar
where no one recognizes him opened the welcome possibility of writing their
conversation as a heartfelt homage to “The Gambler.” Kenny doesn’t “break even”
in the end but Charlie does leave with some Rogers-esque advice, the “ace that
I could keep,” which in turn charts the course to the novel’s much-improved
conclusion.
When that weird spontaneity of your writerly imagination
seems to summon characters or settings or plot twists that you didn’t know you
needed, or even in opposition to your intentions, trust it. The novel knows
best, even when you’re not yet certain it is a novel. Show a little faith in
the serendipity of the real and fictional characters who walk into your life in
these opportune moments and turn you around. It’s a kind of magic, and that’s
what they’re supposed to do. “There’s a wonder to it yet,” as Ron Rash wrote in
his masterful story “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out.” And there’s a purpose
as well.
Pat Conroy once called to tell me about two wonderful
ladies he had met earlier in the day by unexpected happenstance. We were twenty
minutes into our conversation about these dynamic newly arrived women in Pat’s
life when it finally dawned on me that he had made them up, that these were
characters who had appeared to him anew in that day’s writing on his unfinished
novel “The Storms of Aquarius.”
I wish I could have called Pat to tell him
about Charlie meeting Kenny Rogers in Toledo, but I can’t. So, I’m telling
y’all instead.
____________________________________________________________
Jonathan Haupt is the executive
director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, the founding director of the annual
Pat Conroy Literary Festival, and the former director of the University of
South Carolina Press where he created the Story River Books southern fiction
imprint with the late Pat Conroy. With novelist and artist Nicole Seitz, he is
co-editor of the anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat
Conroy, which was honored with the Silver Medal for Best Regional
Nonfiction in the Southeast by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Haupt’s
articles, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in the
Charleston Post & Courier, Beaufort Lowcountry Weekly,
Beaufort Lifestyle magazine, Pink magazine, Shrimp,
Collards & Gritsmagazine, Fall Lines literary journal,
and the Conroy Center’s Porch Talk blog. He serves as an
associate producer and consultant to the SCETV author interview program By
the River, on the board of directors of the South Carolina Academy of
Authors and the Friends of South Carolina Libraries, on the American Writers
Museum affiliates steering committee, and on the South Carolina Humanities
advisory committee. He’s currently writing a Microsoft Word document that just
might be a novel.
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