As noted below, today is author Pat Conroy’s birthday. He’s 59.
Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me this story about Conroy, in part because the tale it tells concerns Byron’s own high school alma mater.
Mr. Conroy’s latest book, “My Losing Season,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is ostensibly a memoir of his senior year playing basketball at the Citadel.
But the book’s most gripping moment, for those readers interested in education, may be the three and a half pages set inside Room 2A, the classroom of Joseph A. Monte at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Monte was Mr. Conroy’s sophomore-year English instructor, and in describing how Mr. Monte taught him to read Faulkner that year, Mr. Conroy has provided a bonus for all those devoted teachers in his audience: he has captured that elusive moment when a teacher succeeds in firing the imagination of a student.
Mr. Monte’s mantra was: “Read the great books, gentlemen, just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.” To that end, in November 1960, Mr. Conroy received a personal assignment to read “The Sound and the Fury.”
After studying the first 90 pages, Mr. Conroy said he felt as if he was “reading the book underwater.” Even after rereading those 90 pages, he did not understand a word.
When Mr. Conroy approached his teacher in the cafeteria to tell him of his despair, Mr. Monte sent him scurrying in a different direction: the scene in “Macbeth” when Macbeth learns of the death of his queen.
“There you will find the key to your dilemma,” the future novelist was told, “if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”
The critical passage, Mr. Conroy discovered, was when Macbeth says, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mr. Conroy realized that “The Sound and the Fury” was also told by an “idiot,” Benjy.
“That’s why I was confused,” Mr. Conroy writes in his new book. “It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”
The lesson, according to Mr. Monte: “Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward. Sometimes it makes you work.”
For his trouble, Mr. Conroy received an “A+, double credit” in Mr. Monte’s ever-present grade book.
“This is a good moment in the life of your mind,” Mr. Conroy recalls his teacher saying. “It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”
The longer article by Jacques Steinberg originally appeared in The New York Times in 2002, but can be found several places on the Internet including here.