But reading for Conroy is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. He has for years kept notebooks in which he records words and expressions, over time creating a vast reservoir of playful turns of phrase, dazzling flashes of description, and snippets of delightful sound, all just for his love of language. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the furthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. Though nearly gagging, the young Kazantzakis kisses dirt from the lifeless feet as the father tells him, “That’s what courage tastes like, that’s what freedom tastes like.” In a scene that has haunted me since I first read it, the father lifted his son off the Cretan earth and made the boy kiss the bottom of the dead men’s feet. On the Isle of Crete I bought Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis and still see the immortal scene when the author’s father took him to a devastated garden to witness the swinging bodies of Greek patriots hanging from the branches of fruit trees. In Look Homeward Angel, the death of Ben Gant can still make me weep, as can the death of Thomas Wolfe’s stone-carving father in Of Time and The River. The insufferable Casaubon dies in Middlemarch and Robert Jordan awaits his death in the mountains of Spain in For Whom the Bell Tolls. At any time, night or day, I can conjure up the fatal love of Romeo for the raven-haired Juliet. Hector can still impart lessons about honor as he rides out to face Achilles on the plains of Troy. There is Jay Gatsby floating face downward in his swimming pool or Tom Robinson’s bullet riddled body cut down in his Alabama prison yard in To Kill a Mockingbird. If I close my eyes I can conjure up a whole country of the dead who will live for all time because writers turned them into living flesh and blood. Let me beckon Madame Bovary to issue me a cursory note of warning whenever I get suicidal or despairing as I live out a life too sad by half. Let me call on the spirit of Anna Karenina as she steps out onto the train tracks of Moscow in the last minute of her glorious and implacable life. I take it as an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever.
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