Years before it became a center of controversy for its traditional exclusion of women, South Carolina's venerable military academy The Citadel inspired novelist Pat Conroy (who is one of its graduates) to craft a powerful and vivid story he called "The Lords of Discipline." The novel takes place at the fictional Carolina Military Institute, and the author specifically notes that he based his story in details drawn from the experiences of cadets at many other such schools. The burden of tradition and mystique in an old Southern military school are unmistakable, but it is a world Conroy has come to understand, and serves as a fascinating setting for his story. Will McLean does not belong to the social circle of young men who usually attend the Carolina Military Institute. He is an outsider, a young man wounded by his relationship with his father, and something of a rebel. Will is also a survivor, and he carefully makes his way at the Institute in the early 1960s, bonding with three other cadets amid the brutal hazing and almost threatening camaraderie that are part of life at the school. Particularly disturbing are the activities of a secret group of privileged cadets known only as "The Ten." When he is ordered to look out for the Institute's first black cadet, Will can no longer ignore the corruption and violence around him, a stand that will bring him face-to-face with the force of the Institute's fierce pride and brutalizing tradition. Conroy's story is rich and explosive, and Will McLean is a charming, deeply compelling hero -- an English major in military academy full of warrior wannabes, striving to be a man in a world of overgrown boys. The alluring atmosphere of the privileged enclave of Charleston is very much a part of this story, and it is well captured, with the witty detachment of an outsider. The riveting narrative of "The Lords of Discipline" is couched in the sensuous detail and affecting humanity that define Conroy's writing at its best. Critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Star, has called the novel "a work of enormous power, passion, humor and wisdom."

I wear the ring. I wear the ring and I return often to the city of Charleston, South Carolina, to study the history of my becoming a man. My approach to Charleston is always silent and distracted, but I come under full sail, with hissing silk and memories a-wing above me in the shapes of the birds I love best: old brown pelicans, Great Blue herons, cowbirds, falcons lost at sea, ospreys lean from dives, and eagles over schools of mullet. I am a lowcountry boy. My entrance to this marsh-haunted city is always filled with troubled meditations on both my education and my solitude during a four-year residence at the Institute. The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye. But to me, Charleston is a dark city, a melancholy city, whose severe covenants and secrets are as powerful and beguiling as its elegance, whose demons dance their alley dances and compose their malign hymns to the side of the moon I cannot see. I studied those demons closely once, and they helped kill off the boy in me. I am not a son of Charleston. Nor could I be if I wanted to. I am always a visitor, and my allegiance lies with other visitors, sons and daughters of accident and circumstance. Edgar Allan Poe was a son by visitation. It was no surprise to me when I was a freshman at the Institute to discover that Poe was once stationed at Fort Moultrie and that he wrote "The Gold Bug" about one of the sea islands near Charleston. I like to think of him walking the streets of Charleston as I walked them, and it pleases me to think that the city watched him, felt the shimmer of his madness and genius in his slouching promenades along Meeting Street. I like to think of the city shaping this agitated, misplaced soldier, keening his passion for shade, trimming the soft edges of his nightmare, harshening his poisons and his metaphors, deepening his intimacy with the sunless wastes that issued forth from his kingdom of nightmare in blazing islands, still inchoate and unformed, of the English language. Whenever I go back to Charleston, I think of Poe. I remember that Poe spent a single year attending West Point before dropping out in disgrace and beginning his life among words. I wonder how that year in the barracks marked him; I wonder if our markings were similar.

 

Brutality, murder, racism and other evils only partially redeemed in a military college in the sixties, admittedly based on Conroy's own undergraduate experience at The Citadel in the 1960's. An unsparing, frightening novel later filmed with Mark Breland.

The novelist Pat Conroy's life and personal experience are so inextricably bound up with his writing that, at first glance, it might seem that he is merely retelling the story of his life, again and again. The truth is, as usual, far more complicated and interesting. Significant elements and characters in his novels are obviously drawn from his life, a choice that apparently has created tremendous tension in his family. But these facts are merely points of departure for the author, who has a gift that is perhaps the most desirable and elusive of all for any novelist -- the ability to spin an unforgettable story.

Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta, the eldest of seven children and the son of Col. Donald Conroy, a man not unlike the hero of "The Great Santini." He attended The Citadel, the South Carolina military academy that inspired the setting for The Lords of Discipline, and briefly taught school on an island off the South Carolina coast, an experience recounted in The Water Is Wide. The fallout from his life with his family seems to have inspired Conroy to create deeply compelling stories of vivid characters searching for love and fulfillment. These tales are invariably rooted in the infernal complexities and often dark realities of Southern tradition, notably in The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The death of his mother -- a crafty Southern woman who chose to be called Peggy, after the author of "Gone With the Wind" -- led him to write his most recent novel "Beach Music."
Though Conroy's books have created publicized rifts within his own family, they stand on their own with the public and most critics, having been embraced by a faithful and ever-growing readership and inspiring popular film adaptations. "Misfortune," Garry Abrams wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "has been good to novelist Pat Conroy."

 

 

The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy
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