Pat Conroy’s First Book

I just finished “The Boo” by Pat Conroy. This odd little book is the first thing Pat Conroy ever published and has a pretty interesting back story. When Conroy was at The Citadel, a South Carolina military college, the much beloved Assistant Commandant of Cadets was LTC Thomas Courvoise, known to cadets as “The Boo”. A short time after Conroy’s graduation, the management of the college, alleging that “The Boo”, was “bad for discipline” demoted Courvoise from Assistant Commandant of Cadets and banished him to a warehouse in a distant part of the campus in an effort to separate him from the cadets.

In reaction to Courvoise’s demotion, Conroy decided to “tell his story”. He interviewed LTC Courvoise at great length as well as dozens of the cadets the colonel had supervised over the years. The book that emerged is a collection of anecdotes, humorous and serious, organized thematically. It really is kind of a “love letter” to both LTC Courvoise and to the Corps of Cadets of The Citadel.

By his own admission, Conroy wrote this paean to “The Boo” in an effort to “tell a story and right a wrong”. While the book didn’t get Courvoise’s job back, it does provide us with an outstanding portrait of life at The Citadel in the mid to late 1960s. It also provides readers with a fascinating window on Conroy’s development as a writer. I recommend it very highly to anyone interested in The Citadel, or Pat Conroy.

109 for the year

The Original Was Better

I just finished Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre and must admit to being somewhat disappointed. This book provides a fresh look at the events covered in Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was, and while it is considerably more accurate, is not nearly as good a book.

Macintyre’s writing is just too discursive for me. Time after time, he hares off into lengthy digressions that are only peripherally (if at all!) related to the main story. For instance, a renowned pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury assisted in spec’ing out and obtaining the dead body, but we get a very lengthy introduction and exposition of Sir Bernard’s career, which has little to do with the case. Similarly, Ewan Montagu’s brother Ivor was a communist, and later evidence revealed was, until at least 1942, spying for the Soviets. So we get another lengthy description of Ivor’s recruitment, activities and surveillance by MI-5 followed by the author’s speculation that perhaps Ivor passed info about MINCEMEAT onto the Soviets. The problem here is that a) there’s no evidence that Ewan ever spoke bout MINCEMEAT to Ivor and b) the much more plausible rout for transmission of such info to the Soviets was through messieurs Philby, Blunt and McLean. There are many such discursions.

There were some good bits though. First was the actual identification of the body. We now know that the actual person who “became” MAJ Martin RM, was Glyndwr Michael a 34 year old Welshman who died from phosphorous poisoning (either intentional or unintentional) in Jan of 1943. Macintyre also does a much more thorough job tracing the fake documents through the Spanish and German bureaucracies, albeit with many more unnecessary and irrelevant discursions about assorted Spanish and German officials. And there were also some good bits about Montagu’s postwar machinations to get permission to write The Man Who Never Was and a decent little “what happened to them” about the key players.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure the additional information was worth the trouble it took to get it. But I am glad I now know the whole story. My advice is to get the book form the library and skim over the dross.

 

108 for the year