The Pat Conroy Cookbook (39 page)

If I could choose background music for that time in New Orleans, I would choose the “Triumphal March” from
Aida
without a moment’s hesitation.

But here is the memory I carry most strongly from that storied weekend.
Fifteen years later, I was walking through the den where my wife, Cassandra, was watching a show on the Food Network. A dark-haired chef, a dark flame of a man, was filleting a grouper with great expertise. I stared at the man and said to Sandra, “I know that guy.”

“How do you know him?” my wife asked. She and I were still new to each other, and new to an addiction to the Food Network, so she didn’t know the chef’s name either.

Slowly, it returned: the image of Nan Talese removing the bracelets from her arm in the kitchen of a world-class restaurant. I put it all together and realized that Nan and I had met Emeril Lagasse in the earliest stages of his career. I adore his show and think he’s sexy as hell. I love it when he shouts out, “Bam! Let’s bring it up a notch or two.” I roar my approval along with the bedazzled audience.

When I mentioned to Nan that I had identified the chef of that restaurant in New Orleans as Emeril Lagasse, I could not help but taunt her. “You never listen to my advice. You should have published Emeril’s first cookbook.”

“He was a perfectly dreadful man,” Nan said.

“No, he and his staff simply wanted to be paid for their labor,” I said, laughing on the phone.

EMERIL’S BARBECUED SHRIMP WITH ROSEMARY BISCUITS
“These shrimp aren’t really barbecued. Instead, this is my take on a classic New Orleans dish where whole shrimp are baked with butter, olive oil, and spices. When Emeril’s opened, we took the dish up another notch and created this amazingly rich sauce for sautéed shrimp. The barbecue base will keep for a month, tightly covered in the refrigerator. Try the same sauce with oysters, adding the oysters to the sauce after it has reduced enough to coat the back of a spoon.” —Emeril Lagasse

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SERVES 4 TO 6

M
y longtime literary agent Julian Bach and I moved in different circles, and I consider it a small miracle that he entered my life at the precise time I needed him most. The superintendent had fired me from teaching the children of Daufuskie Island, and I was in the fierce process of handwriting the book that became
The Water Is Wide
. My firing had attracted some national attention. Betsy Fancher had written a brilliant article in
South Today
that was carried on the wires to California. Joe Cummings came down from
Newsweek
and my name attracted the adjective “controversial” for the first but not the last time in my life. I had completed two hundred pages on yellow legal pads when a journalist named Richard Bruner came to my door to change the direction of my life. He took down the details of my story with the efficiency and craft I had come to admire in print journalists. After he completed the interview, I showed Richard Bruner my writing room, which was covered with the manuscript pages and a copy of my first, self-published book,
The Boo
.

“You need an agent for this new book, pal,” he said. “How did you pay for the printing of
The Boo?”

“I told Willie Scheper at the bank that I had written a book about The
Citadel and he offered to write me a check for three thousand dollars on the spot.”

“Did you sell any?” he asked.

“Sold them all,” I said. “Our first printing was for fifteen hundred copies and we just went back to press.”

“You really need an agent, son.” Richard Bruner wrote Julian Bach’s name, phone number, and address on a sheet of paper. “Julian’s good. I’d say he’s the best.”

In three tight paragraphs I wrote down every word I would say to Julian Bach if I could get him to come to the phone. I practiced in front of a mirror, hoping I sounded sincere but not maudlin, resolute but not desperate. For one hour I sat by the phone summoning the courage to place the call. Even I understood that an encounter with Julian Bach could play a huge role in whatever career as a writer I might have. I dialed his number in New York and tried to sound professional and dignified when his receptionist, Diane Cusumano, answered the phone. For some reason I thought Diane would put up more of a fight to keep an amateur out of her boss’s life, but Diane was accommodating and sweet and before I was ready for my grand entrance onto the stage of Julian Bach, a most impatient, authoritative male voice was on the line.

“Yes, yes, what is it? Who are you and why are you calling me?”

“Mr. Bach,” I read, shaken, “I have written a book about a year I spent teaching on a Carolina sea island.”

“Who are you? What’s your name? How did you get to this office?”

I had not written that information down. “I taught eighteen black children for a year before I was fired.”

“Do you have a name, young man? Where are you calling from?”

“My name is Pat Conroy and I live in Beaufort, South Carolina.”

“Get to the point. Who sent you to me?”

“A man named Richard Bruner.”

“Oh, Dick, of course,” Julian said. “Look, I get lots of calls from kids who want to write; most of them turn out to be losers. Get me a freshly typed manuscript by Friday and I will put it with my weekend reading. I
make no promises.” He slammed the phone down without saying goodbye, hurting my Southern-boy feelings.

I walked downstairs and joined my wife, Barbara, and my mother in the kitchen.

“Did you call Mr. Bach?” Barbara asked.

“I think he said I’ve got a New York agent,” I said, as the two women in my life screamed out of relief and pressure.

“I have to get him a freshly typed manuscript by Friday,” I said.

“Does he know you don’t know how to type?”

“No, I was ashamed to tell him.”

“Don’t worry,” Barbara said, rushing to the phone. “I’m calling everyone we know in Beaufort who types. We’ll give them each one chapter and tell them to get it back to us tomorrow.”

My wife and mother marshaled a small battalion of friends in the town of Beaufort who drove or ran to our house as soon as they were called to action. Ting Colquhoun and Betty Sams hurried over from their nearby houses. My English teacher Millen Ellis arrived as Harriet Keyserling was coming through the back door. All night, those friends came crossing through the front door to receive a chapter of my handwritten manuscript.

“We need it back tomorrow morning,” my mother would shout. Barbara would say, “Pat’s got himself a New York agent.”

All returned the next morning with their chapters completed. Barbara began putting the manuscript together, but we instantly stumbled on one problem, which we had not anticipated. Some of those glorious typists who banged out pages for Julian Bach had used onionskin paper, others long yellow sheets, and still others short blue sheets. Since I didn’t type, I didn’t know about the existence of pica or elite or that kind of typescript that looks like handwriting. Harriet Keyserling had typed her chapter on her personal stationery. The first chapter’s pages were numbered one to twenty, the second chapter’s one to seventeen, the third chapter’s one to twenty-five, and so on.

But Julian Bach wanted to have it for his weekend and, by God, he would get it for his weekend read. Jack Colquhoun was waiting for me at
the post office when I arrived at closing time. He boxed the manuscript and shipped it special delivery to Julian Bach Jr. Literary Agency, 3 East 48th Street, New York, NY 10017. His phone number was Plaza 3–4331. Cable address: Turtle News, New York. Jack mailed it off as we embraced in the mailroom.

Friday I received a phone call from Julian Bach telling me that the manuscript had arrived. Then he said, “Pat, I have to tell you, I haven’t read a single word of it, but it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s being passed around to everyone in the office. It’s making quite a hit.”

I hung up the phone, mortified. A sense of shame washed over me that I could not shake or control. What I had wanted most of all was to attract the admiration of a New York agent, not his laughter and certainly not his scorn. Since I had not held a job in six months, my mother and wife had leapt through a window of opportunity opened by the unforeseeable arrival of Julian Bach in my life. But it was I who should have acted in a professional manner; it was my name on the manuscript and my name on the return address. I thought I had lost my greatest chance to discover if I was a real writer or not. I was bereft and told no one about my conversation with Julian Bach. Later that week I drove to a chicken farm outside Allendale to apply for a job. The farmer asked me if I was that teacher who’d been fired down in Beaufort County, and when I answered in the affirmative he tore up my application and said he needed someone he could trust with his chickens. In a season chock-full of low points, that was as bad as it got.

Three weeks later the letter arrived from the Julian Bach agency and the shock of seeing that address from the fabled city of New York nearly brought me to my knees. I felt astonishment, despair, and then hopelessness. If this man turned my book down, I had no idea what would happen to me and my family. So much was riding on this single letter that I did not rip it open at once. Instead I went to the back door, got into my 1969 yellow Volkswagen convertible, and drove across the bridge and out toward the beach. I took the left at the dirt road that led to Dataw Island, a magnificent hunting preserve owned by my good friend the historian Larry Rowland. One of the many ways Larry was a good friend was his
presentation of a key to the gate of Dataw. I had free access not only to the island but to the graceful, music box–like house that his father had built with his own hands.