A Generous Man

by Kevin Nance

JANUARY 25, 2011 TAGS: WRITERS, BOOKS COMMENTS (1)

When Reynolds Price detonated onto the American literary scene in 1962 with his precocious, pitch-perfect first novel, A Long and Happy Life, critics hailed him as the heir of William Faulkner. The anointment was to be expected; you could say Price had invited it. The byzantine, paragraph-length first sentence of the book, in which he introduced what would prove to be his most famous pair of characters — a small-town North Carolina teenager and her feckless lover — was, after all, self-consciously Faulknerian:

Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow lane of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon by Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it)—when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back “Don’t” and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.

Price was no Faulkner, of course, and had never meant to be. (It’s notable that in the dozen or so novels that would follow A Long and Happy Life, he never again attempted a performance like that opening.) Faulkner’s books were haunted by the legacy of the Civil War, in particular the psychic burdens of life in the defeated South. For all of Price’s close attention to the mid-20th-century speech of his native North Carolina, his most enduring concerns as a novelist — the imperatives and near-impossibility of love and lasting human connection, especially within families — are not deeply anchored in the particularities of that time and place. Race, despite a sprinkling of black characters, is all but a non-factor in his fiction. Where Faulkner was the prototypical Southern writer, Price was a writer whose narratives happened to unfold in the South; they could have done so, albeit in different accents, almost anywhere. Unlike Faulkner, he made no grand statements about what it meant to be a Southerner. At the beginning of Reynolds Price’s career as at the end — which came January 20, 2011, when he died at age 77 — he was a writer not of the intellect but of the heart.

The outstanding achievements of his body of work — his tragicomic second novel, A Generous Man (1966), with its Dickensian coincidences and denouement; Permanent Errors (1970), a searing collection of autobiographical essays and short fictions, including his best short story, “Truth and Lies”; the multigenerational family saga The Surface of Earth (1975), the first of a trilogy that also includes The Source of Light (1981) and The Promise of Rest (1995); and the novel Kate Vaiden (1986) — say little about the state of the region. But they reveal a great deal about, among other things, the relation of parents and children (particularly fathers and sons), the acquisition and acceptance of maturity by the young, and the importance of loyalty within families even when they’re riven by conflict.

It’s possible that Price’s lack of historical and/or sociological Big Themes hurt him with the critics; in academia, certainly, his books received far less attention than those by, say, Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy, whose more cerebral approaches to life in the modern South could be dissected with equal relish by partisans of the New Criticism and of French literary theory. After his early promise, Price settled into a middle echelon of Southern literary writers just below that of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and the early Truman Capote, although above that of, say, George Garrett or Pat Conroy. Considering Price’s career today, you feel a sense of slight disappointment or, if you prefer, underappreciation. Certainly he never had the national impact of his fellow Duke University alumnus William Styron, whose own first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), had been a similar sensation; whose fault that is — Price’s or ours — remains unclear.

Reynolds Price

By the time I took his fiction-writing class, as an undergraduate at Duke in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Price was still prolific — The Source of Light appeared during those years, as did his remarkable book of poems, Vital Provisions, and his PBS television play, Private Contentment — and a uniquely glamorous figure on campus. Then in his late 40s and early 50s, he was startlingly handsome, with a lock of dark hair that fell across his tanned, Byronic brow, and blessed with one of the richest baritone speaking voices ever heard in a classroom. He was worldly and erudite (he’d been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford), a Milton specialist whose love for art and opera were well known, but also earthy and approachable; he lived in an exquisitely furnished ranch-style house next to a pond a few miles from campus, and often invited students there. He was widely assumed to be homosexual — a fact he later confirmed in interviews, and increasingly drew upon in his autobiographical fictions, poems and memoirs. He hobnobbed with famous writers, and was particularly close to the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, with whom he had served on National Endowment for the Arts panels in the 1970s. (In preparation to write a profile of Morrison in Poets & Writers magazine in 2008, I asked her for a list of the literary friends who knew her best. It consisted of one name: Reynolds Price.)

Around the time I graduated from Duke, Price’s doctors discovered that he had a tumor along his spine. When they removed it from his back, it robbed him of the use of his legs. His writing barely missed a beat; his first book after the surgery was Kate Vaiden, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. I saw him a few times in later years, shrunken into a wheelchair, but still with that magnificent voice and full head of now iron-gray hair. He remained dauntingly attentive and intense, his gaze seeming to penetrate your soul. Whatever he’d see there, you hoped he’d use it in a story. Or maybe not.

Kevin Nance, a freelance writer based in Chicago, writes regularly for Obit.
First Photo by Wallace Kaufman