By Vicky Dickson
There’s an irony attached to achieving great renown as a writer. In a way, such writers become like landmarks, those places everyone intends to visit … eventually. There’s no real urgency, since it’s assumed the landmarks will always be around; the books will always be in print. So we put off visiting, put off reading, and thereby deny ourselves both pleasure and enlightenment.
So it was for me with Reynolds Price. I’d often heard him on NPR’s All Things Considered, and read his memoir, A Whole New Life, about the aftereffects of the treatment for a deadly tumor that grew around his spinal cord. But I was embarrassingly ignorant of the great body of Price’s work. So his death has inspired me to begin a study of some of the 40 genre-spanning books that the longtime Duke professor produced during 50-plus years of writing.
I wanted to see for myself why Price became such an important figure in America literature. It only took reading “The Fare to the Moon,†a long story from the three-story collection The Foreseeable Future for me to start to understand, and to be awed by his ability to craft sentences that are breathtaking in the way they cut to the quick. Like this one:
“She was one real woman named Leah Birch – whatever her color or the size of her house – who had finally cared so deep and steady as to all but fill the gully cut in him by his beautiful mother when she heard his prayers one December night and kissed his cheek and then left him forever by morning.â€
Price’s are sentences you need to pay close attention to; they need time for their revelations to unfold.
But beautiful sentences don’t count for much in a story in which the characters don’t feel real, where they’re one-dimensional or their actions conform to the needs of a plot rather than springing from any essential motivation. So it’s fortunate that Reynolds also had great empathy for his characters. Though “The Fare to the Moon†is about tremendous pain that is caused by interracial adultery, none of the people in it are stereotypical; you come to understand why they do what they do, and don’t feel like blaming any of them. And perhaps the empathy produced by reading about such people even enhances your ability to empathize with the people struggling all around you.
It may well be that Price’s ability to empathize was grounded in his deep religious faith. In Letter to a Man in the Fire, he wrote of the private, non-institutional faith that probably enabled him to successfully face the “danger for me if I went on living as my sense of a writer’s life appeared to demand – a long silent watch on the world, then decades of solitary reporting.â€
That faith may also have allowed him to see the awful pain that accompanied his cancer as not only a condition that connected him more surely to the whole of suffering humanity, but as a path toward strength: “Poets more ancient than Aeschylus have hymned the awful paradox that humankind can apparently only advance through suffering.â€
Price offered his faith, in full awareness of the disdain religion often provokes among the learned, as a means of countering the cynicism he perceived among some of the college students he taught, their choice of “lifelong mental and spiritual death in late adolescence, if not sooner – the curse of surrender to the backwash of time and the all but irreparable friction of trifling or too demanding human interactions.â€
Price offers readers, still, a new way of looking at the world – and hope to those in search of it. It’s another measure of the greatness of the artist we’ve lost.
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Local history buffs, and anyone else who’s curious about the town we live in, have a real treat in store this month with the Feb. 7 release of Carrboro, a pictorial history by longtime residents Dave Otto and Richard Ellington. Come out to Flyleaf on Feb. 20 at 4 p.m. to pick up a copy and get it signed. You can also catch the authors at Carrboro’s Centennial Event on March 3, or stop by Townsend Bertram & Company on March 5 between 2 and 5 p.m. for another book signing.
Chatham county resident Belle Boggs will join Kenan Visiting Writer Lori Ostlund at McIntyre’s on Feb. 5 at 11 a.m. for a short story reading. Don’t miss the opportunity to become acquainted with these two highly talented young writers.
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