arts & Iifestyle
The
phantom’s
return
page 23
A memoir filled with joy
Aging N,C. writer revisits his youthful adventures at Oxford, his journey home by Pam Kelley . The Charlotte Observer
DURHAM — In a world crowded with
memoirs recounting every sort of human
trial, Reynolds Price’s new book,“Ardent
Spirits,” stands out
because of what it’s not.
It’s not a tale of adver
sity or pain or loss. It is,
like its author, full of sto
ries funny and wise. The
book brings alive a time
in post-World War II
England when a promis
ing young scholar could
have coffee with poet
WH. Auden, then run
into J.R.R. Tolkien as he
strolled to the bus stop.
Price, 76, has taught
English at Duke
University, his alma mater,
for 51 years. He has pub
lished more than three
dozen books, won awards,
been inducted into the
American Academy of
Arts and Letters.
He has also survived
spinal cancer, though the treatment that saved
his life in the mid-’80s left him in a wheelchair,
a paraplegic, dependent on live-in assistants.
Now, North Carolina’s venerable man of let
ters returns to some of the most colorful years in
his life — from 1955, when he begins studies as
a Rhodes scholar, to 1961, when he completes
his first novel, “A Long and Happy Life.” The
book, out Tuesday, is getting good reviews. James
Schiff, author of “Understanding Reynolds
Price,” calls it Price’s most compelling work since
his award-winning 1986 novel, “Kate Vaiden.”
On a recent spring afternoon. Price took a
break in his Duke office between classes. That
day, he taught a class on John Milton and fin
ished his daily physical therapy, required to
stimulate blood circulation in his legs. Later,
Reynolds Price speaks at a 2007 ceremony awarding him the Thomas Wolfe
Prize at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Photo Credit: Allie Mullin/UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature
he would teach a seminar on the gospels of
Mark and John.
Nearby, Price’s assistant, a recent Duke
graduate, waited until needed.
Each year Price hires a new assistant, mak
ing it clear the job will last only 12 months “so
they don’t get trapped in some old man’s ill
ness and heartbreak.”
Price lives with physical pain. But despite
the pain, the wheel^air and his quip about
heartbreak, he’s a man with a glass-half-full
disposition, full of gratitude and good cheer.
“I love to laugh, love my friends, my fami-
lyj’he said. “There are times when I try to get a
little more depressed than I am, but I can’t
quite manage it.”
He crossed his legs — grabbing a pants leg,
lifting, resting ankle on oppo
site knee — and explained
why he wrote his new memoir:
“I had loved those years of my
life so much.”
A new life at Oxford
“Ardent Spirits” begins in
1955 as a 22-year-old Price,
N.C. born and bred, says good
bye to his widowed mother
and brother, boards an ocean
liner and heads to England.
Once there, he moves into
Merton College and finds, to
his dismay, that 40 degrees
constitutes a reasonably warm
room in mid
winter Britain.
He invests in
sweaters and
spends huge
amounts to run
a space heater,
causing a friend
to quip that he’s growing
orchids and iguanas.
“My prodigality kept me at
least from perishing of cold,” he
writes, “and I took a certain
pleasure in being something of
an outrageous college pet —
the Man Who Craves Heat.”
“Ardent Spirits” is full of
such gems, evocative stories about friends,
professors and his landlady. Win, whose color
ful expressions would provide Price rich mate
rial for his fiction. (When Price once com
mented on a homely woman. Win quipped:
“Well you don’t look at the mantel while you’re
poking the fire, now do you?”)
Through connections, location and luck,
Price also runs into famous people regularly.
Brigitte Bardot turns up in front of him in a
movie theater. The room he rents from his land
lady is just down the road from Tolkien’s house.
British writer Sir Stephen Spender accom
panies him to a 1957 production of “Titus
Andronicus,” starring Vivien Leigh and hus
band Laurence Olivier. Afterward, as they
greet Leigh backstage, she encourages them to
say hello to Larry, still in his dressing room.
They knock, and one of world’s great actors
opens the door, “naked as jay.”
Like “Clear Pictures,” a memoir of his
childhood, and “A Whole New Life,” the story
of his cancer and recovery. Price’s new book
benefits from his potent memory for conver
sations and details.
Price isn’t a journal keeper,
but when he checked recollec
tions against letters he sent his
mother during his Oxford
years, he found only tiny dis
crepancies. This cheered him,
he said, because he remem
bers the scandal over James •
Frey’s memoir fabrications in
“A Million Litde Pieces.”
“Oprah had made such a
deal about that guy a few
years ago, I thought,‘Don’t tell
a single lie. You’ll get caught.’”
A ‘fervent erotic relation’
In “Ardent Spirits,” Price
also writes about being a gay man, though he
prefers the term "queer.”
He held off until now, he said, because “I
wanted to be very careful about not invading
see Writer on 27
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