Reynolds Price obituary
Bestselling American novelist whose debut was hailed amajor literary event
Reynolds Price, who has died aged 77 after aheart attack, was one of that golden generation of American novelists, including Gore Vidal, William Styron and Truman Capote, who seemed to have been blessed in the cradle with genius, physical grace and what writers need above all good luck at the outset oftheir careers. In 1962 his debut novel, A Long and Happy Life, was hailed as amajor literary event. Itwon the William Faulkner award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. The story of the dreams, disillusionment and eventual spiritual growth of a young woman, Rosacoke Mustian, the book expanded into atrilogy, completed more than 20 years later with Good Hearts (1988).
Price's own life was both long and not unhappy. He was born into alower middle-class family in Macon, North Carolina, a region devastated by the Depression. In his first volume ofmemoirs, Clear Pictures (1989), herecalled a family dominated byaloved, but alcoholic, father and aloved, but fussily nervous, mother. The world in which he was brought up was complacently racist and sternly Methodist. Price would lose the one, and cleave to the other.
He won scholarships effortlessly. Hetook his first degree at Duke University, North Carolina, graduating in1955 with highest honours. Hisnotebooks indicate that he was determined from the first to write fiction. But he shrewdly qualified himself for an academic career as well. Itwould be his writer's crutch.
Price won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in 1956. He was overcome with the beauty ofthe city, and astonished at the filth ofthe Merton College lavatories. Heenrolled for a BLitt degree on Milton's Samson Agonistes. His time at Oxford coincided with WH Auden's period asprofessor ofpoetry (Auden's sanitary arrangements, Price recalled, were asastonishing as Merton's). Auden made himself accessible to students, every morning at coffee! time. H e took to the exquisitely well-mannered young American.
While at Oxford, Price, a virgin, had a painfully inhibited relationship with afellow student. He lost his virginity toa young academic called, in his second volume of memoirs, "Matyas". It, too, was unhappy. Less unhappily, Price sent a batch of his unpublished stories to Stephen Spender, the literary editor of Encounter, on the whimsical grounds that he thought the poet had "the kindest face I have ever seen". Editorial kindness rarely extends to indulging the egos of hopeful postgraduates. But Spender realised that an unusual talent had landed in his in-tray. He rushed the stories into print and helped get Price's novel-in-progress placed.
Like Byron, Price awoke and found himself famous. Within 18 months, ALong and Happy Life was published, and his career thereafter went swimmingly. He taught creative writing at Duke and, by 1977, was James B Duke professor a chair endowed in the name of the university's tobacco-enriched founder. He wrote a string of novels, winning prizes and fellowships. He made money, built himself a fine house in the woods and had, it seemed, a charmed life. Charm and a bubbling wit were what everyone noted about him. "You make any house you are in golden," Spender once told him.
Around him, the Duke English department was rising to prominence under the chairmanship of the charismatic Stanley Fish. At the same time, the region was developing into the North Carolina "research triangle", amagnet for scholars worldwide. Among all this change, Price North Carolinian, man and boy embodied continuity. He knew everyone on and off the campus. Going into a local restaurant with him was frustrating. Somany people had to be conversed with before you reached the table.
In 1984 Price's world disintegrated. He was diagnosed with cancer of the spine. Radiotherapy cured the disease but damaged his nervous system, leaving him paraplegic. Others might have enriched! themsel ves with amalpractice suit, but he confronted his condition not as an aggrieved patient, but as an author and a devout Christian. Although in constant pain, he refused painkillers, other than the evening martini, on the grounds that they dulled his mind. Out of the experience, he wrote a book with what he considered an ironic title, A Whole New Life (1994).
Typically, as with the Rosacoke trilogy and his bestseller Kate Vaiden (1986), Price employed female centres ofconsciousness. He was later criticised by some writers for never dealing directly with gay themes in his fiction. Price shrugged off the objection with the excuse that most readers were not interested in gay fiction. And he liked having a lot of readers. Quietly, behind the scenes, he moved to get the traditionally conservative Duke to solemnise gay unions in its vast chapel.
In his later years Price became increasingly drawn to religion, writing translations of the gospels and the religious meditation A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined (2003). He also cultivated anationwide presence as a radio-essayist on the NPR public broadcasting service.
He is survived by his brother, Will.
Edward Reynolds Price, writer, born 1February 1933; died 20 January 2011
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