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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 adversity or pain or loss. It is, like its author, full of stories funny and wise. The book brings alive a time in post-World War II England when a promising young scholar could have coffee with poet W.H. 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 published 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 letters 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 finished his daily physical therapy, required to stimulate blood circulation in his legs. Later, 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, making it clear the job will last only 12 months “so they don't get trapped in some old man's illness and heartbreak.”
Price lives with physical pain. But despite the pain, the wheelchair 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 family,” 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 opposite 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 goodbye 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 midwinter 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 colorful expressions would provide Price rich material for his fiction. (When Price once commented 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 landlady is just down the road from Tolkien's house.
British writer Sir Stephen Spender accompanies him to a 1957 production of “Titus Andronicus,” starring Vivien Leigh and husband 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 conversations and details.
Price isn't a journal keeper, but when he checked recollections against letters he sent his mother during his Oxford years, he found only tiny discrepancies. This cheered him, he said, because he remembers the scandal over James Frey's memoir fabrications in “A Million Little 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 anyone else's privacy or making anyone more unhappy than seemed necessary.”
Now that many in his past are dead, he treats the subject straight on. He had known he was attracted to men since he was teenager, he writes, though as a young man, he was hardly promiscuous. His total number of sexual acts was so low it “would have shamed a robust Chaucerian friar.”
In Oxford, he had his first “quite fervent erotic relation” with a man eight years older. “Despite the fact that I'd turned 25 in February, it was my first experience of employing my body in one of its grandest jobs.”
Later, back in North Carolina for his military draft physical, he fills out a questionnaire asking, “Do you now have or have you ever had…?” followed by a list that includes measles, epileptic seizures, syphilis, nervous breakdown, prison sentence, homosexual relations.
He checks all appropriate boxes, prompting a young Navy doctor to point to “homosexual relations” and ask: “Have you consulted a psychiatrist about this problem?”
“Sir,” Price replies, “I've never felt the need.”
Then, in a comic moment of overkill, he hands the Navy man a letter from his family physician attesting to his “lifetime history of serious respiratory allergies.”
Minutes later, the doctor tells him he's unfit for military service.
To this day, Price said, he's not sure if it was homosexuality or allergies that kept him out of the service. Either way, “I don't think I've ever heard a sentence that I more enjoyed hearing.”
From England to Durham
The subtitle of “Ardent Spirits” is “Leaving Home, Coming Back.” As it suggests, Price's story comes full circle.
He leaves North Carolina to see the world but comes home to make a career at Duke. He sails to Oxford to study Milton, then returns to teach in Durham for the rest of his career.
On a recent morning, Price sat before more than 20 undergraduates who spent the spring studying Milton with him.
Price was a Duke student himself when he fell in love with Milton's ornate language. At Oxford, he wrote his thesis on “Samson Agonistes.” (And, in a tidbit of interest to his students, he explains in his memoir how illness and procrastination nearly caused him to miss his thesis deadline.)
In class, Price spoke Samson's lines in his rich baritone – “This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, No long petition – speedy death” – sounding, indeed, like an Oxford-educated intellect.
But that formidable persona didn't linger. The discussion grew lively as Price lobbed questions and students offered answers on the motivations of Dalila, Samson's estranged wife.
Price, too, had a few thoughts about the couple. “Apparently,” he said, “they were good sexual partners.”
More to accomplish
On days he's not teaching, Price usually writes; but with a book tour beginning, he's taking a break. He plans to return to his desk midsummer. “I haven't finished accomplishing what I want to accomplish.”
He wants to write, especially, about surviving 25 years of chronic pain. He still hears from readers inspired and encouraged by “A Whole New Life,” his memoir of cancer and recovery.
He continues to live by a bit of wisdom learned at Oxford, from a professor quoting his mother on her deathbed. “I only regret my economies,” she told her son.
Price's interpretation is this: Do what you want to do, love the people you want to love. Splurge when you can.
“Few things I've heard,” he writes, “have ever been wiser or of greater use in my own long life; and I pass the story on, every chance I get, to my younger friends and students – the story and the words it embodies (with a pronoun change): You'll only regret your economies.”
Pam Kelley: 704-358-5271; pkelley@charlotteobserver.com.
