A Long and Happy Life

by Reynolds Price

  This is my theory: Like many wise, young Southern writers before him, Reynolds Price felt eager to publish a first novel set in the American South while bravely standing up to its predominant literary landlord, Bill Faulkner. An onstage Annie Oakley courts a boyfriend by singing, “Anything you can do I can do better!”

  The young Shelby Foote, persuasive at every age, had wrangled a grumpy Faulkner into reading his own first novel. Foote received the Master’s reply, “It’s good. But do better next time.” In a letter to a friend, Faulkner would say, “Foote should stop reading me.” Excellent Rx from the very doctor who should know best.

  Three decades earlier, Master Faulkner had claimed so much of Dixie’s literary landscape that other writers—especially the young ’uns—soon qualified only as tenant farmers of his outlying fields. He’d left so few square feet uncultivated.

  Some people believe that the Reformation (and world religion, generally) was justified for having produced one provincial organist chapel-master named J. S. Bach. In such a way, on such a scale, William Faulkner might be the sole justification for the American Civil War.

  It is impossible to chart Price’s dry Piedmont geography without accounting for the tidal downward pull of Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner was more Mississippian than American. His nation treated him accordingly. But, after French readers found his work dark and philosophical enough for them, after Sweden handed him the prize of prizes, and once Hollywood itself asked him to touch up others’ scripts, his own country belatedly noticed. Faulkner knew all the experimental works expatriates were producing in Paris. And into these Joycean abstractions of narrative forms he fed the tar-dark history of his state. That combination—Art Deco penetrating Delta Gothic—resulted in a kind of fission never seen before or since.

  Eudora Welty’s folks had only lately moved to Mississippi. They relocated from Ohio for her dad’s insurance job. Faulkner was a different die-hard species of Mississippian. With the family name as yet spelled “Falkner,” almost since its first form “Falconer,” his forebears had haunted and bossed the state into being. They were around, if unshaven, since certain Indians needed dissuading of their acreage. There is a comic line from William Carlos Williams: “It was an old family, old and rotten.” (Today’s American aristocrats? Whichever of 1640s roughnecks most wished to be.)

  What comprised Faulkner’s genetic (and therefore literary) cargo? Savagery, gunplay, chivalry, and genealogy as a form of Chinese ancestor-worship. From father to son, ownership at all costs became first dynastic then too soon toxic. But concerns of the Founders, however criminal, are a far cry from those of the Price family living on a clerk-employee’s salary. If Faulkner’s terrain is the Deep South, as in deep-sea diving, the Prices’ North Carolina is happily of only wading-depth. This affords a freedom permitting self-invention. Renting at least implies a sort of mobility, a freedom from the fatedness of family-owned property that must never fall into the hands of strangers. If Faulkner’s black sense of comedy was tickled by the new-arrived Snopses aping while overturning the manners of first settlers, North Carolina’s Scotch-Irish yeoman stock belonged to a fine if plainer, more pious order.

  Reynolds Price’s fiction idealizes certain ethical distinctions among working clerks, teachers, white hirelings of the old families. If Faulkner overstated the erotic and homicidal tendencies of his semi-invented slave-lord ancestors, Price was left free to show the moral nuances, the redemptive ways, of his better-behaved stock.

  Faulkner is rightly considered the reigning genius of twentieth-century American fiction (with Tennessee Williams holding that sovereign position in theatrical writing). But, for that unlucky generation born post-genius, where was a newbie to commence?

  In 1962, Bossman Faulkner might be newly buried. But doesn’t immortality leave such a man forever inconveniently undead? His influence will keep him propped forever upright, making mischief, ruining the bell curve for his region’s talented young.

  Reynolds Price, self-made, self-named, rightly wanted to be known—not as “son of,” not as “heir to”—but solely as Reynolds Price. He felt justifiably proud of his manifold talents. After Duke and Oxford, he could now “pass,” someone handsome and gifted, at ease in any educated company worldwide. His accomplishments, if promoted and generously sponsored, still needed asserting. Against whom? Some senior regional figure. So, Price’s first book’s opening sentence tilts directly at the biggest windmill-windbag of all.

  Price never readily admitted to over-many influences. He did concede being shaped and awed by John Milton (well and safely dead since 1674). But one fact all Reynolds’s friends eventually admitted and smiled about: This writer (famous so early in his life), a single child that siblinghood unseated only at age eight, did not always share his toys easily. After all, his standards were august, and he met them all himself. He read ancient Greek. He was in love with the Holy Bible as both guide and goal. Like Welty upon endorsing him, Price could never bring himself to overpraise contemporaries.

  At Duke, after early success, he stopped teaching undergraduate fiction-writing. Instead, he took to professing those texts acknowledged for their incomparable authority: He alternated semesters between the Bible and Paradise Lost. I once teased him, at some risk. Reynolds had done a Bible translation and, in his most preacherly baritone, announced that he was “about to go on book tour with The Gospels.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I quipped. “San Francisco, Seattle, and unto the Corinthians.” Price laughed only because everyone in the room did.

  Reynolds did not share others’ awe at Faulkner’s most fertile fifteen years of work. He resisted what seemed to him both the Master’s overblown reputation and his admitted excesses. (Such excesses may be inevitable in a prose style so groundbreaking and thereby prone to late-life self-parody.)

  Why then, at the start of Price’s own book number one, would he so ritually refer to Faulkner? The long opening sentence is his oblique burnt offering to a god newly departed. But it means to clear the air.

  Faulkner still daunts all thoughtful writers, young or not. Atop his home-rolled rococo style there should hang a sign, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO HOPE TO COPY HERE.

  * * *

  We’re drawn, though scared, by his Carlsbad Cavern sentences, by his characters’ avarice, by their glandular compulsions, by his obsession with racial commingling. The books remain energized by his farmboy readiness to catalog all forms of earthly sexual contact: man-woman, woman-woman, boy-boy, boy-cow. Never in any language does lyrical bestiality chew its cud quite so winningly as in Faulkner’s vernal barn.

  Dorothy Parker remarked that Price’s was a Southern novel “with no violence.” (Excepting, of course, the emotional kind.) But this too segregates him from a Faulkner whose characters so often seem in need of emergency rooms and Gamblers’ Anonymous.

  Every artistic generation must plant its own flag; this means striking the last claimant’s colors. The task is rendered harder for the heirs of someone preternaturally venturesome. Faulkner, though five and a half feet tall, was some specimen of Giant. (Price did once concede that Faulkner had written “two or three novels fit to stand with the best.”)

  Reynolds’s own family had once owned slaves. But unlike the Deep South’s rice- and cotton-cultivating massive work forces, the more prosperous upland farmers owned smaller spreads that typically held one to three African conscripts. (Unlucky North Carolina owned the smallest number of slaves but reportedly lost the largest number of Confederate soldiers.)

  Mississippi, with its inventoried thousands of bartered souls, inherited lingering guilt unto the second and third generations. Price’s own familial exemptions around the issue of race changed—and necessarily lightened—his personal historic vision. One of the paradoxes of a novelist’s life runs: The more troubles you’ve seen (from your great-grandparents forward), the deeper and darker is your native narrative ore. Price, the son of diligent, if transitory, twentieth-century renters, cared far less about thos
e creation myths underwriting the Southland itself. All that belonged to others. Racial-mixing and the legacy of enslavement might have been bitter daily bread for the Faulkners. But to an Oxbridge-educated lad under thirty, these entangling legacies must’ve looked passé in 1962, eight years after Brown v. Board of Education.

  Price’s hope was democratic, not aristocratic. He was the meritocracy embodied. One “Ed Price” of Warrenton (North Carolina), via the certitude of his abilities, owing to the scope of his sovereign imagination, arrived knowing himself to actually be “Reynolds Price.” He found (and founded) himself, a novelist worth translating into twenty languages. His mysterious literary arrival as an artist born seemingly intact was adjudged a national, not just a regional, advance. He would be tapped early into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Maybe owing to the vistas offer him by his Rhodes Scholarship, Price’s artistic trajectory involved a cleanly foreseeable and international future. He was not merely a product of the Old South’s entangling nepotisms. Reynolds Price (and his own modest upland tradition) gave him a pass to Mississippi’s obsession with its noble genealogy, its mythic Wagnerian duels and power quests.

  Even Price’s bodily relation to his fictional subjects differs markedly from Faulkner’s. His books feel less crowded, better ventilated, fleeter of foot. Unlike Faulkner’s repetitious circular sense of time in Absalom! for instance, Price’s works are utterly devoted to chronology. His first best model was the Bible with its first line “In the beginning” and its last chapter promising “Revelation.”

  I recall the spirit of 1962, with an American president in his midforties. We felt that Youth finally literally ruled. Soon as I finished high school in ’65 I hoped to join the Peace Corps. One reason I loved 1962’s A Long and Happy Life on first reading: how it seemed made of precisely this Youth. It signaled another caffeinated break with the old order. Brisk, suave John Kennedy had called his national agenda “The New Frontier.” And to a comer of an author with his first book published one year before Kennedy’s murder, the American experiment surely seemed to stretch ahead as purest promise. If Faulkner most resembled that aristocrat-populist FDR, in the role of a Kennedyesque juvenile lead, cast Reynolds Price.

  And yet, as if to subvert any lingering patriarchal influence, Price begins his own first novel with a pretzeled, railroad-roundhouse of a sentence almost parodically Faulknerian. Is this meant as literary homeopathy? You introduce one starter sample of an illness so the organism can isolate then transcend it? (Price would live to regret making this his inaugural novel’s starting line. A truncated quotation from his once-off Faulkner imitation haunted even his New York Times obit.)

  His book opens from the perspective of a youngster’s speeding motorcycle as it rudely passes the funeral-cortege blocking its own way forward in 1962. I don’t want to say it’s Faulkner in that truck-bed’s homemade coffin, but we cannot help imagining him there. Price is showing us how Faulkner might’ve started just such a new young book. And Price, embodiment of the New South’s New Frontier, is proving he can beat the Master known for serving up compound sentences. The new boy can pass, on the left, the Old South’s majordomo.

  Only after that’s done, only in sentence number two does Reynolds Price become “Reynolds Price.” And he would stay precisely that the next five decades.

  In the end, Reynolds was less the direct heir of Faulkner, far more the son of Price’s kinder, milder mentor, Miss Welty. In trying to surpass Faulkner, Price was in some valiant way perhaps protecting her.

  Price won the national medal for Notable First Novel. That award had been funded by the donated winnings of a Nobel laureate and was naturally named for him. It is called the William Faulkner Award. The old bear was, finally, inescapable.

  V

  The novel ends at a white persons’ church service, having begun at one for blacks. Rosacoke has permitted herself a faltering dalliance with sullen, unknowable Wesley Beavers. Her basic generosity has been demonstrated even to a friend dead from the novel’s beginning. But this very openness puts Rosa at odds with her communal rectitude once she meets Wesley’s sexual demands. She must soon and solely confront her own unannunciated pregnancy. We fear that her bringing forth Wesley’s baby will be the end of Rosacoke. Even if she and the child survive, they’ll be further steamrolled like so many others by this crossroad’s hard work and joyless conformity. And yet, if anything can, Rosa’s own imagination might lift even this, her gravid burden, toward a state of blessedness.

  Rosacoke’s adored childhood friend Mildred died young in childbirth, the baby’s father stubbornly unknown. Throughout Price’s book, this model of a toiling, accepting mother left by an abstracted invisible father echoes the supernal circumstance of Christ’s own hit-and-run paternity.

  Price’s fictive universe is so predicated on New Testament paradigms, his first book seems able to spin fresh parables (loaves and fishes) from all the old ones. He is always both updating and undercutting the great Original. He provides a light irony that never demeans the grave sweetness of holiness itself.

  The closing joke, a disaster-prone church Christmas pageant, remains shot through with tenderness. The Wise Men must be played by men no wiser than your average churchgoing adult farmer. The ritual reenactment of Bethlehem’s nativity brings us gorgeous actual Scripture, and all our favorite carols.

  Despite her being secretly “in trouble,” Rosa is the Virgin (at least in tonight’s play). She finds that, despite her terror and confusion, she can yet feel for the infant playing Baby Jesus. (Even if this baby be a no-neck Gupton.) So surely she might also accept the child she’s carrying. Hardly blessed among women, she will certainly not bring forth a Redeemer. Simply the Son of Wesley. Wesley, named for the founder of Methodism, Wesley, the boy-man who knows her only in the biblical sense. It is a sad, wrenching ending.

  But the miracle of Rosa’s character has been so dimensionally created we guess that her generous vision—always outwardly directed—might truly redeem whatever must befall her and her child. If our Rosacoke Mustian salvages the best from everyone she meets, won’t she make far more of anyone she bears?

  * * *

  Reynolds Price seemed born knowing and laughing, expecting and deserving respect. Even as a boy not yet turned thirty, he had already made literature. If Rosacoke proved a refining filter for her own sidelined community, Price grew up to be—with his Bible translations, his poems, plays, and essays—a force for the good, an old-fashioned Man of Letters.

  His state of buoyant blessedness darkened at age fifty-one. The aggressive treatment of a spinal malignancy killed both the cancer and his ability to walk. Typical of Reynolds to find, almost at once, immobility’s every hidden benefit. Always a closet pasha, he rightly pointed out: Most writers would secretly prefer to be wheeled by some literate young person from their desk to a waiting meal and, after some stimulating (if brief) conversation, back to the desk again.

  I’ll devote just eight sentences to his positive influence on me, a fellow North Carolinian, born fourteen years and thirty miles from him. Not long after I’d escaped our native state, Reynolds read my first stories and summoned me clear from Palo Alto to teach as an adjunct at Duke. He’d reeled me back, half against my will, to a state I felt belonged to my father’s family, not me. (Being twenty-four, I then had Corfu in mind!)

  This native’s return was eased by seeing Reynolds’s own lair—its Rembrandt etchings, ancient Russian icons, death masks of Blake and Keats. Just as he had once done portraits of Vivien Leigh and Ethel Waters, young artists’ portraits of Reynolds were also much in evidence. I noted how daily he worked. He showed me that talent is never an excuse to coast. Talent is the one reason to struggle.

  His home still contains a wall of books, set in his beloved chronological order, all first editions, each, of course, by Reynolds Price. In that glass case, across its nearly forty titles, there is not a careless or hurried sentence, not a banal thought, not one image unfelt before being ideally
polished, mitered, aligned. Leading off the many genres he undertook—Bible commentaries, volumes of poetry, an inspiring work about surviving cancer—Price’s own firstborn stands, face out.

  It contains the start-up nectar, a singular sample of all that would follow. It seems to have come from nowhere, as yet it somehow appeared spangled with meadow dew. To this day, it trails the mystery of its arrival.

  Beginner’s luck? Hardly. Except, of course, the good fortune of a brain so fine welded from the start to a will that strong. The book remains as forward-movingly innocent as Miss Rosacoke Mustian herself and just that full of grace. The novel has lasted because it feels as natural, as inevitably breathed-into, as some deep, clear Schubert song.

  * * *

  What Reynolds’s friends remember best is that big, warming baritone, his lifelong total recall, his elating simplicity when relaxed and at his funniest. The goal of his later years was simply finding the strength to dignify his desk by sitting straight enough to work there one full hour a day. Born Depression-poor, rightly praised from the beginning, there was always something of the prince about Reynolds Price.

  His last decades he lived with spinal dissolution. The resulting pain overshot even his own powers of expression and therefore others’ ever imagining. But, as with certain worthy royals, he transformed adversities into named campaigns (ones he called books). Under his public reign and in his private hands, successive troubles found themselves turned into new and deepening subjects. His investigation ran on, tireless, throughout his bodily betrayal.

  The dignity of making things every day of his life, it never failed him.

  © IAN HOLLJES

  REYNOLDS PRICE