Ardent Spirits

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by Reynolds Price


  * * *

  Such a theory of memory has some occasional groundings in fact, groundings that should make us profoundly suspicious of potentially accusatory memories. If we’re the creators of our memories, then those inventions have often been a calamitous source of tragic consequences. Any sworn testimony from a witness in a court case may well be at the mercy of creative memory. And many appalling results of the recovered-memory movement of the 1970s and ’80s arose from such unexamined views of memory—occurrences like the false accusations of employees in children’s care centers or adult children’s “recovered,” but often inhumanly false, memories of sexual abuse at the hands of close relations. Such fantasies have often been encouraged as reliable memories by doctrinaire therapists and have sometimes resulted in prison sentences and ruined lives for innocent fathers, mothers, kin, teachers, and devoted caretakers. The documentary films made by Ofra Bikel, several of which have aired on PBS’s Frontline, are meticulous and frightening accounts of such fantasies and their overwhelming power in the hands of the cruelest, most self-deluded, and most easily panicked among us.

  My two parental families, though, are proof that what we call memories may often be astonishingly faithful to history—and accurate through the length of long lives, even in kinsmen who’ve never transcribed so much as a single memory. It’s easy enough to believe that a family may preserve group memories that it’s shared, in identical form through decades of family reunions, say. But kinsmen have occasionally saddened or delighted me with detailed accounts of awful or hilarious events to which we’ve each been witnesses, though we may have kept those details from one another for many years.

  For that reason then, and many more, I’m not inclined to agree with anyone’s claim that memory is largely re-creation. Most friends with whom I share an experience in the distant past tend to affirm that my recall of the experience matches their own, give or take a small point. And a surprised affirmation occurs so often that I’m compelled to wonder whether the chief distinguishing trait of a serious writer of narrative may not be a brain wired with unusual powers of faithful memory. It’s by no means a distinction imagined solely by me, as I’ll detail below.

  My insistence in this matter comes at a time when several of the most successful memoirs of recent years have been exposed as outright inventions. In the light of ensuing public concern, while I can hardly claim that all the memories recorded here are unerring, I can assert my confidence that they bear a high resemblance to actual happenings in my life and in many lives near me. And that achievement is by no means a personal virtue—only a phenomenon of birth like the color of my eyes and a craftsman’s skill, honed by long polishing.

  Three final details are worth noting—when I’ve attributed remarks to friends or others, I’ve attempted to preserve the content and characteristic rhythm of their speech; but the presence of quotation marks is not a guarantee of verbatim record. And in the case of a few friends and others, I’ve changed names. To the best of my knowledge, nonetheless, no lies have been told; surely none was intended—especially in matters involving sex.

  R.P.

  ONE

  THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN, AND THE CONTINENT 1955–1958

  1

  ON THE AFTERNOON of September 30, 1955 an elegantly trim and all-but-new ocean liner slid from its berth on the Hudson River in New York City and headed for England. With its other passengers in tourist class, I was among a group of some thirty American men bound northeast for Oxford University. Our ship was the S.S. United States which, on its maiden voyage three years earlier, had shaved ten hours off the prior record for transatlantic voyages. We’d be five days on the early-autumn sea and, with any luck, could dodge the great storms that had roiled the Atlantic in recent years.

  Only a few months earlier, I’d met the distinguished historian Bernard De Voto when he came to lecture at Duke, my undergraduate alma mater. I’d heard that De Voto was famous for his strong pro-American tilt; so a chill lifted the roots of my black hair when the young woman who was backstage beside me suddenly told De Voto that I was now a Rhodes Scholar. He looked up into my sudden pallor, chuckled a little sardonically, and said “Mr. Price, I’m glad to have met you while you’re still a bearable man.” Startled though I was, I managed to ask what he meant; and he said “I’ve never met a Rhodes Scholar, of whatever age, who didn’t inform me of that fact within two minutes of shaking my hand.” So here, more than fifty years later, I’ve fulfilled De Voto’s prophecy and started this book with such a declaration. I hope it proves relevant at least.

  On the pier, to wave me off with decidedly mixed emotions on both sides of the gesture, were my mother and my only other near kinsman, a brother. They’d driven me up from our home in North Carolina two days before. We’d stayed in the now-defunct Taft Hotel (lamented Times Square home of the world’s best club sandwich and inexpensive clean rooms for businessmen and tourists). And we’d eased our lengthy parting with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum and a Times Square showing of On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando at his early sympathetic best and Eva Marie Saint in her own serenely luminous youth.

  Transatlantic crossings in those days of the great liners—so different from present-day slummy cruise ships—were famously preceded by departure parties complete with champagne, flowers, and last-minute bon-voyage telegrams from friends. I had a few telegrams from my aunts and teachers; but despite the family’s native buoyancy, we were finding it hard to provide genuine cheer that day. Though none of us mentioned it, separately we knew that this latest parting marked the ritual definition of a painful fact—once more, our close and likable family was drastically changing.

  * * *

  My father, Will Price, had died of lung cancer only nineteen months before. A brilliant comedian, he was a man perennially strapped by money woes; and his horizons had been lowered early by the fact that—like Mother—he’d concluded his education with high school. Through the hard years of the Great Depression, he’d struggled to support us with salesman jobs while contending with the demon of alcoholism (he managed to quit for good when he was thirty-six and I was three—thus I never saw him drunk). When he died at fifty-four, he was holding down the best job of his life; but he was still a high-class traveling salesman, often away from home three nights a week. And alongside his first-rate comic talents, he had the melancholic tendencies of many more famous clowns.

  At middle age, he was a tired man who was worrying—and smoking—himself to death. A hypochondriac, convinced of heart troubles he never had, he’d foreseen an early end from his mid-forties on. So in addition to meeting the monthly bills, he’d strained to set aside enough life insurance to guard us at his parting. Yet in those days of minimal health insurance, his brief hospitalization—and the hopeless surgery to remove a lung—gutted his financial leavings. Within a few days of his funeral, my mother had been forced to take a job selling boys’ clothing at a local retail store.

  She was forty-nine when he died and had never worked outside our home. I was a college junior then, age twenty-one, who stepped up my own money-raising effort—the painting of suspicious coats-of-arms for relatives and friends. And my brother, at thirteen, took on a summer job for the Department of Agriculture—measuring our home county’s lush and lethal tobacco fields. Till then, we’d been unusually close; and our grief had brought us closer. Now we were breaking our bond.

  Yet while I’m a shameless weeper, I don’t recall tears as I stood on deck among my new friends and looked down at my mother and brother—Elizabeth and Bill (who’d later assume my father’s name, Will). Like most Americans of my Depression and World War II generation, I’d traveled very little till then. There’d been an early boyhood trip through the historical sites of eastern Virginia and the city of Washington, a few trips to New York to sample the riches of a Broadway that still produced frequent real plays (often brilliantly cast), family trips to Virginia Beach and Myrtle, more nearby historic-site touring, and a summer-long job in 1953
as the counselor to a cabin of boys at Camp Sequoyah in the Great Smoky Mountains. Since early adolescence, I’d all but tasted the strong desire to visit Europe; but as the son of a father who had no money to spare, and as a boy too young to fight in Europe or the Pacific, my chance of such a visit had been near impossible.

  * * *

  Now, incredibly, I was off. In another half-hour the tugs turned back, though the Statue of Liberty would be visible behind us for a while longer, more radiant with emotion than I’d have guessed likely. Then I turned in earnest to meeting my Rhodester colleagues and attending to a passenger’s duties. I signed on for a second seating at all meals in the third-class dining room—thereby gaining the chance of a later breakfast—and I stowed my good wool trousers and a Harris-tweed sport coat in the tiny closet in my shared cabin so the wrinkles would hang out (another lesson from a traveling father). That way, I’d be as well turned out as a serious young man of my time and place was expected to be.

  After dinner on the first night at sea—pleasant-enough food but served with the usual American big-city absence of grace or human connection—I celebrated with my new friends at one of the ship’s several bars. In early childhood I’d learned from a wicked uncle about my father’s problem with drink and had developed an early fear of its presence in our home (though my parents never stocked it, they had no problem when friends turned up with their own bottles, a practice that scared me nonetheless—wouldn’t Dad be tempted to start all over?).

  That fear had lasted, well disguised, right through my membership in a swinging college fraternity. Since the possession of alcohol was then strictly forbidden on the Duke campus, my friends only drank at weekend parties in town or in stark concrete-block party spaces available for rent in the local woods. So it had been easy enough for me to rely on Cokes. Maybe oddly, my father had never asked me not to drink. He’d only said, when he and I were alone in his car on the afternoon of my fraternity initiation, “Son, there’s just one thing to remember—the men in your family have never been very good around liquor.” And so they hadn’t—the men on both sides of my family—as by then I well knew.

  I never tasted ardent spirits then until he was dead, though hardly a year before this first voyage, I’d gone out with some of my fraternity brothers to an illegal Durham saloon and ordered a drink I’d heard of in a movie—Sauternes and soda: a semi-tolerable mix of sweet dessert wine and soda water. It was not only illegal; it confirmed even more indelibly my brothers’ delighted sense of me as an intellectual fop who was nonetheless their bemusing fool of a mascot. My grades were helping keep the fraternity off social probation after all, and I enjoyed their fond kidding. My fraternity name, for instance, was Misterfofelees after an essay I’d published in the campus literary magazine concerning the evil Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy Dr. Faustus. I continued to drink the same syrup once or twice a month for the remainder of my college years, nursing a tall glass as slowly as possible despite my brothers’ tendency to force frequent complimentary refills on me.

  * * *

  Still unaccustomed to saloon life, however upscale, on my first night at sea—surely no more than a hundred miles from New York—I relaxed, drank another Sauternes and soda, and received no jesting comments from my friends. It was maybe one o’clock in the morning then before I turned in with a new sense of mature independence, to my three-man cabin—all three of us were Rhodesters. We had no porthole, no natural light to wake us; but at six I was wakened by the whisk of something slid under our door. I was in a lower berth, so I got up quietly and fetched the brief mimeographed shipboard newspaper. At the top of the front page, among announcements for dance contests and badminton tournaments, a headline said “Actor James Dean Killed in Car Crash.” I was still more affected than I’d realized by the death of my father, even here well beyond the three-mile limit; and at once that piece of the news struck deep.

  I’d never met Dean, I knew almost nothing about his life—except that he was two years minus three days older than I—and I’d had no forewarning of the power of his acting when I went alone to see his first film East of Eden just a few months earlier and had been deeply moved. On my first trip to New York five years before, I’d seen young Julie Harris in her Broadway triumph in The Member of the Wedding; and she’d been Dean’s co-star in the film. The scene with their kiss on a small-town Ferris wheel remains one of the great romantic moments in film; but the final scene, with Dean and Harris determined to stand watch at the bedside of Dean’s father, who’d suffered a stroke, chimed with my own recent family sadness. (For more than two weeks, I’d slept in a chair in my father’s hospital room at his request—a request that honored me more than any other I’d got. After the surgery that removed a lung, I was there in his room when something awful broke loose in his chest; he panicked, a too-young doctor came, did something I couldn’t see; and Dad was never truly conscious again. But my finger was on his thready pulse when his heart ceased to beat some three days later.)

  Stronger still, though, was the plain perfection of James Dean’s meticulous portrait—from start to finish—of a man my age, externally very different from me but internally a near twin in his need for a father’s love and respect. I’d got more of both from my own good father, yet the sudden news that James Byron Dean had died in the mangled wreck of a car on the day when I was gladly parting from a mother who suffered still from the death of a man whom I’d tended through his last awful days seemed more than uncanny. (Another young man had died almost exactly a month earlier—Emmett Till, age fourteen, murdered at the hands of Mississippi white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. I’d followed that story with a sense of awful omen, an oncoming tide of unstoppable violence from my part of the world.)

  But neither death marred for long the five days of pleasure at sea. Despite our tourist-class tickets, the captain gave us privileged bright boys access to numerous cabin-class privileges—their swimming pool, their masseurs, plus evening music and dancing in their lounge, plus a last-night-at-sea dinner in first class, complete with my introduction to baked Alaska (a dessert which had yet to reach the upper South except as a treat for the idle rich in MGM movies). Chiefly, though, I relished two things.

  First among the pleasures were the nighttime hours I could spend alone on deck submerged in plutonian darkness with almost alarmingly bright star-shine above. In my contented eight years as an only child before my brother’s birth, solitude had been my natural condition; and despite a shipload of some two thousand other passengers, I was generally free to walk the decks and feel the rhythmic but enormous surge of the ocean beneath a ship that, however large, was the merest cork to the gorgeous giant that heaved to all sides and beneath us and could, no doubt, turn this gentle week into something appalling if not deadly (in five later crossings, I experienced days of bad winter storms and high turbulence; but the fall of ’55 was far more peaceful).

  Among the numerous matters I considered in those dark nights on deck was the basic young man’s question of the Fifties and Sixties—Who am I? I was no doubt too confident, by a wide margin, of most of the answers. I was the son of upper-middle-class Southern parents, each of them born within forty years of the end of the Civil War and the African slavery which precipitated that war’s slaughter of 620,000 men (if we destroyed that many men, proportionally, from today’s population we’d kill six million). Years later Dad’s sister Lulie Price Gay said to me of my great-grandmother McCraw, “Ma-Mammy lost five first cousins in one battle.” More than I liked to think still, I continued to share—generally in silence—a small percentage of their trust in the inevitability of the Southern racial arrangement—the benign separation, as they saw it, of two races who (in an inexplicably close bond) had built an immensely complex agrarian civilization across a huge stretch of land. The old South, after all, was geographically larger than Western Europe and almost as prolific in the production of distinguished art—specifically music, poetry, drama, and fiction
(if we extend its history from the work of Mark Twain, a short-term Confederate soldier, on through the time of my early manhood).

  Owing to the Great Depression and the Second War, as I’ve said, I’d never left the nation till now. My passionate absorption in the arts—first, painting; then serious reading, then writing—began in that order when I was still an only child and we lived in a wooded suburb that nonetheless, to me, seemed like the deep forest. Those piney acres, with occasional snakes and a stream that was rich in lizards and crawfish, were the source of early answers to mysteries that could have balked my life if I’d met them first in the crowded streets of concrete cities—Who put me here? And why?

  Helpful as they were, those solitary country years, though, had kept me from serious out-of-school connection with my age-mates. When I joined them, back in town, in the fourth grade, I took to their interests with excited pleasure; and despite a period of hostile rejection from a pair of other boys, I’d ultimately reached high school with no memorable sexual connections with anyone but myself. My memories of the start of an erotic life center on a room of my own when I was eleven. It had a floor-length mirror, left behind by a prior renter; and I launched into the early outskirts of puberty with long reflected games at that mirror—me and my own bare skin in fantastic stories and games that erupted before long in outright sexual elation.

  From there I moved onward through the years before high school in minor fascination with a dark-haired girl who seemed to me the summit of human beauty. She was in fact lovely and kind; but in the rare times we were alone together, I felt none of the intense magnetism of physical attraction. That magnetism, which our deepest needs eventually assign to one of the genders—an assignment which is still entirely mysterious—would wait awhile longer. It came in my first year of high school. When I was fourteen we’d moved to Raleigh, a small Carolina city luckily rich in its artistic resources; and it was there that I quickly sensed a new excitement in the presence of a few boys my age. Soon a neighbor boy, now long-dead, was laboring strenuously to join me in frequent early expeditions into the delights of intimate—and laughing—physical contact; and for years he remained a cheerful resource.

 

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