Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  When she came to my office for her first conference, I learned several interesting things. First she’d spent a good part of her late childhood and adolescence in her parents’ house, only two blocks from my own parents’. She was sixteen years old now, when most of her fellow freshmen were eighteen. And she was a graduate of my high school in Raleigh—Needham Broughton High, widely acknowledged as the best public high school in the state—and there she’d studied with my own remarkable English teacher Phyllis Peacock, a woman marked by an outlandish but ultimately irresistible intensity of love for her subject (I’ve noted that Mrs. Peacock had been crucial to my decision at age sixteen to pursue a life of writing rather than painting).

  It turned out that Anne had been similarly tempted; and even here in her first days of college, she still possessed a strong urge to draw and paint. Her brief description of such an early memory struck me, not so much by its few clear words of evocative prose as by the remarkable earliness of her small scrap of memory. (It would be years before I learned, and oddly from Anne’s eventual husband—Taghi Modarressi, a psychiatrist who was himself a distinguished Iranian novelist—that an unusually well-stocked early memory was characteristic of dedicated writers. He even suggested that the act of writing might be a form of relieving, and unburdening ourselves of, the pressure of such memory.) That early in our acquaintance then, Anne Tyler and I shared several important things in our past experience; and our meetings could proceed with an ease that was not always native to freshman conferences, despite the fact that I was then nearer to the age of my students than to most of my teaching colleagues.

  * * *

  As my two freshman classes continued to read from the volume of essays, my next assigned subject for the theme was the production of an actual essay. I mentioned some possible subjects, most of them no doubt characteristic of my own recent concerns and maybe a little morbid for young women of such apparent good health and spirits. I suggested for instance an essay about their first encounter with death, a grandparent’s funeral maybe. And while I don’t remember any other single piece from that week’s crop of thirty-six essays, I do recall Anne Tyler’s. In fact I still possess a copy.

  She called it “The Galax,” and it describes an event from Anne’s childhood when she and her three brothers lived with their idealistic parents in a quasi-pacifist community called Celo deep in the North Carolina mountains. In the short piece Anne joins a group of mountain women for a foray through woods to gather wild galax, an evergreen vine which they’ll sell for Christmas decoration. With remarkable subtlety, for such a young writer with so few words allowed, Anne clarifies the degree to which she differs so profoundly from these embedded mountaineers. When I’d read the theme several times, and gone over it with her in conference, I acted on impulse and told her that, thereafter, when I assigned theme subjects to the other class members, she was secretly to feel free to write whatever she wished. It was my first impulsive move as a teacher and one that, most obviously, I’ve never regretted.

  If only I’d kept copies of her work in the course of that freshman experience, I’d have an instructive and compelling portrayal of a gifted apprentice writer’s rapid self-discovery and growth. And if I’d done discreetly what one of my colleagues has done throughout his equally long career—that is, photographed each student for future reference—I’d have another picture of the engaging woman Anne Tyler was becoming. In the absence of an early photograph, however, I attempted to preserve that memory in a poem which I wrote shortly after a visit to Baltimore in 1995 (the last time I’d see Taghi alive—that good man was dying of lymphoma); and here are the opening lines of my memory—

  Thirty-seven years ago this month,

  You entered the first class I ever taught—

  The gray-eyed Athena, straight as a poplar.

  Tall, dark-haired and far more gifted

  Than a tasteful billionaire’s Christmas tree . . .

  To have had the pleasure of such a presence—with the mind that moved it—in the first class I taught seemed, in my tyro’s innocence, almost normal. How was I to know that it wouldn’t happen often? Time, though, would tell me what an initial godsend I’d had—a gift of sufficient richness to constitute one of the ultimate reasons for my spending, throughout my life, a part of each year at a teacher’s desk. An unmitigated appetite for hope—not money, surely—is the fuel. Anne Tyler would graduate from Duke in only three years at age nineteen, but she’d be a member of one other class I’d teach.

  * * *

  In my second year back at Duke, I was asked by a stingy-hearted colleague (not Bill Blackburn) if I’d teach his writing course for a semester while he was on sabbatical. Maybe a better descriptive word is parched—once he returned, he failed to offer so much as a word of minimal thanks for my work, only the flat assertion that he’d never have his course taught again in his own absence. Well, I’d taught it with great pleasure; and (for what it was worth to them) two of the students went on to become world-respected novelists. My colleague had no such luck, ever.

  In the expectation of an interesting semester, I silently divided those older writing students into two sections. Those with whom I hadn’t previously worked were in one; in the other I assembled an especially promising group of students with whom I’d either worked previously or had known well. Anne Tyler was prime among the group I already knew—as were Fred Chappell and Wallace Kaufman, among three or four others. That second group would meet for one extended evening each week at Fred and Sue Chappell’s apartment near the Woman’s Campus. I’d met Fred in 1954 during my last undergraduate year and had published his first story and at least one of his early poems in the student magazine which I was editing then. When I was in England, Fred’s drinking ran him afoul of the deans; and he retired to his home in the Carolina mountains. There he married his girlfriend Sue, who accompanied him on his successful return to Duke. They gave the class a warm welcome each week, and the group proved as remarkable as I’d hoped.

  I’d often begin the evening by reading a few pages from whatever I’d written that week, and we’d discuss my problems before moving on to their work (given the closeness of our ages, I had no trouble in getting them to speak candidly about my faults). As we moved on to their work, we witnessed the start of Fred Chappell’s always moving and frequently hilarious fiction that reinvented his own memories from a boyhood life in a large Appalachian family. Wally Kaufman had begun to deal, in stories, with his world of blue-collar north-shore Long Island. And in the course of the term, Anne completed a short story that still seems to me astonishing. It’s called “The Saints in Caesar’s Household”; and while it would appear in the student magazine, and years later in a creative-writing textbook, it’s never appeared elsewhere (Anne has always resisted collecting her short fiction).

  When she’d given me the manuscript at the end of a previous meeting, I’d gone straight home and read it in my trailer bed with climbing excitement. I’d known this girl was good, but now she’d taken a long stride onward. When she read it aloud at the next class meeting, the other members sagely granted the strength of the story; but no one was prepared to say—or perhaps to see—what a first-rate thing she’d made: first-rate, I knew, by any standards. It was the first adult writing class I’d managed, but raw instinct prevented my trying to tell the whole class how high the story stood.

  I suspected it was my complex duty not to discourage any of the other gifted students by praising one of their number disproportionately. But later, privately, I told Anne what I thought and asked her if I might do what Eudora Welty had done for me some four years earlier—submit the story to Diarmuid Russell. With her sometimes unnerving self-possession—or was it genuine shyness?—she only said “Yes.” So I sent the story off and Diarmuid responded Yes in his own laconic way. He never managed to sell that one story, but in only a few more years he’d sold Anne’s first novel, and one of the most successful careers of the past five decades in American fiction had begun. With no
false humility whatever, I can add that I make no claim to have taught Anne Tyler anything significant about narrative writing. The fact that, despite the eight-year difference in our ages, we met in parallel starting-gates may have produced a certain mutual excitement in those early years; but if so, that effect was benignly accidental, not managed by me. It might even have helped us both more.

  I can recall, for instance, that in the summer after our first year’s work together, Anne sent me a new short story. I can only guess that it had something to do with a young man and woman at a dance (maybe I’m wrong). I know that I wrote back in response, and I know that—once she’d left Duke and completed a year’s work in Russian studies at Columbia—she returned to campus and worked for a year as a cataloguer of Russian books. I saw her a few times then at student parties, and I met the young Iranian resident in psychiatry at Duke Hospital whom she’d ultimately marry. But I don’t recall seeing her privately. My apprentice teacher’s sense—learned from Professor Blackburn—that a responsible male teacher must be very circumspect in his dealings with female students rather absurdly hindered my early relations with Anne, who spent all her college summers very near my mother’s house where I could have seen her often (four years later, that same excessive circumspection affected my dealings with Josephine Humphries, the next greatly gifted student with whom I worked).

  * * *

  The friends who were roughly my age in those first years back in Durham consisted mainly of two couples—Dick and Charlotte Quaintance and Bill and Marie Combs. Dick and Bill were a few years older than I and had essentially completed work for their doctorates at, respectively, Yale and Harvard. Each of the couples had two children; and while it appeared—unostentatiously—that Dick might have a little money of his own, all of us seemed strapped each month to make it through till payday (we’d often borrow a dollar or two, from whichever one of us was still afloat, to feed ourselves till then).

  The Quaintances and Combses provided almost all my social life—weekend dinners, with good food and drinkable cheap wine, that would last till two or three in the morning. Our gatherings were further fueled by intense but ultimately laughing discussions of the novels and poems we taught and the films we saw (the best of the Ingmar Bergman films, for instance, were opening then with powerful frequency); and all our meetings were seasoned with sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking accounts of the students we were learning to know in the exhausting yet somehow exhilarating hours of conferences.

  It’s more than interesting, in retrospect, to consider that most of those close friends were either from the northeast or the Midwest; yet the subject of civil rights—and specifically of Duke’s all-white student body—seldom arose in our conversations. Was the explanation as simple as the fact that virtually all of us had simply settled, long since in most cases, into an acceptance (however sad) of the realities of segregation? Surely we were not that massively indifferent to so great an injustice. Still, the only one of us whom I can recall as participating in any of the peaceful marches and demonstrations that occurred regularly in Durham was Bill Combs, who’d been reared in Mississippi. And our undergraduate students showed less interest in the civil-rights movements than we, a great deal less—though there was none of the obviously vicious environment of governmental resistance to oncoming change that one heard of from the deep South. For that, we had the complex history of North Carolina to thank and the governorship of Terry Sanford (and ours was a state which had lost more men than any other Confederate state to the Civil War).

  As for social companions, I don’t recall a single “date” with any woman but Dorothy Roberts, the phenomenally capable secretary of the English department. She’d begun that job in the late 1940s and, with only a single assistant (an older woman who primarily typed and filed), Dot Roberts did, with impeccable professional pride, the job that’s now done by some five or six employees. She was some fifteen years older than I; and she tended to contribute excessive talk to social situations, small or large; but she was good-looking and unquestionably loyal to any man or woman who earned her respect (her standards were old-fashioned Southern but high—she hailed from south central Virginia and had graduated from the University of Richmond). Starting shortly after my return to Duke and continuing till she retired from the department in the late 1980s, she was my frequent partner at lectures, dinners, whatever. To the best of my knowledge, no one thought we were lovers; and neither of us forged that appearance, not once in the thirty-odd years of our devoted and affectionate friendship.

  This may be as good a time as any to recount a relevant fact—the fact that, in all my life, I’ve lied only once about my sexual proclivities. In fact it was to one of my old college friends that I told—I still believe—the only lie I ever told about my sexuality. I later declined to answer the question from a very few others whom I thought had no right to ask it, but I lied to no one else, and that was long ago.

  Late in our senior year, one of my closest friends came to the office from which I was editing the student literary magazine and quietly said, in private, that he’d heard a disturbing rumor from an acquaintance of ours—the claim that I was queer. Since the acquaintance had no firsthand knowledge of me or any of my actions, I was puzzled as to the origins of the rumor (especially since, till then, my very low total of sexual acts would have shamed a robust Chaucerian friar). It was the first time I’d faced the rumor; and in response—and in the barest minimum of words—I lied. I said I was not; and I never corrected the claim, not to that friend. It would be another twenty years before any number of queer Americans felt safe in openly discussing their exotic sexuality. To have advertised it in the 1950s or early ’60s would have endangered anyone’s hope of a stable career, not to mention his standing with kinfolk and friends—or the police.

  * * *

  Otherwise I spent increasing amounts of evening time with Fred and Sue Chappell. Slowly I was learning that Fred was very close to being the best-read young American I knew (better than I); and finding an early and near-supreme literacy at the roots of his rural fiction and intensely intellectual poetry—all in a man who was ready to talk till dawn, as his long-suffering wife Sue poured us endless coffee—was a genuine help to my prevailing solitude. At least once a week also, I’d accept an invitation from Bill Blackburn and join him for a sirloin steak, a huge baked potato, and salad—served atop the desk in the living room of his four-room apartment.

  By now Blackburn was in the vicinity of sixty, was entering his second decade of bachelor life, and the loneliness was plainly drilling in on him. The extremes of mood which I’d watched as his student were even more vivid at close range. Belly laughter at his own fine jokes could turn in a moment to indigo silence. After a long wait, he might rise and refill my wineglass, put a record on his turntable—a succession of Monteverdi madrigals, say—and we’d sit in a further bottomless quiet through a rapt half-hour of a kind that I’d never experienced with any other music-loving friend.

  Even at a public concert, one friend might whisper a comment to the other but not with Bill. If anything had replaced the missionary-parent religion of his childhood, it was music. To him the notes and voices that poured from his state-of-the-art speakers mattered most desperately. Few of his friends can have more nearly shared his love of a certain kind of music than I (Fred Chappell would later be another), but the unbroken solemnity of the listening sessions eventually grew hard to endure. They were never as hard to attend to, though, as his steadily delivered opinions of our departmental colleagues.

  Almost anyone who knew Bill Blackburn intimately in the final two decades of his life was aware that he descended slowly but with no turn-back into what can only be called grave clinical paranoia. Many of his colleagues—most of whom, I came to realize, thought of him with wary admiration and slightly bemused affection—were, he came to feel, his sworn enemies, dedicated to destroying his good name in our community and, somehow, to endangering his employment at the university (despi
te the fact that, tenured full professor as he was, he could only have been fired under extremely rare circumstances).

  Maybe his long immersion in the literature of the lethal courts of Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth the Virgin Queen had left him with more of a sense of viperous dark corridors and daggers-to-the-gut than was healthy. When I felt that I knew him well enough to attempt to lure him into a chuckling dispersion of his outlandish fears, he repeated that his own father had died “mad.” In fact he often catalogued for me his other close kin, still alive, some of whom he described as mentally disturbed—including his ancient mother who lived in a retirement home just down the block.

  I met the old lady several times—she was then in her nineties—and was compelled to agree that, despite considerable charm and the remains of a girlish beauty, she appeared to be advancing into religious mania. Blackburn had told me that, upon learning of his divorce, she’d torn from her New Testament and mailed to him, with no further comment, the page on which Jesus most firmly precludes a broken marriage. (The incidental fact that, in all these pages, I’ve not yet referred to him as Bill reflects the fact that, after a six-year acquaintanceship, he’d never once asked me to call him by his first name. And the moment when, after three more years, I seized the nettle and addressed him as Bill—on one relaxed evening over drinks—was awesome. I’d weighed the wisdom of such a move well before making it; and now that I’d dared it, the coldest of chills afflicted my spine as I met his all-but-glaring gaze—was it the furious How dare you? he implied or a plain sad surprise? I’d never know but Bill it remained from that night onward.)