Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  Dryden said, “By education most have been misled” . . . The effectiveness of English teaching is in direct ratio to the teacher’s ability to bring students to the realization that English is life. The teacher must take his subject out of the classroom and into the world, for English is not a subject. It is life. So long as we remain heirs of the English heritage, whether we speak, think, act, see, or hear, we must use the English language—and we must employ it with accuracy, intelligence, and understanding. Socrates said, “The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest injury to the dead man at the very beginning of his journey thither.” . . . And you have souls in your hands.

  I was seventeen years old, and my audience consisted of teachers from nearby high schools and junior colleges. If one of them snickered, she had the kindness to conceal her amusement—What can this boy know of the endless drain of a job as demanding as the job of a celibate priest? And all for wages that are often less than the pay of a yard man, a janitor, or the coach of a middle-school football team.

  * * *

  In my three weekly days of writing, the ability to sit at home and work steadily also improved. My first published story after returning was “Troubled Sleep,” an imagined narrative suggested by Nevill Coghill’s inaugural lecture as Merton professor. It appeared in Encounter in April ’59; and the sight of it in print—and a story in print feels very different from one in typescript or what we now call hard copy—further strengthened my sense of possibility. Not only might I become a professional writer, now I was one—paid for my work in an internationally respected magazine, read by strangers with extraordinary standards of judgment (standards which they’d begun revealing to me in frequent letters).

  That appearance came a little more than a year before my three-year contract with Duke was set to expire, and by then I’d begun planning a yearlong return to Oxford. With a small monthly contribution to my savings, I figured I’d have $3,000 ($21,000 now) to fund a year’s work on a D.Phil. I’ve noted that David Cecil had agreed to resume direction of the degree; and Nevill, among a few other friends, was ready to welcome me. Better still, on the evidence of frequent letters, my expectation of resuming some form of close relation with Matyas was pitched high. Meanwhile I pressed on with my teaching as A Long and Happy Life neared the ending I’d foreseen as long ago as January ’57. The manuscript of that one story was nearing two hundred pages; yet because, from the start, I’d thought of the narrative as the final piece in a volume of stories, I continued to think that what I’d soon be submitting for publication would be a volume of five short stories and a concluding novella.

  My notes for the long story give no indication of when I thought I’d be done with A Long and Happy Life; but I know I shipped off the manuscript with excited pride late in ’60, a little more than two years after the start. And I have a note of receipt from Diarmuid, dated December 20, 1960. He said that he’d forward the manuscript immediately to Jason Epstein at Random House (Hiram Haydn, who’d given me the original contract for a book of stories, had by then become one of the three founders of a first-rate publishing house called Atheneum). When Diarmuid had read the whole ms., he sent me a longer message on December 27.

  I read the long story, and I must say I think it’s very good. The only fault that occurs to me is that [it] is long enough to be a novel, and it does rather unbalance the other stories, and it might be better to consider offering the long story as a novel and waiting for more short stories to come along to round out a story collection? Will you let me know how you feel about this?

  * * *

  On the thirtieth I responded at length, objecting strenuously.

  . . . the five stories and the novel are a book, not a miscellany. After the first story, they were written quite consciously as a whole book. Their themes are intimately connected, over-lapping, mutually enriching, I think; and they are arranged in an antiphonal way—one story raises questions which another considers and sometimes answers. I hope you won’t think all this is narcissistic mystification. I could outline what I mean in considerable detail if you asked me to . . . but I’ll stop with saying that A Long and Happy Life is the title of the whole book—there are two stories about young children, one about adolescence, two about youth, two about great age. [I was confused then as to the number of stories.]

  Matters moved far more rapidly thereafter than they might today. On January 13 Diarmuid had a letter from Jason Epstein that said, in part . . . neither Bob Loomis nor I liked the Reynolds Price. We thought it lost itself in its language: that the characters never emerged from the sea of words.

  When he forwarded the news, Diarmuid trimmed off the remainder of Epstein’s letter (it discussed the work of other writers whom Diarmuid represented). When I got the portion pertaining to me, I went straight to Bill Blackburn’s office to share it with him (Bob Loomis had been a student of Bill’s only a few years before me, though I’d never met him).

  I was disappointed. Random House was a well-stocked publisher in midcentury America, far more so than now—though Jason Epstein was hardly the Grand Panjandrum he’d become for a while before retiring (I’d never heard of him till I received his message to Diarmuid)—and I was a fledgling who’d swanked it coolly among his friends for the past three years, claiming he had a contract with Random House. But maybe because Hiram had continued to express an interest in bringing me to his new house, Atheneum, I was hardly devastated. I honestly believed—hell, I knew—that Loomis and Epstein were flat wrong about my prose and the characters it projected. And Blackburn confirmed me in my hope that Haydn, whom I’d never met, would bail me and my stories out.

  So he did. Little more than two weeks later, Diarmuid wrote again, in his winning but often barely readable script. Hiram just called to say wonderful—but he and his other allies are going to raise the question of doing the long item as a novel first—so pending this discussion the contract can wait. As you know, I’m very strongly for this move, for I think it will aid your reputation more.

  As compared with Loomis and Epstein at the time, Hiram and one of his allies—Simon Michael Bessie—were decidedly tall senior figures in American publishing; and to cut short a longish discussion (all blessedly conducted by letter, no telephone pressure), I eventually saw the wisdom of culling out the long story, publishing it as the novel I’d been so slow to recognize, and then saving my short stories for a second book. Chatto and Windus had also worried about the combination of stories and novel and were relieved when I agreed to the separation.

  With spring, there were rapidly gathering encouragements. The fact that Atheneum was a young house with relatively few authors on its roster meant that I received extraordinarily close attention from their superb staff. Hermann Ziegner presided over the preparation of the manuscript and wrote me whenever he, or any other in-house reader, questioned my merest comma—no high-handed copyediting whatever (I’d heard nightmarish tales of such treatment at some other houses and at least one famous magazine, The New Yorker). And Harry Ford, who’d come from Alfred Knopf and was already a much-admired book designer, enveloped me from the start in his plans for the book’s typography, the full-cloth binding, the jacket drawing, and a good deal else. Though I’d yet to meet anyone in the firm, almost all of them had gone to considerable early lengths to express their enthusiasm for the novel.

  And Hiram Haydn—who was incidentally a Ph.D. in literature, the ongoing editor of The American Scholar, and himself the author of more than one admirable novel—stayed in steady touch, with each piece of news on the manuscript’s progress. Some three years ahead, he’d prove a more paternal editor than I was comfortable with; but he literally never forced any of his suggestions upon me. And when it came to editing, I can recall only a single question from him. Early in the process, he wrote to say that on a certain page it seemed to him that, for a moment, I’d altered my third-person point of view—was the change intentional? I replied
that it was, and I tried to tell him why; he was satisfied. Otherwise in the entire prepublication process, there was only one real crisis. All these years later I’ve still never met another serious young writer who’d gone to a good house, large or small, and met with such a warm and patient yet discriminating welcome. I suspected I was lucky—Diarmuid, who was hardly given to flattery in any direction, told me I was—and I tried to show my awareness of the great good fortune lavished on me.

  * * *

  The one hitch in a phenomenally smooth voyage came when I heard in 1961 from Atheneum’s lawyer, the then-young but eventually noted Alan U. Schwartz. Hiram had asked him to vet the manuscript for possible libel or privacy problems. Only a first-time author’s naïveté had kept me from telling Atheneum at once that I’d unconsciously adopted, for the name of my central male character, the name of a well-known citizen of Durham. Even I was made aware of the problem only when Bill Blackburn eventually said to me “I trust you’ve got Mr. Wesley Beavers’s permission to use his name.” Well, of course I hadn’t. Who was Mr. Beavers?—and incidentally the word beaver had not then acquired widespread meaning in the South as the female genital. It soon appeared that the living Mr. Beavers was a realtor at the prime real-estate agency in town. I must have subliminally acquired his name from the local paper, maybe from an ad. And Alan Schwartz carefully and sympathetically outlined for me the legal problems that might arise from using the name (he was exactly my age and very much a junior man in a famous literary-law firm, but he’s gone on to be an enormous success).

  New York state had a statute covering invasions of privacy; and since the book would be published in New York, it was likely that any suit against me for the use of a real person’s name would probably be filed in New York (is it possible to invent a credible name that someone doesn’t possess?). The fact that Mr. Beavers had not already sued for his name’s appearance in Encounter for instance or in the O. Henry volume was no indication of what he might do in the future. Schwartz went on to explain that if I could find several other men of the same name in the area of my story “your position would be improved” but no more than that. I’d previously suggested the possibility of getting Mr. Beavers’s consent for the use of his name.

  But Schwartz said “an attempt to procure his consent is risky because it certainly will draw his attention to the book.” At that point, my lawyer had reached his expected lawyerly conclusion—“I, for one, would be much happier if you could change his name to some name not as indigenous to the locale of this book. This may seem like a harsh conclusion but experience has demonstrated that in this field at least prevention is much less costly than the cure.” Fairly aghast by then, on Schwartz’s sympathetic suggestion I spent hours searching the Duke Library’s vast collection of phone directories. If there was another Wesley Beavers in the United States, he seemed to have no listed number.

  But as I thought more intensely about my lawyer’s “harsh conclusion,” it seemed impossible to accept. My character had been named Wesley Beavers since he first appeared in “A Chain of Love” which I’d written in 1955. To change his name now, six years later, would be like changing my own name at my advanced age (the fact that so many Hollywood stars had accepted name changes from their employers had always seemed unimaginable—Lucille LeSueur becoming Joan Crawford, Marion Morrison becoming John Wayne).

  No one at Atheneum, nor Diarmuid Russell, brought any pressure on me for a solution. So at last I asked Alan Schwartz to send me an uncomplicated permission form; I’d beard Mr. Beavers in his den at the realty company and throw myself on his mercy. I should have known of course that no responsible lawyer is capable of writing a simple form; but at least Schwartz sent me a several-page form in which Mr. Beavers sold me the use of his name, forever, for the sum of one dollar.

  I phoned Mr. Beavers for an appointment and—very edgily—went to his office. Since I hadn’t specified my business, he was likely expecting to meet a young Duke faculty member in the market for a house. At first sight I knew two things—Mr. Beavers was some thirty years older than I, and almost surely never read a novel. I accepted the chair he offered, in a courtly old-school manner, and proceeded to explain myself. I’d written a novel in which I named one of my main characters Wesley Beavers—somehow I’d acquired his name unconsciously (which was true). My character was a man in his early twenties from Warren County, N.C.; and my story involved his love relation with, and eventual commitment to, a girlfriend named Rosacoke Mustian.

  Alan Schwartz had warned me against any temptation to offer Mr. Beavers a copy of my manuscript; and in fact I didn’t mention Rosacoke’s illegitimate pregnancy, a service offered to her by Wesley. That far, Mr. Beavers had listened patiently; so next I smiled nervously and asked him to sign a permission form which I happened to have with me—“You know how these New York lawyers are . . .” Mr. Beavers had spent his life selling houses and land, so it was highly likely he’d had a good deal to do with lawyers well before I was born.

  He took the form and leafed through it slowly. At last he looked up and said “Mr. Price, I’m not a famous man. My name is not going to do your book a bit of good.” Again, I tried to explain my dilemma as simply as possible—I’d been using his name for years, benignly; it would be very hard now for me to change it. He read the last page of the form again, where he sells me the use of his name forever for the sum of one dollar. Then he looked up and said “Call me in a few days, hear?—and I’ll let you know what I can do with this.”

  My heart sank of course but I rose, thanked him, and asked when I should phone. He said “Let’s see—today’s Wednesday. We’ve got a lawyer here in the office; I’ll ask him to look this over. Call me next Wednesday.” A whole week, God! My heart plunged through the floorboards. Yet I could hardly ask him to hurry.

  After a week’s hard waiting, though, I phoned again; and the real Wesley Beavers said “Sure, I’ll sign your paper. Come on down here this afternoon.” Quickly I phoned Alan Schwartz in New York. With inevitable caution, he said “Fine—we hope. Go down but take a witness, and be sure he accepts the dollar specified in the agreement. If he refuses it—and he may try, being the wily old trader you say he is—the permission is void. And before you go down, record the serial number of the dollar you’ll give him.” I co-opted one of the English department secretaries—a woman named Barbara Skipper; her beautiful young face would surely be a help—and down we went in my still-trusty Beetle.

  Mr. Beavers greeted us almost cheerfully and proceeded to sign the form which Barbara witnessed with her signature just below his. Then I tried to hand the man his dollar. He waved it off—“Oh keep your dollar, boy. Keep it.” I’m sure he knew what he was attempting to do; but I persisted and, while he stood frozen with his hands at his sides, I actually reached forward to deposit the dollar in his shirt pocket. He didn’t stop me. The right to my Wesley’s name was now assured; and the relief was enormous (I’d still had no luck whatever in finding a substitute name; and not so long ago, I found my record of the serial number of that crucial dollar among some ancient papers in the depths of a drawer).

  * * *

  The remainder of that spring and early summer were busy with a good many concerns that lay beyond the novel. My teaching continued. In the freshman course we were now reading modern poems, poets who ranged from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Frost and Auden. And in the sophomore survey, I was guiding the class through long stretches of British and Irish poetry that ranged from the work of Pope and Wordsworth on through Keats and finally Yeats. Almost none of the poems was new to me but the chance to discuss them with a class of some thirty upperclassmen—a good many of whom were more than intelligent and ready to talk—was again illuminating.

  Among other revelations came the understanding that, not yet but a little later, I myself would very much need to return to the writing of poems—poems that could absorb and clarify elations and mysteries in my own daily life, emotions that could not be imported directly into my fiction. F
or all my love of prose narrative, and my thanks for the good it’s done in my life, I’ve never once doubted that the higher art, just behind music, is poetry; and the help it’s given me—in the reading and writing—has seldom been less than enormous.

  Among my concerns were the ongoing arrangements of a forthcoming year in England. And as my hopes for returning to Oxford solidified, I wrote to the Principal of the Postmasters at Merton and asked if there was a chance I could spend the summer in my old rooms in Mob Quad. He replied at once to say that my request presented no apparent problem and that, further, I’d be made a member of the high table for the summer and Michaelmas term. Such a generosity was surprising, even for those gentler times—the savings on food and drink would be large; and the pittance I’d be charged for the two rooms was negligible. Further—and lo!—showers had been installed in Bill Jackson’s old scout’s pantry on the ground floor of Mob, though the bogs remained in their old position—against the south side of the chapel.

  7

  THE SOLUTION to another very serious concern remains mysterious to me, and my files don’t offer a full explanation nor does my memory. I’ve mentioned, more than once, that I and my colleagues had been hired on three-year nonrenewable contracts. Yet at some point in our third year, Arlin Turner—our new chairman who was hard at work on his Hawthorne biography—let the instructors know that all eight or nine of us would be offered a fourth year to search out another job for ourselves when our Duke appointment ended. That dispensation, standard enough in academia, didn’t appear to affect me since I’d be in England for that extra year. So I went to Professor Turner to inquire as to whether I’d be given one more year’s employment on my return from England. I specified that I’d be spending that year in Oxford, hard at work on the D.Phil. which I’d already commenced.