Book Review : A Writer’s Memoirs in the Grand Southern Tradition

Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides by Reynolds Price (Atheneum: $19.95; 288 pages)

The lingering pain of a debilitating illness is what first prompted Reynolds Price to explore self-hypnosis, first as an analgesic and later, almost accidentally, as a stimulant to memory: “The sensation was so powerful that I felt as if I’d whiffed a potent drug,” writes Price, a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist--and now, in his mid-50s, an autobiographer--of superb accomplishment. “As I began to feel the gathered force of so much past, I turned to write a story I’d planned but never begun.”

The “gathered force” of a flood-tide of memory has been expertly channeled into “Clear Pictures,” an elegant, even stately narrative of a Southern childhood and coming-of-age that spans the Depression, the war years and the late 1940s. His autobiography is truly intimate--in a spiritual as well as a sexual and psychological sense--but it is also full of insights about the folkways of the Deep South: the tattered chivalry, the ambivalent linkages between black and white, the anxieties of a precarious middle class. In that sense, “Clear Pictures” is as much about the making of the contemporary South as it is about the making of a contemporary Southern writer.

Astoundingly, Price fixes his first memory at the age of only 4 or 5 months: “I’m lying in dry sun, alone and happy,” he writes. “I’m fascinated by the pure blue sky, but Topsy the goat is chained to my right. . . .”

Through Childhood

He leads us through childhood and adolescence in Macon, Asheboro, Warrenton, and later Raleigh, N. C., and he shows us the lives and deaths of his loved ones in reverent but unapologetic prose: Will and Elizabeth Price, his cherished father and mother; a beloved aunt; the black hired hand who was his father’s true friend; the older cousin who taught him to hunt; the teachers who taught him about arts and letters; the young woman who initiated him into the mysteries of the rosary and the crucifix, rather than the back seat or the porch swing. Price is, as he puts it, “the secret sharer of knotted tales of family hatreds, addictions, elopements, abortions and adulteries as cruel as pistol shots in the naked face.”

Price gives us the history, politics and lore of a family of the Deep South, the ailments and adventures and ambitions of youth, the love stories, the tales of grief and woe, the little atrocities of adolescence. At times, the stories are Southern Gothic: “No living soul who hasn’t walked through it can begin to imagine,” his aunt says of “the private hell” of her own benighted life, “the tortures of the damned.”

More often, though, the tone is biblical: “I was both a serious toy and a temporary household god,” Reynolds Price writes of himself as a young child in “Clear Pictures.” “If I’d known so early . . . that I was, for my father, an actual hostage given to God--an Isaac to his Abraham--I might not have understood or born the weight of the office.”

Generous Descriptions

He gives us, too, a generous selection of family portraits and photographs, each one annotated with precise but sentimental and sometimes bittersweet recollections: “Elizabeth Rodwell in 1926,” he writes in the caption to an early photograph of his mother. “Her eyes will never lose this unabashed warmth. And she’ll keep her hair short the rest of her life, going always to men’s barber shops, never a beauty parlor; but she’ll soon retire the vampish curl.” It’s evidence of Price’s power as a writer that these photographs strike us as illuminations of a biblical text rather than an assortment family snapshots.

The author writes, with no less tenderness, of the “black help” whom he’d known and loved and learned from, and he does not overlook “the ludicrous and tragic limitations which racial custom tried to set” over the friendships between black and white. But, typically, he pleads for compassion toward both races:

“Martin Luther King was only 4 years older than I; our exact contemporaries were the pivotal generation in the seismic racial changes of the 1960s,” he writes, almost beseechingly. “And anyone hoping to understand the background of our crucial generation must make a broad imaginative leap and, above all, suspend condemnation for now. We suspend it after all when speaking of cooler, more distant figures like Moses and Isaiah, Socrates and Aeschylus, Cicero and Virgil, Jesus and Paul--all of whom lived in and achieved their work in dense webs of slavery, though none of them appears to have attacked its inevitability.”

Price is a truly civilized writer, by which I mean that his work reflects a profound knowledge of history and literature, an abiding faith in God, and a reverence for humankind’s struggle for redemption. Although his stories are very much concerned with the here-and-now, he admits that a loftier spirit inspires and pervades his work: “(One) of the patterns I watch longest here is the ceaseless and unknowably intricate figure woven at the heart of my life, and the world’s, by what I’ve called the unseen power ,” he writes. “I use that potentially spooky term as an occasional substitute for God because I’m maybe too aware that some of my friends find my belief foolish or at best a forgivable anachronism, much like my insistence on writing comprehensible English when many of my younger academic comrades are bent on full-time careers as jargon-huffing murk machines.”

Amen! Reynolds Price is a worthy heir of the finest traditions in Southern storytelling, both as a folk art and as high literature. He has returned to the secret world of his own childhood, a place where others have found a threatening and treacherous darkness, but Price discovered only the purest light. To be sure, he found suffering and terror and even death, and he describes them in sometimes heartbreaking detail, but “Clear Pictures” still glows with that bright, healing light.