PRICE: Writer Rises With Tales of South : Reynolds Price, Southern Writer, Rises Again

When you tell Reynolds Price that you hope to see him on this or that day, the fates be willing, he laughs with such understanding that you know you’ve touched on an idea he has thought about more than a little.

Struck by cancer of the spinal cord six years ago, the author is no longer so bold as to challenge destiny with a level gaze. Like a deer that appears in the woods outside his house in the rural North Carolina piedmont, luck comes mysteriously and can bolt at the slightest reckless gesture.

One of the country’s most widely recognized writers, and one of the best-loved by his readers, Price, at 57, is finding his Southern star at its zenith.

Writing below the Mason-Dixon line is currently the literary fashion, with an outpouring of noted talent (Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Pat Conroy) and a recrudescence of interest in such regional staples as the small-town beauty shop (“Steel Magnolias”).

A professor at Duke University for 32 years, Price has seen students Anne Tyler (“The Accidental Tourist,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) and Josephine Humphreys (“Dreams of Sleep,” winner of the 1985 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award) rise to national prominence. His own story-telling, which depicts the rural South of the ‘40s and ‘50s, has been punctuated with honors, beginning with the novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award in 1962, and continuing, in recent years, with publication of his best-seller, “Kate Vaiden,” the story of a resilient, free-spirited farm girl, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1986.

The book’s writing, which came after successive cancer surgeries, signaled a new life after what the writer acknowledges was a “Rubicon” experience. In his “AWC” existence, (After Wheelchair, as he defines time now), Price has seen the restriction of his physical capacities paralleled by a surge of literary activity.

A warmly greeted book of memoirs, “Clear Pictures,” was published last year, and a trilogy of plays, “New Music,” premiered at the Cleveland Play House. A new novel, “The Tongues of Angels” (Atheneum), appears later this month, a book of poems, “The Use of Fire,” is due out in the fall, and a collection of novellas is scheduled for publication next spring. Plus Price has almost enough material for a book of short stories and an idea for a novel that he will begin writing during the summer.

A distinguished, handsome man with a devil-may-care cowlick of silver hair (“You should have seen me 25 years ago. I was a real babe then,” he tells an admiring student), Price seems as naturally Southern as any piece of the landscape. Erudite (a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, at the age of 22), he is courteously candid (though he says non-Southerners are often scared off by his honest emotions) and frequently exercises a romping humor (“I think I am programmed to laugh every five minutes”).

Like many Southerners, knowing they are the only Americans who have fought and lost a war on their soil, he has an inner ear for the tragic Greek chorus and a respect for the tradition of story-telling, which he ranks after food as man’s principal need--sex and shelter being relatively expendable.

The idea of some inexplicable force propelling him forward--his very handwriting has become bolder with his recovery--is in keeping with the determination of his fictional characters who tend to be strengthened, rather than diminished, by adversity. It is also in the mold of the quiet heroes from his life: His mother, the model for Kate Vaiden, was orphaned before she was 14, while his father conquered his drinking problem before Alcoholics Anonymous was heard of.

So, speaking of the massive chronic pain that assaulted his central nervous system, Price says simply, “I finally was in a bit of a despairing situation.” For five months after the first surgery in early June, 1984, he was able only to write an occasional short poem.

“I sat in a chair upstairs and was very depressed and baffled because I started losing (the use of) my legs very fast. I drew a lot of pictures. I spent so much time drawing as a child. It was very strange, as though my mind were starting all over again. If I were going to get back to being a creative writer I had to start the way I started as a child, which was looking very carefully at things and drawing pictures of them.”

In the late fall, Price received a call from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., asking him to write a play for the drama department. “I thought, ‘I think I know a summons from the Holy Ghost when I hear one,’ ” he says with a chuckle. “I said, ‘Well, here’s the story on me: I may die before I write your play, if you want to take a risk on it.’ They said, ‘Sure.’ ”

Price spent two months writing the drama, a task that would normally have required two weeks; but the engine was cranked back up, and, in the following months, he raced to complete the final two-thirds of “Kate Vaiden.”

His pain, however, was still raging through his nerve connections, unavoidably damaged by four cancer surgeries. Disenchanted with sleep-inducing pain-killers, Price turned to hypnosis in 1987. After an initial session with a hypnotist in Duke’s psychiatry department, he says, “It felt as if I might have snorted some very powerful, pleasurable drug.”

After two months of weekly sessions and several years of practice, Price has taught his unconscious to obey. Only an occasional meditative moment is necessary now to remind it of who’s in control. “It has finally figured out, OK, we’re just not going to worry a whole lot about this pain. It’s going to be live and let live,” he says.

Since publication of “Clear Pictures,” in which he discusses his pain, Price has received many requests to write about his successful methods. “It’s something I owe to whatever’s gotten me through all this in working order,” he acknowledges. “But I don’t feel I’m ready yet to say, ‘Look at me. Didn’t I get through this wonderfully?’ I don’t want to give the devil ideas. ‘Oh, you think you’ve gotten through this wonderfully, do you? Well, then try this.’ ”

Besides providing a means of learning mind-control, hypnosis has also opened the channels of memory to Price’s childhood. A portion of that sudden rush of remembrances was “the partly dumb, partly wonderful, pure childhood innocence” of a summer he spent after his sophomore year in college as a camp counselor in the Great Smoky Mountains.

In “The Tongues of Angels,” the resulting book, Price turns from his former theme of the conflict between mankind’s desires for freedom and companionship, to explore the fraternal/paternal relationships between two young men, as well as between teacher and student. “A majority of my early heroes were schoolteachers,” says Price, who by the 11th grade was telling the world he wanted to grow up to be a writer and a teacher.

Since the immediate success of his first book, Price has not been obliged to teach. But, he says of his 32-year career at Duke, “It seems as natural to me as the color of my eyes.” From the creative writing class and a course on John Milton, which he conducts during the spring semesters, he has compiled an address book thick with telephone numbers of former students. It is they, he says, who “have provided me with the apostolic succession of angels who have come and stayed in my house and who make my life possible now.”

Although a bachelor, he does not regard his perennial set of college kids as a wishfully doting father. While he stresses, “a very large number of the students I know get better as they age,” he says that he realized for the first time at that summer camp that “there are an awfully lot of human beings who are far better to know just before or just after puberty than at any other point in their lives.”

To Price’s delight, however, he sees his students currently entering a quasi-’60s era. “Most of the best students I know are simply graduating from college with absolutely no idea that they want or immediately need some kind of highly lucrative job. They want to find a place to live and people they want to be with. They’re prepared to deliver pizzas or work in laundries to fund their lives and their work. Thank God we’re out of that awful yuppie period of the ‘70s, where they all wanted to go to Harvard Business School.”

Price’s own parents, he says, “never once said, ‘How are you going to feed yourself?’ ” The son of a salesman and a homemaker--”very loving, instinctively intelligent parents”--he spent his early childhood in small rural towns of North Carolina with the farm people who would provide the seeds for many of his fictional characters. An undergraduate at Duke, he returned to teach at the university following his scholarship in England.

It is a choice he is now seeing repeated among talented young authors who are coming home from studies in the North and stints in Europe to live and write about the South. As the region becomes urbanized, their subjects have veered from the modest rural inhabitants of Price’s novels and those of his mentor, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner. These newer writers are documenting contemporary members of the upper-middle-class South, and, if theirs are tales of well-exercised lawyers rather than pot-bellied sheriffs, Price still finds the Southern voice is present.

The whole idea of telling stories fascinates him. “Why do we do this, and are we the only narrating species on the planet?” he asks.

He attributes the South’s penchant for tale-telling, like the Jewish ghetto tradition, to a rich oral heritage, and laughs at the regularity at which the rest of the nation discovers the South.

“It’s pretty amusing to watch,” he comments, observing that the South has already been in and out of vogue three times during his career. “The country has a love-hate relationship with the South because of our historical follies. There’s never been a time when, in the forefront of American comedy, there’s not some dumb bunch of Southerners running around.”

However, he says: “As long as there remains anything that’s recognizably Southern--this strange Anglo-Saxon/Celtic society with a tremendously powerful black presence in it, its very strong connections with some form of Christianity, a major heritage as an agrarian society, a slave-owning past, a tragic war fought and lost on the premises--as long as there’s any kind of continuing memory of that, then I think literature will continue to rise from it.”

Price sees his own life story from the point of view of a “cheerful realist,” as he calls himself. With his paraplegia, he tires easily and naps at midday. He is obliged to go to the movies, which he loves, in the less-crowded afternoons, “with the old-age pensioners.” But he zings through the halls of the Gothic stone building where he teaches, his coffee mug clutched between his knees and impatiently jerks up a pants cuff to cross his legs.

His house, which resembles a woodsman’s cottage, is a repository of “magical memorabilia,” or, as he also calls it, “a lotta stuff.” There are pictures and letters from friends--opera singer Leontyne Price, novelist and fellow Duke graduate William Styron. Smoked hams and boxes of old 78 rpm records share the basement, etchings crowd the living room walls, and a collection of Indian arrowheads, started when he was 5 years old, bedecks a bookcase.

“It’s an aging boy’s museum,” he says with a caring glance around at the totems that recall what he regards as “the happiest life of anybody I know well.”

But that, he says, is “up until this minute. Beyond that I wouldn’t make a moment’s prediction.”