THE LESSER OF THE LIONS
Reynolds Price never achieved the status of his contemporaries, but his posthumous memoir details a life of acclaim and amity
The stars were happily aligned in the years 1932-34 as far as the American literary firmament is concerned. Three noted novelists — John Updike, Philip Roth and Reynolds Price — were born in those years. The last named, in his posthumously published memoir
Midstream, admits that his reputation never acquired the lustre of his two contemporaries — “Updike and Roth sold more copies and were more critically attended to than I,” Price writes. On his death on January 20, 2011, however, he was widely mourned as a major voice in American Literature, Southern Division.
Certainly Price equalled or exceeded the prolific output of Roth and Updike, publishing 39 full length volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and translations, while teaching at Duke University in North Carolina for more than 50 years. In the category of memoir alone, he produced three volumes, plus this fourth entry, about two-thirds completed before his death. It picks up where his 2009 memoir Ardent Spirits leaves off, in July 1961, with the author approaching the age of 30 and returning to Oxford for his fourth and final year at that institution. An enthusiastic participant in literary discussions, good friends with such important scholars as David Cecil and Neville Coghill and unashamed if highly discreet concerning his unfulfilled homosexuality, Price was eager to savour the last enchantments of Oxford University. “Oxford was unfinished business for me,” he writes. “I was hell-bent on finishing that social and sexual education.”
The latter should not have been a terribly difficult challenge, even though homosexuality was still outlawed in Britain. Price seems to have been highly presentable, he was a good talker, he was young and, not least significant, he was living in the middle of an all-male society of students and dons. Alas, Price notes, “very few of them were queer.” (“Queer” is the author’s preferred term for “homosexual,” and is used freely throughout the memoir.) At first, this did not matter. Price was pinning his hopes on a don from Eastern Europe, one Matyas, with whom he had shared an “intense romance” the previous year. Matyas, unfortunately for Price, had since become attached to a charming young woman whom he intended to marry. Picking up where they last left off was now out of the question. He did express hope that Price would meet his intended and prepare her for matrimony by explaining to her some of his sexual kinks, a service of friendship the author firmly refused.
Throughout the memoir, Price reiterates his great goal, “the one great desire I’d yet to fulfill,” which was “chancing on a man I could love and be loved by, in close proximity from here to the grave.” At least during this part of his life he failed — perhaps, he observes, because he dreaded rejection. It doesn’t seem to have dampened his spirits. What he lacked in carnal fulfillment, he seemed to gain in the intellectual richness of his chaste male friendships, chiefly with poet Stephen Spender. Spender was a sad case. In the 1930s, he had won fame as leader, with W. H. Auden, of a circle of highly politicized young poets. So prominent and so attached were Spender and Auden that they were casually referred to as “the Spender Auden group,” by critics like George Orwell, who also ridiculed them as “parlour Bolsheviks” and “the Pansy left.”
As the years went by, Auden’s reputation rose. Spender’s declined. By the time Price became friends with Spender in the early 1960s, the latter salvaged his sense of import-
He would wake up after a dose of the morphine and ask, ‘Am I dead?’
ance by becoming editor of an influential journal, Encounter. (A periodical financed indirectly, it was later revealed, by the CIA.) “It seemed almost too simple an explanation to say that, since his recent poetry had met with bad reviews and he’d withdrawn from publishing more of it, the eminence he commanded as editor of Encounter gave him more continued satisfaction than anything else available in the early postwar years,” Price writes. “Better to be an internationally famed literary figure, perhaps, than an aging and cuffedabout boy-genius poet.”
Too simple it may have been to say this, but it was basically true. Price certainly doesn’t blame Spender for his choice of career path. Among other things, friendship with Spender resulted in the author’s rubbing shoulders with figures of high glamour, such as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the height of their scandalous love affair in Rome. This was meat and drink to “a lifelong consumer of human beauty,” as Price describes himself. He is amused and appalled by the rude table talk of an eminent literary figure such as the poet Robert Graves, but you can hear him catch his breath as he sights Alain Delon at a restaurant in Rome. The actor was, Price recalls, “the finest-looking young man I’ve seen, before or since.”
Price may have been more generous minded to Spender in those days because his own literary comet was in the ascendant. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was about to be published and already Price could hear “a gathering beat of indications that the book was bound for success.” Magazines were printing excerpts, editors were throwing celebratory dinners, foreign rights were being snapped up, blurbs from older writers were more than commonly laudatory.
The signals were not misleading. The novel would end up several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, with movie options and a screenplay not far behind. Critical response was overwhelmingly good. As is always the case, however, a few reviews were less than besotted. Naturally, Price focused on them. In his view, they seemed to originate in “personal hatred.” Price writes, “It’s a reaction that’s as bizarre to me now as then. Considering the very small number of novels that can be said to have harmed real portions of the human race ... how can a given novel elicit the sorts of verbal mayhem that one sees regularly in the reviews by such otherwise mild-mannered organs as The New York Times Book Review and now the often savage voices of the Internet?”
Speaking as a mild-mannered book reviewer, I have no answer to that question. I approve of Price’s response, however. “I’ve never in my life replied to a negative review,” he writes. Far more wondrous and significant than the tenor of book reviews is the fact Price’s novel actually made money. Whether or not the author’s literary stature remains high, or he becomes another of literary history’s Stephen Spenders, is another question.
His was a life full of good things, besides literary reputation — the memoir often reads like a litany of exceptional dinners, good conversation among brilliant people, concerts, performances, art gallery openings, and so on. There is no doubt he had a gift for friendship — which made it all the more devastating when he was inflicted with spinal cancer and became subject to life in a wheelchair with unremitting pain. As a last resort, he took morphine, according to his brother William, who completes the memoir. He would fall asleep after a dose of the morphine and then wake up hours later and ask an attendant, “Am I dead? Am I dead?”
The one grace note was a visit from artist and biographer Matthew Spender, the son of his old friend. On the last day of the visit, William Price recalls, there was “stimulating conversation and much laughter.” Then Matthew Spender left. He had given his brother, William Price writes, “a week of the happiest hours he had known in months.” It was almost, Reynolds Price told his brother, as if he had been with Stephen again. A few days later, the novelist was dead.