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  “Ardent Spirits is Mr. Price’s third memoir [and] it is the best of this winning lot. . . . Price’s warmth, vigor, and good humor consistently shine through.”

  —DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times

  AFTER TWO EARLIER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS—Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life—acclaimed writer Reynolds Price offers a full account of his life from the mid-1950s to the publication of his first novel in 1962.

  Oxford University and Britain—which had scarcely recovered from the severe demands of World War II—were places of enormous vitality for Price, both academic and personal. From spotting J. R. R. Tolkien on the street in Oxford to intimate dinners with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, young Price was welcomed into the company of the most respected intellectual and artistic circles. Fully entrenched in the culture of his era, Price unfailingly makes clear the connections between his experience and the great tradition of world literature.

  In lucid and frequently witty prose, Price offers full access to six years in the early adulthood of a rich life—“a gallery of portraits and sexual discovery” (The Weekly Standard) and part of the great train of human accomplishment in which Price so ardently believed.

  “The most compelling book he’s published since Kate Vaiden in 1986. Price has always been one of our finest storytellers, but in Ardent Spirits he rises to new heights, delivering a compelling account of a profoundly exciting period in a young man’s life.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  REYNOLDS PRICE was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. He earned an A.B. from Duke University, and in 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University to study English literature. After three years and the B.Litt. degree, he returned to Duke, where—for over fifty years—he continued teaching as the James B. Duke Professor of English.

  With his novel A Long and Happy Life, he began a career that resulted in thirty-eight subsequent volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, memoirs, and translations. His novels include Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1986. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. Price died on January 20, 2011.

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  COVER DESIGN BY REX BONOMELLI • COVER PHOTOGRAPH: REYNOLDS PRICE NEAR

  HAMPSTEAD HEATH IN LONDON, SUMMER OF 1956; PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM BLACKBURN • AUTHOR IMAGE BY IAN HOLLJES

  Winner of a 2010 Lambda Literary Award

  More Praise for ARDENT SPIRITS

  “Price’s memory is astonishing. . . . Ardent Spirits . . . is the first time Price has written about his relationships, particularly his first real love. . . . [It] is also a record of Price’s early evolution as a writer.”

  —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

  “[A] fascinating book. The construct of beautifully formed sentences encasing the whole enterprise buttresses the civilized tone that Price so prizes as a man and writer.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Ardent Spirits is a gallery of portraits and a chronicle of artistic self-discovery. It is also a strong contribution to the literature of sexual candor.”

  —The Weekly Standard

  “This engaging memoir . . . covers just six years in a young man’s life, albeit a life that was unusually rich in friendship and youthful accomplishment. . . . You’ll have to read the very enjoyable Ardent Spirits.”

  —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

  “Ardent Spirits . . . is, like its author, full of stories funny and wise . . . evocative stories about friends, professors, and his landlady, Win, whose colorful expressions would provide Price rich material for his fiction.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “A richly detailed memoir.”

  —The Boston Globe

  BOOKS BY

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  MIDSTREAM 2012

  ARDENT SPIRITS 2009

  LETTER TO A GODCHILD 2006

  THE GOOD PRIEST’S SON 2005

  A SERIOUS WAY OF WONDERING 2003

  NOBLE NORFLEET 2002

  FEASTING THE HEART 2000

  A PERFECT FRIEND 2000

  LETTER TO A MAN IN THE FIRE 1999

  LEARNING A TRADE 1998

  ROXANNA SLADE 1998

  THE COLLECTED POEMS 1997

  THREE GOSPELS 1996

  THE PROMISE OF REST 1995

  A WHOLE NEW LIFE 1994

  THE COLLECTED STORIES 1993

  FULL MOON 1993

  BLUE CALHOUN 1992

  THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 1991

  NEW MUSIC 1990

  THE USE OF FIRE 1990

  THE TONGUES OF ANGELS 1990

  CLEAR PICTURES 1989

  GOOD HEARTS 1988

  A COMMON ROOM 1987

  THE LAWS OF ICE 1986

  KATE VAIDEN 1986

  PRIVATE CONTENTMENT 1984

  VITAL PROVISIONS 1982

  THE SOURCE OF LIGHT 1981

  A PALPABLE GOD 1978

  EARLY DARK 1977

  THE SURFACE OF EARTH 1975

  THINGS THEMSELVES 1972

  PERMANENT ERRORS 1970

  LOVE AND WORK 1968

  A GENEROUS MAN 1966

  THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES 1963

  A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE 1962

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  Copyright © 2009 by Reynolds Price

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009002376

  ISBN 978-0-7432-9189-7

  ISBN 978-0-7432-9190-3 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6637-6 (ebook)

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Photograph by Betmann, courtesy of Corbis; Photograph by Walter Stoneman, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London; Photograph by Erich Auerbach, courtesy of Getty Images Houston Archive; Photograph by John Menapace, courtesy of Duke University Press; Photograph by Jeremy Grayson, courtesy of Spectrum Color Library/ HIP/ The Image Works; Photograph by Terence Spencer, courtesy of Getty Collection, Time & Life Pictures; Photograph by Imogen Cunningham, courtesy of The Imogen Cunningham Trust

  FOR

  PAUL FLESCHNER

  CONTENTS

  A Foreword

  Part One: The United States, Britain, and the Continent 1955–1958

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

>   Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Two: The United States 1958–1961

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Reynolds Price (1933–2011)

  Index

  ARDENT SPIRITS

  A FOREWORD

  TWO YEARS AFTER I became paraplegic in the wake of spinal cancer, I was living with severe pain down my back and legs—the steady result of surgical scarring and radiation burns. When drugs proved all but useless, I underwent training in self-hypnosis at Duke Medical Center in the hope of some degree of relief. Soon after I completed that eventually unsuccessful training, my mind began to yield (as if in reward for the difficulties of the past) great stretches of memory.

  It was memory that returned to me an array of figures from my early life—parents, aunts, cousins, and teachers who’d guided me into manhood with selfless care. The reality of the memories soon compelled me to begin recording them, and that work gave me more pleasure than any of my prior efforts. So in 1989 I published the resulting volume, Clear Pictures. It spans the years from my birth, as the Great Depression sank to its nadir, through my father’s death in 1954 when I was twenty-one. Once I’d launched those memories, I was free to write a stretch of fiction, poetry, and plays.

  But when I’d advanced a considerable distance into the inevitable wheelchair life, I began to feel that an account of my experiences in the brutality of cancer treatment might be of interest to others moving through such a maze. In 1994 then, I published a second memoir called A Whole New Life. It covered three years—from the discovery of a spinal-cord malignancy in 1984 to the failed first attempt to remove that tumor, a disastrous resort to radiation, then further surgeries and a slow return to rewarding life, though a life that left my legs paralyzed and my days dependent on live-in assistants. The writing of A Whole New Life was hardly a pleasure; but like most forms of narrative, it brought its own relief. Better perhaps, it found me able to describe an ongoing life that—oddly—was often enjoyable and certainly more productive than before.

  This third volume—Ardent Spirits—recalls an especially rich time, from the autumn of 1955 till the early summer of 1961. Comprised in that era were three years of study at Oxford—a stretch that included my first chance at both sustained writing and rewarding love. And that time was followed by three years of financially strapped teaching back at Duke and the completion of my first novel, A Long and Happy Life, to substantial benefits.

  Ardent Spirits is the most detailed of the three memoirs, likely because the first is built from the distant memories of childhood and the second recalls a chasm of pain and fear, one which could only be crossed on a narrow bridge with few handholds. By contrast, Ardent Spirits means to convey a succession of moments which combined, through six years, in producing intense stretches of the rarest human privilege—prolonged joy. That privilege came from a series of outright gifts, given me by a line of friends and lovers whose generosity is honored in both the title of this book and the substance of these memories.

  * * *

  It’s usually with the arrival of a fitting title that I begin to know what I’m writing about and how to proceed. The phrase ardent spirits arrived one evening in October 2004 when I’d been in a group of lucky writers who were guided through Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, after the paying tourists were gone. As we were led through the surprisingly few rooms in that sensible dwelling, we’d reached Jefferson’s bedroom and were hearing of him and his slave Sally Hemings when full dark waylaid us. In an instant we learned how little modern light that most famous American home has to offer; and I promptly sensed Monticello as a human dwelling, not a tourist site. Our well-informed guide suggested that members of the group join hands for safety as he led us through other pitch-black rooms out onto one of the pavilions that Jefferson extended from the front side of the house.

  There, under a clear autumn sky, he concluded our visit by telling us of Jefferson’s near-bankrupting love of French wines. Finally the guide said that, over and above the Burgundies and Bordeaux which stocked the retired president’s cellar, “Mr. Jefferson kept very few ardent spirits, only for those few friends who required them.” As we scattered, I paused to ask the guide what he meant by ardent spirits. Despite my Southern childhood, the phrase had eluded me. On the spot, I learned that they were, simply, hard liquor—homemade spirits for those Virginia and Carolina squires who declined (or scorned) Mr. Jefferson’s fancifications from the grand French vineyards.

  Back home a few days later, the phrase rang on in my head as I continued thinking of a book I meant to begin soon—this memoir of high adult happiness. Soon I knew that Ardent Spirits would be my title. By the word spirits, I’d intend the intimates who’d lent such usable heat to the years I’d describe—years which would seldom again be matched for such gifts in my life.

  * * *

  As I began the writing, I knew that I meant to preserve above all the most striking of those impressions. But I’d kept no journals of the first three years in England. So I moved on through a first draft of Part One by relying entirely on unwritten memories that were five decades old. It was only when I’d finished a draft that it occurred to me to ask the Duke Library for copies of the letters I’d written home in those years—a typed page-and-a-half every Sunday. Mother had saved them all; and when I discovered them at her death in 1965, I added them to the papers the university had requested and then barely thought of them again.

  There are, to be sure, events and feelings you don’t include in letters to your mother. Yet apart from what I’d already recorded in Part One, there was little in those letters by way of fresh news from the past—a couple of dates I’d misremembered and a steady reminder (in the midst of so much pleasure) of how homesick I’d often been for the remains of my inmost family. The details of Part One then are owing almost entirely to the enduring goodness of those three years in my memory. Only long after thinking I’d completed it did I discover, buried in a drawer, a fragmentary calendar of my first term at Oxford. I’ve used it to supply a few minor details—the name of the college physician, for instance.

  Part Two begins with three years of apprentice teaching back at Duke, by a very raw apprentice indeed; and it proceeds more rapidly than Part One—first, because my memories were less complex; and second, because my life at the time was a great deal less eventful than my time in Europe. Generally I was either in the classroom, teaching my students to write brief essays and conferring with them in my office about their results; or I was at home alone, slowly teaching myself to write a first novel, one set in a landscape much like the country woods where I was living in a small house-trailer. My personal memories of the time are surprisingly few—I was doing so little that proved memorable.

  The reader may be glad to know that the realities of wheelchair life have made a deep plowing through my voluminous papers impossible; and with the exception of a very few investigations undertaken by a helpful friend, I didn’t want to rely on research assistance. What’s here then, throughout, is literally a memoir. And despite the recent scientific assaults on our faith in the accuracy of memory, I can say that if I didn’t feel that what’s recorded is reliable, I wouldn’t have offered it. I’m now past seventy-five, and I share with my contemporaries a loss of short-term memory that’s forest-fire in its sweep, but the distant memories grow even more crystalline in their clarity and depth. Only yesterday, as my young dentist picked sharply at my teeth, I was flooded by a sudden wash of visually precise memories of my dentist’s tragically gifted father—a man whom I’d known well forty years ago, whose impressive efforts at fiction writing were swamped by alcohol. Trapped in the dentist’s chair, I could still have given a police detective the details from which an accurate portrai
t could have been drawn, years after my friend’s early death.

  * * *

  As a writer, I’m even more grateful than others might be for such a change in the quality of memory in the face of age. In fact, though I was a vain enough man in my early and midmanhood, I’ve long since ceased to regret the downward pull of years. That glacial action has proved literally painless; and now if I pause at the mirror for anything more than a shave or a combing, I answer my frequent Who’s that? with a settled Well, it’s me. And me is who I’ve been since about the age of four or five, the earliest time of sustained self-consciousness.

  If I roll away, discard my momentary visual confusion, and ask myself How old do I feel?, the answer is seventeen or eighteen (however comic such an answer may seem for anyone but my calendar contemporaries). Most days, despite the pain that goes on serving me loyally after numerous gougings and burnings, I sense myself as a mainly cheerful young man poised on the edge of independence and increasingly aware of the strengths, weaknesses, and secrets that I hope will follow me as faithfully as any good dog to the end of my life.

  But does my sense of continuity mean that I remember in reliable detail the events, thoughts, and emotions of the man I actually was in North Carolina, the British Isles, continental Europe, and elsewhere some five decades ago? Anyone who’s known me for most of my life can confirm that I’ve been essentially the same mind in a sequence of bodies as separate as those on any extended strip of movie film (and no one is alive who’s known me all my life). However, recent studies of human recollection suggest to some scholars that what we mean by memory may frequently be fresh creation.

  To simplify drastically what I know of their work, a number of scholars assert that, in an effort to recover the past, we take a few strands of accurate memory, then interweave them with imagined strands into a detailed visual narrative—a good part of which (if we could check that narrative against a film of our entire lives) would never have occurred in the exterior world. In light of such a theory, we are as much artists in the production of “memory” as when we shut our eyes in sleep and produce the poems which our species has long called dreams.