His home is a spirited and colorful display of collections that speak of the many facets of Reynolds Price’s personality.
Reynolds Price is waiting for company to call.The award-winning Southern writer is at the door of his modest brick-and-timber 10-room home. Separated from the dozens of beech and hickory trees on his wooded lot by only a screen door, he greets visitors and puts them at ease with his gentle smile.
On this visit, he not only opens the door to his home of nearly 30 years but also the door to his life–by recounting tales of the significant people and events in it and revealing his wry humor and sensitive nature.
Price, who was diagnosed with spinal cancer 12 years ago and now uses a wheelchair, makes his home on the first level of this two-story house. The second floor is used by his assistant, Adam Russell.
The first floor is a spirited and colorful display of artwork, with pieces enlivening almost every wall.
In the living room, unhung art often sits in the bend of the sofa’s arms and stands on the floor next to the fireplace.
Paintings like the large landscape over the blush wine-colored sofa invite a closer look. A black-and-white photo of diva Leontyne Price (no relation to Reynolds) grabs attention with the singer’s fierce stare. This unframed photo of the soprano in a scene from “Tosca” stands like a piece of sheet music atop Price’s harpsichord.
Price revels in the attention to his collection.
“From childhood, I’ve always been a collector of things,” says Price, who 10 days ago turned 63. “The things that interested me were the things I liked to have around me.”
Things like the Greek and Russian religious icons he has been picking up for more than 20 years, the angel ornaments that well-wishers gave him when he was ill, and fine, contemporary paintings he has found in galleries and on travels.
“I did a lot of drawing and painting as a child,” says Price, sitting in his living room, where masks, paintings and sculpture speak of the many facets of his personality. “My father was tremendously interested in it as a hobby. He and I would draw together. But by the time I got into high school, I had looked at enough paintings by other people to realize that I didn’t really think I was gifted enough.”
That realization coincided with his 11th-grade English teacher recognizing his talent to tell a story.
“I did the normal assignments of junior English. But when I started to hand in my papers, she took a special interest in the work,” says Price in his quiet baritone. “By the time I finished high school, I really knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and I never looked back.”
A long and happy life
Starting at Duke University, on to Oxford and back to Duke, where Price is now a professor of English, the determined writer realized his boyhood dreams–and more.
At 25, he began writing his first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel. The book was published four years later in 1962 and praise came from the likes of Dorothy Parker (a “lovely novel, meticulously observed, beautifully told”) and Eudora Welty (who described Price as “the most impressive new writer” she had come across).
A recent color photograph of Price and Welty sits on the waist-high bookshelf that leads to his study, a bright, long space filled with books, naturally, and angels and a corner shrine filled with religious statues of the Virgin Mary.
(“I think of myself as a very religious person, but I don’t go to church,” says Price. “I grew up in the white Southern church, but when I got to college and began to realize how phenomenally segregated the churches were, I didn’t want to go anymore.”)
The native North Carolinian, who now writes daily in this well-lighted place, has filled the years since his debut with 25 other books–including “Kate Vaiden” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, $16.95, hardcover; Ballantine Books, $5.99, paperback), winner of the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award. He also has written stage and screenplays; memoirs; collections of stories, poems and essays; and songs (“Copperline” with James Taylor).
Remembering the 25-year-old man he once was, Price says, “We feel like the same person. Maybe that’s the great secret of life.
“Everyone has a certain ideal age, and now I roll by the mirror and think `Who is that old man?’ “
But this isn’t said with a wistful voice. Price’s tone is actually one of wonder and anticipation for the future, much like that of Rosacoke Mustian, the main character in Price’s first novel.
“When you ask me how I’ve changed since that 25-year-old man I’d be hard-put to tell you,” says Price. “I think I am very much the same. But when I go back and read the things that young man wrote, I realize I wouldn’t write them now.”
Gospel according to Price
What Price is writing these days is as rooted in religion as is much of the art in his home. “The Three Gospels,” a non-fiction work about the New Testament gospels of Mark and John and a modern-day gospel of Price’s own, is scheduled to be published by Charles Scribner’s in May ($23).
Before that, Price made his first foray into the world of non-fiction with “A Whole New Life” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, $20), the very personal and frank telling of his illness and healing.
Price wrote this book about his fight with cancer of the spine because he didn’t know of anything else written by survivors.
“If anyone was going to be made paraplegic it should have been me,” he says. “My friends have always called me the great indoorsman, saying, `You can’t get Reynolds out for exercise if you try.’ And I’ve always been the guy who wants to sit in the house and read or write the book.”
In “A Whole New Life,” Price writes of how his wheelchair affected his mobility (he didn’t have to make structural changes to the interior of his home, but he moved his bedroom from the second floor down into his first-floor study). He also addresses his ongoing fight with pain.
In the beginning, it was all he could think about. He went back to doctors to ask what could be done about the pain. He tried drugs, which didn’t help.
Finally, a doctor suggested biofeedback and hypnosis.
“It (hypnosis and biofeedback) made the difference–not ridding my body of pain, but helping me to think of it differently,” he says, “to put it in a corner of my thinking as opposed to it being in the center of a room.”
Thresholds
For a year, nearly any place other than his study was the center of his world.
After being diagnosed with cancer in 1984, Price couldn’t make himself cross the threshold of his study. Though he had started “Kate Vaiden” before he had become ill, depression kept him from continuing on the work.
“I couldn’t even read more than a few minutes at a time,” he recalls.
A phone call five months later from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., asking him to write a play for them, seemed to bring Price back.
Rosemary Henenberg, chairman of the theater arts department at Hendrix, was the person who made the call. She had no idea that Price was ill and that he had been unable to write. “I’m not surprised that Reynolds thought that this call was a moment of grace,” she says.
It was just three months later that Price presented the college with “August Snow.”
“But I still couldn’t go in that study,” he says. Instead, he did all his writing longhand from a chair in his living room.
It wasn’t until January 1985 that Price returned to writing “Kate Vaiden”–and the study.
“I try hard not to overplan my books . . . I have a vague sense of how things are going to wind up and I have to figure out how to get the people there.
“But I’m sure the final two-thirds of the book were definitely affected by what I was going through because (the character) Kate Vaiden, late in the novel, ends up having cancer surgery.
“There certainly had been cancer in my family’s life,” says Price, whose father died of cancer. His father called the young Price “preacher.” (His full name is Edward Reynolds Price, having been named for his father’s father and for “so many Edwards in my family.”)
William Solomon Price died before the author could ask him why he dubbed him “preacher.” “It wasn’t because I was pious or sanctimonious. I was very much like an only child,” says Price, whose brother, Bill, was born when the author was 8.
“As a child, I tended to like to stay with the grownups more so than other children. Grownups were telling better stories. Lord knows, I had childhood friends. My younger cousins were very close to me then and still are.”
Family remains important to Price. A visitor can hear that in Price’s many stories and see that on the bedroom wall where photos of his brother and parents join other pictures of close friends.
His bedroom, like the rest of his home, is inviting, simple and warm. A white ceiling fan whirs in a slow spin over a brass bed covered by a log cabin quilt he bought through a mail-order catalog.
“I’ve had this quilt for about 10 years and this old cow skin rug by the bed for almost 35,” says Price. “I suppose this rug is getting kind of seedy, but I still like it.”
Price also likes the idea of having more space to hang pictures, which is what he plans to do in the new workout room that recently has been added on next to his bedroom.
On the home front
“This has been home to me in all the best senses of the word for 31 years now,” says Price, who lives a half-hour’s drive away from his brother. “I had a vagabond childhood with my mother and father during the Depression. . . . I think I lived in something like 14 places in 14 years.
“When I moved here in 1965, I remember saying, `My heirs will move me the next time to the cemetery.’
“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” says Price, whose first home of his own was a trailer home.
Price says he wouldn’t change anything about his life–not even his illness. “It’s something that was hellacious for three to four years, but in so many ways it enriched my experiences and my sympathy for the rest of the human race, and I wouldn’t turn that around.
“I can’t think of anything I’d change,” he says. “I often say to my students that you are looking at a happy man. I’m someone who makes a good living doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to do.”
