A Long and Happy Life

by Reynolds Price

  If his published prose sounds clear and conversational, Price’s casual talk could run to the opulent, the arcane and allusive. If his narratives cleave to literal chronology, his conversation hopscotched through time and space. If he kept close tabs on New York literary trends, he also nightly watched the leading Hollywood gossip shows. Being a respected artist himself, he knew how much work underwrites all seeming ease; this only fueled his ardor as a fan, forever movie-mad. As a high-schooler, he had mailed his own drawings of Vivien Leigh and Ethel Waters to those stars. His accomplished sketches arrived with requests. Would the divas please autograph Reynolds Price’s visions of them and—in the enclosed, stamped packets—return those? Thank you. When he died, these images, framed safe under glass, still ornamented his foyer.

  * * *

  After an intense linguistic preparation, Reynolds, future Bible translator and scholar, could have addressed Christ Jesus in His own idiomatic Aramaic. He felt rightly proud of his acute memory. Once asked to talk about his first-grade class, the novelist smiled, offering choices, “Left to right or right to left?”

  II

  Nineteen thirty-three proved the hardest year of the Depression. Reynolds Price appeared in Macon, North Carolina. His salesman father often found himself between jobs. Throughout the 1930s, the family made frequent moves. But a curious certainty traveled with them: their own joshing, irreverent, expressive love for one another. This legacy, once granted an adored child, can never be denied him

  He would be an only child for nearly a decade. Then his brother, Bill, now a respected historian, arrived. Till then, Reynolds had remained the one highly observed kid among a bevy of unwed aunts and great-aunts. They were ready to adore most any baby of their name. First they got little Reynolds listening, then talking. On both counts, he readily complied.

  In early photographs, he shines like some MGM feature-player, a pretty, dark-eyed child—protected by the tribe’s comic brio that made his family’s each rented home feel permanent. After Reynolds’s death, I asked his brother about the presence of books in their early years: “Dad mostly read newspapers (daily and evening) but seldom a book. Mother used to say she had read little fiction but that All Quiet on the Western Front was her favorite. At least she picked a good one.”

  * * *

  Reynolds had been born some kind of prodigy. For all that luck granted him, for all that poor health seemed to later withdraw, he remained precocious a full seventy-seven years.

  His choicest stories, breathed or written, were pure inheritance from his native Warren County. He arrived in that farmed-out sector of an unrich state just as it experienced a dreadful economic setback only World War II would half-heal. But home turf in deepest trouble provides its richest stories.

  His funny, talkative parents, high school graduates, were fervent believers in education. Reynolds Price’s confidence, hard-won by previous hardscrabble generations then handed crowning to him, would prove unshakable. His first name was Edward, but his brother, Bill, recalls, “Reynolds” seemed far more than his middle name. As a child of eight, he asked to go by that. “There were lots of Eddies in Warrenton but no other Reynoldses,” his brother adds in a jovial, language-loving voice that seems a Price family legacy.

  “Reynolds Price” has the ring of Tidewater gentry, and who would ever want that corrected? Price’s future deans at Oxford assumed he was high-born. They were right, of course.

  * * *

  Duke University recognized his adolescent individuality and took him unto itself. There he interested a visiting Eudora Welty. His undergraduate short story, one she called “professional,” found its way into print. After enjoying a Rhodes Scholarship, and a lively acquaintance with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, the prodigal returned to teach at Duke. He wrote in the early hours before his teaching duties. Two years along, Price sold his first book, A Long and Happy Life. The title yet seems both a wish and prediction.

  Its cover bore Welty’s rare imprimatur. In hindsight, her motherly statement feels touching. We hear her both wanting to reveal this favorite to the world while seeking to shield him from the head-turning harm of overpraise. Part of Welty’s endorsement reads (in a voice half-miming Price’s own laden understatement, itself slightly lifted from her), “His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well.” No one could argue the point.

  When the book appeared, Reynolds was invited everywhere. He had the looks, the baritone speaking voice, the thank you–note upbringing to help him always make a strong, gentle impression.

  His debut work, the one I read in gulps at the public library, is still my candidate for Best Novel Written by the Youngest Person. Its comic-lyrical prose seems the achievement of a writer’s practiced fourth book. How to describe its style? Classical in structure, casual of surface. There comes a moment in the life of a wonderfully made cotton shirt when it has been washed free of all itchy starter-sizing, when it is just two scrubbings away from tearing apart under one arm. That is Price’s early style. Revision’s lye-soap has purged its fabric of all adverbs, of any yellowing redundancies. Such care makes its art the opposite of careless. And yet, prodigious understanding of its characters, a warmed reticent understatement, still bears North Carolina’s pride in modesty.

  If the concept of “an old soul” has any currency for you, then Reynolds Price’s must’ve ridden many a previous cosmic merry-go-round. (Curious—but his recent death only increases the mystery of such vast youthful access.)

  III

  A Long and Happy Life. Its title shines forth all the hope of youth while admitting to mortality’s eventual full-stop.

  As a first novel it is not typical: no exposed autobiographical confession. It dodges being by and about a strapping young Wolfeian, first getting notice, then love, and finally revenge.

  For one thing, its hero is a heroine. Rosacoke Mustian. She’s born to working people whose true value is best known only to them. Rosa inhabits a rustic region largely forgotten by both colleges and commerce. She will never win a “free ride” scholarship to Duke, Oxford, and beyond.

  She is canny without being intellectual, she is deeply attractive if not precisely beautiful. She does not hail from the poorest family in the county, but her tribe learned long ago to steer clear of the Sheriff and live on next to nothing.

  The book’s brilliant central trope is to make readers fall in love with its teenaged protagonist. Harper Lee also fell for Rosa. She endorsed the novel. And her tomboy narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird shares with Price’s lead a certain puckish charm. But Rosacoke is not the adored daughter of the town’s one liberal lawyer; she is not a child jerked into awareness by suddenly pulling for “the others.” She is The Other. Scout Finch knows Negroes because her housekeeper is one. For Rosa, her black friend Mildred is not the family servant but a working peer. Rosa is a country girl nearly poor as Mayella, Mockingbird’s presumed rape victim. Like Mayella, Rosa lives with daily deprivation and the dangers of sexuality (including and especially her own). The popularity of Harper Lee’s novel depends upon its narrator’s remaining conveniently prepubescent. Because Rosacoke is full-grown, sexually aware, and cash-strapped, her own risks and choices are far more exposed and direct. To the extent that we feel at one with loving jeopardized Rosa, to that exact extent does this swift novel succeed.

  Half a century after Rosa’s inked conception, people still speak of her as someone alive. She is out walking around on parole from her own book. I once asked my former teacher John Cheever what he thought of this novel. He answered at once, “I love Rosacoke.” His present-tense response struck me as succinct and wise.

  Rosacoke has older literary girl-cousins, of course. She partly resembles Faulkner’s Lena Grove, the pregnant, barefoot pilgrim placidly walking hundreds of miles in Light in August to seek her baby’s fleeing father. But Rosa is far smarter. She’s more like Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene of Far from the Madding Crowd—a romantic who, offered two stolid su
itors, chooses a third, the two-timing soldier with nothing to offer but his sex appeal and red uniform. Price’s heroine offers wit that can resemble Shakespeare’s most magnetic comic heroine, Rosalind. Her name suggests it might have left a mark on Price’s “Rosacoke.” And all three girls, like Rosa, waste most of their time securing handsome men who’ll prove their flat inferiors.

  * * *

  The novel memorably begins with a homemade African-American funeral at the no-frills “Delight Baptist Church.” Rosacoke is the humid cemetery’s calm tourguide. She will be the one white person in the sanctuary (her escort, Wesley, is too fascinated with his own motorcycle to leave it outside unguarded). The whole funeral, like most of this novel, seems to take place out of doors. Price so knew and loved his native countryside: his faith in its Edenic completeness gives the strapped lives of its citizens, white and black, a margin of innocence, even a calming luxury.

  Since Mildred, the unwed woman being buried, died giving birth to the child of an unknown man, her longtime white employers have chosen not to interrupt their beach vacations. Rosa—unasked—still turns up to represents them. Without our quite noticing, Price is already creating a central character whose behavior feels as naturally inevitable as it is admirable. Miss Mustian’s goodness is somehow set on “automatic.” Virtue, like happiness, is a devilishly difficult subject.

  Not only has Rosa turned up as stand-in for all “the white friends”; not only has she got to the church (at motorbike speed) before any deacon does; not only does she purge the sanctuary of an agreeable addict found snoozing there, Rosa has also sent in advance today’s one expensive bouquet, a tribute beyond her means. She will have to pay it off in small installments.

  By page thirty—after more instances of this skinny girl’s sympathy, humor, and forgiveness—we all want Rosacoke at our own funerals, no, better, our next birthday parties.

  We, become her partisans, soon tell ourselves: She is prettier than she knows, she is more ethically evolved than any member of the local clergy. How, we’re made to wonder—watching this amazing person settle into romancing a sex-obsessed, if otherwise indifferent, Wesley Beavers—how can no one in her world notice Rosa? Her yellow hair, her quiet generous jokes, her radical humanity, all go uncelebrated. (Except, of course, by us. Is this discipleship?)

  Rosacoke’s Christian regard seems to include and illumine every occupant of this bypassed county. Her cross-generational knowledge translates into empathy for all. And yet, in the young Price’s expert hands, Rosa’s life always remains a suspense story. She is allowed her own free will, if loosed upon the few flawed choices offered.

  Price had all but memorized Christ’s parables. His first book benefits from this faith in everyday wisdom. In the writer’s later works, the New Testament paradigm could come to feel assumed. The ritually religious sometimes felt preordained, too-ready-made; the steeplechase of setbacks at times overwhelmed characters’ natural cowlicked humanity. A raped woman must spend one whole book systematically forgiving her assailant. (Why is it, in certain books, all the men can “give” but women there can only “forgive”?)

  Reynolds Price was a professing Christian. Like many other writers who come to the church only in adulthood, he had been spared mandatory Sabbath services in childhood. Walker Percy, a great novelist and coreligionist, became a devout Catholic convert only at age thirty-one. In Jay Tolson’s sympathetic Percy biography, one rare grinning photo of this stoic writer shows him meeting the Pope!

  I asked Reynolds’s brother, Bill, about the boys’ religious training. He noted their parents had been rendered more tolerant by being a “mixed marriage” (between a Methodist and a Baptist). Reynolds had avoided the rigid our-way-or-no-way doctrine as the bedrock of fundamentalist Southern Protestantism. (It would be shocking to discover at the gates of Paradise an inverse ratio between true piety and church attendance! I am counting on that.)

  As an adult Christian, Price continued to avoid church membership. This might help explain both the durability of his idealizing faith and the many gained hours needed to produce his forty books. Though his first novel begins and ends at church, it never descends to mere sermon.

  Like his fellow scribe-congregants Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, Price truly believed in Christ’s daily redemptive power. This trinity of Southerners, at their best, left us fiction revealing Christ’s mercies in lived lives, not tracts. “Nothing is more tedious than an author with a cause,” G. B. Shaw admitted, knowing his own socialist shortcomings.

  Good dogma has ruined even some great books. Tolstoy abandoned novels for pamphlets. In the service of an author’s faith, all protagonists risk surrendering to strong-armed theology, denied the sweet disorganized perversity of human nature itself.

  But with Rosacoke Mustian, Price’s balance finds the ideal starter fulcrum between fact and figment, between lesson and carol, between everyone Fallen and those few Blessed.

  She looked in the round mirror on the handlebars and combed out her hair that had the wind in it still after the ride. With the black tree behind her, you could see the dust fly up around her head from out of her hair, and in the round mirror it outlined her with a sudden halo. Even Wesley noticed that.

  “Even Wesley noticed that,” Price documents. He is assuring us that this is Fact, not just saintly decoration. He insures us his Rosa is a local salesgirl first; he will soon elevate her into being a Flemish Madonna (if just for those readers with scripture and art history in mind). Otherwise she stays plain, wry, luminous Rosacoke Mustian.

  IV

  The book’s long first sentence is what many readers remember. No other unit of it resembles this beginning. Price’s normative prose cleaves to the windowpane school of presentation: The greatest service a writer can provide is showing what his characters experience while staying the hell out of their way. In such a vision, any language that draws attention to itself by yelling “Author, author!” only subtracts from the characters’ personal rights.

  Price’s pure, if muscled, early prose most resembles Hemingway’s. I mean Hemingway at his boyish best, before he started posing on his yacht for Cutty Sark magazine ads.

  Hemingway can be heard in Price’s boiled-down dialogue, his compressed lyrical landscapes. Reynolds learned much from the clean kinetic planes of Hemingway’s great Michigan stories.

  Here, for instance, is Price in his splendid, simpler full-voice:

  The graves went towards the church, taking grass with them, and then the white sand began that had been hauled in from a creek bed. The church stood in the sand under two oak trees, wooden and bleached and square as a gun-shell box, daring people not to come.

  This lively writing seems first cousin to the opening of For Whom the Bell Tolls with its round river rocks. In scarcely fifty words, a lot is set in motion. Instead of finding one of thirty synonyms for “sand,” Price opts for a Bible-like faith in repeating “the sand.” Hemingway would likely approve. We think of graves as the quietest spots possible. But here, graves are animate, willful, even bossy, carrying everything before them. Another contradiction: The visual austerity of the church, instead of scaring folks away, warns them not to avoid it.

  We feel the way one sentence miters snug atop another, with the pleasure of some child’s fitted building blocks. This is old-school prose, gorgeous in understatement, streamlined with subtexts.

  New American Review invited the young Price to discuss a writer who’d most influenced him. The New York–based magazine naturally assumed that any young Southerner must choose the preeminent older Southern writer as his father figure. Price, always ready to confuse, picked a fellow born in Oak Park, Illinois.

  Of course, the first sentence of his first book hails from a very different latitude. In the cemetery passage just quoted, the living verbs are: went, take, began, hauled, stood, bleached, dare, come. The passive construction of the verb to be is frowned upon in most beginning writing classes. And yet is must animate this monument of a first s
entence, built for reasons beyond its own energy or past its literal sense. Why did Price place it here? Why is it given such architectural obtrusiveness and fearsome pride of place? If the Godfather to the rest of the book is Hemingway, then whose is this?

  Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon by Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it)—when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back “Don’t” and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.

  William Faulkner died in 1962. And in 1962, A Long and Happy Life got itself born.

  The Guinness Book of World Records claimed that one sentence inWilliam Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (fully 1,300 words) was the longest ever published in English. Certain Joyce scholars immediately insisted that the last chapter of Ulysses might be only eight sentences long, but at least seven of those contain more words than the one line of Faulkner’s.

  A Long and Happy Life’s opening sentence clocks in, by my myopic count, at 192 words—not a record, but not inconsiderable. Given a book so essentially lean, swift, hard-bodied, why would our prodigy commence with a drumroll so attention-getting? For a book born in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death, is this Harley ride of a sentence meant to be homage-paying or debt-settling? Or maybe both?