In four years at Duke, Reynolds Price is the only professor who ever told me I might fail his class.
The message wasn’t meant specifically for me. As a sophomore in his class on the poetry of John Milton, Price opened the semester by saying he would likely fail four of the 40 people currently enrolled. I looked around, and I saw faces that reflected confusion back, a failure to comprehend something that they’d likely never heard before.
I didn’t fail, but that’s not the point. Professor Price held me to a higher level than nearly any other educator I’ve ever had in both the classes I took with him, and for that, I’ll always be in debt.
Reynolds, though, would never think of it as a debt. Much has been written of the man’s ineffable generosity and true care for his students, and I don’t want to add to the din with broad or sweeping generalizations. I can only speak to my own relationship with Professor Price, which spanned two semesters, a couple hours in his office and one visit to his house, where my Spring ’10 Gospels class read from the apocryphal gospels we’d spent the last month writing.
His home was an amazing thing, the living room a gallery; we parked in a field and drank Coke out of bottles. As we all read and listened to each other with the respect we’d earned over months of discussing words others have died over, it was impossible to not feel humbled in the presence of our professor and his art. When we left, we each shook his hand and promised to stay in touch.
Leaving behind a litany of books that speak for themselves, it’s hardly surprising that Price requested no public funeral. Between his scholarship and his fiction, the man spent his entire adult life portraying himself, the South and his faith in a beautiful American language. I remember the first time he truly criticized my writing, on a first draft of my proto-gospel, and I absorbed his advice almost immediately, left class and changed my draft. And I did better.
Few professors can be said to only accept the best of your work, but this describes Price to perfection. He expected dedication and thoughtfulness from his students, a genuine effort that was never hard to give in one of his classes, both among the most intellectually engaging I’ve ever taken. And best of all, he demanded discussion. He required it. By doing so, he drew the quality from his students even if they might be otherwise resistant; he forced them into the discussion, and in my experience, people usually shined.
One last anecdote. Particularly in the wake of his death, I can’t help but remember our Milton class on Jan. 28, 2009, when Reynolds sat at his desk on the raised dais of an Allen classroom and said, “My good friend John Updike died yesterday.” He then went on to tell us about Updike, a name that I’ve always regarded with a sort of assumed reverence, and to try and dissuade any of us from smoking cigarettes, as Updike had been killed by lung cancer.
Something about that story, unsurprising as it should be considering Price’s own incredible renown, sticks out to me two years later. It was the sadness. He said it with a voice that seemed truly conscious of a death, and not that of John Updike, the American treasure, but John Updike, a man he knew and liked. Two years later, this is how I feel about Reynolds.
—Kevin Lincoln
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