A recollection of Reynolds Price

A generous man, who gave more than 50 years of his life teaching Duke University undergraduates, has passed from our ken. Those of us who knew him for even part of his long career will wonder whether anyone will ever replace him as a master artist portraying the rich diversity of North Carolina’s people or as an inspiration to its young writers.

I first heard of Reynolds Price when I began my graduate study in English at Duke in 1957. Duke’s English faculty lauded the 1955 summa cum laude graduate who had won one of the 32 prestigious Rhodes scholarships given annually to Americans for study at Oxford University. He returned having developed friendships in Oxford with world-renowned writers—W.H. Auden and Steven Spender, among others.

When I began teaching at Duke in 1961, Reynolds’ first book, “A Long and Happy Life,” was published to immense acclaim, with movie rights and a prominent cast of Hollywood stars picked for a movie production which, however, was never completed. The full canon of Reynolds Price’s work includes 13 novels, many short stories and plays and, overall, a highly varied literary output. Critics and reviewers are better qualified than I to comment on them.

What I remember, as an English department colleague of his for 11 years, was a handsome man with dark hair, an intense gaze, rollicking laughter and a rich, deep voice that repeatedly drew upon quotations of poetry and prose which his fecund memory seemed to have ready for any conversation. Reynolds loved people and loved to offer descriptions or stories that flowed from him as mellifluously in conversation as in his writing. It was not by accident that for almost a half century Reynolds taught a course on John Milton, whose deep piety and love of the English language was mirrored in Reynolds Price.

In describing how he could explore life through literature, not just through physical travel, the British poet John Keats “traveled in the realms of gold,/and many goodly states and kingdoms” saw in his diverse reading. Similarly, Reynolds Price traveled widely in literature, but except for his three years at Oxford, lived all his life in North Carolina, which served as the setting for almost all his stories.

Although Reynolds was a wonderful conversationalist, when I knew him in his 20s and 30s, he was, overall, a very private person—a literary artisan who spent much of his time in private—reading, thinking, feeling and writing. He emerged to share himself with students and friends, but was seldom seen taking meals or coffee on campus. Following the discovery and treatment of a tumor wrapped around his spinal cord in 1984, Reynolds was paralyzed from the waist down. After that time, his writing took on a more overtly religious feeling, and in his book titled “A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing,” he shares an experience that people of faith would easily call “miraculous.”

His former students Anne Tyler and Josephine Humphreys were among his early students who proceeded to notable literary careers. And although they are among the best known of his former pupils, the lives of many at Duke were powerfully affected by his presence. As Hamlet said of his father, “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”