CLEAR PICTURES: FIRST LOVES, FIRST GUIDES
by Reynolds Price
Atheneum; 304 pages; $19.95
Unless your childhood was as magical as Mozart’s, writing an extended memoir of those primal years is a risk bordering on chutzpah. Why on earth should anyone else care about the assorted teachers, neighbors and maiden aunts who were your early sources of inspiration? Such people are the private memories of the ones who knew and cherished them.
Readers can be persuaded to care, however, if the memoirist is Reynolds Price (The Source of Light, Kate Vaiden), one of a few writers whose full- length fictions do honor to the term regional novel. Price’s region is central North Carolina, where he has lived for most of his 56 years. His father Will was a traveling salesman who fought a lifelong battle against alcohol and financial insecurity. His mother Elizabeth was one of the genteel metal magnolias who, despite generosity to their black servants, Price notes, were the “chief conveyors” of the racist code that cursed the pre-King South.
A loner by temperament and circumstance — his family was constantly relocating from one drab Piedmont town to another — Price describes the boy he was as “a born witness or spy . . . helplessly fascinated by the ritual power of language.” In Clear Pictures he comes across as a precocious Dixie dandy, worrying earnestly about God and masturbation, and toadying up to visiting artistes like the great contralto Marian Anderson by sending them portraits he had sketched from publicity stills.
There is no posturing, however, in the taut, emotion-driven chapter that tells of his father’s death at age 54. Surgery to remove a cancer-infected lung disclosed that the disease had spread, inoperably. Reynolds, then a junior at Duke University, was at his bedside, holding the “warm, dead flesh” of Will’s wrist, when the end came. He heard “a high moan, an eerie whistle.” As Will’s head pressed deep into the pillows, “the eyes stayed shut but the skin of his face turned purple, and the hard wave rolled downward from mind to feet. It was plainly as real and irresistible as what drives the surf.”
Price, today a paraplegic from cancer of the spine, cites Freud’s comment that the most important day of a man’s life is the day his father dies. It may have been the day that Reynolds Price truly became the writer he hoped to be.
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