Remembering Reyolds Price

Reynolds Price, Novelist
(picture courtesy of Duke University)

I note with sadness the death of Reynolds Price, one of my favorite novelists.  He carried the second half of the 20th century as the essential North Carolina storyteller and thus Southern Writer.  His prose was always a delight to the ear and eye, his characters always carefully observed and developed, his description of culture and family and human nature in his particular time and place always universal. For me he articulated a both a deep sense of the irony of life and an abiding conviction that human life is precious to the creator.

He has helped me to articulate my sense of human nature as essentially good but prone to slip into destructiveness.  For example he referred to  many of his characters as "decent outlaws"--a phrase I have often used to describe several of the characters of the Hebrew Scriptures such as Jacob the Patriarch, and implicitly myself and other members of my tribe.

I was consistently drawn to and warmed by his underlying spirituality, drawn from his own experiences of mystical awareness.  In his book Letter to a Man in the Fire (Scribner, 1999, p. 27), he wrote:

"Starting on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1939, when I was wandering alone in the pine woods by our suburban house in piedmont North Carolina, I've experienced moments of sustained calm awareness that subsequent questioning has never discounted.  These moments, which recurred at unpredictable and widely spaced intervals till some thirteen years ago, still seem to me undeniable manifestations of the Creator's benign, or patiently watchful, interest in particular stretches of my life, though perhaps not all of it.  And each of these moments--never lasting for more than seconds but seeming, in retrospect, hours long--has taken the form of sudden and entirely unsought breakings-in upon my consciousness of a demonstration that all of visible and invisible nature (myself included) is a single reality, a single thought from a central mind."

Because I am one who relishes experiences of the Holy, I have appreciated the consummate word-smithing of Reynolds Price that has helped me  make sense of them in light of the Christian tradition. 

Not having Reynolds Price alive and writing is a loss!