As a 12-year-old exposed to the slings, arrows and frequently outrageous misfortunes of summer camp, Reynolds Price suffered nothing worse than a
”fairly serious case of homesickness, which I managed to conceal from my fellow campers.” Otherwise, Price, 57, looks back on his experience, 40 years ago, as a pleasant and healthful (if not entirely restful) two-week sojourn in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
That`s a lot more than can be said for Raphael Noren, the precocious 14-year-old who figures so prominently, and tragically, in Price`s latest novel, ”The Tongues of Angels” (Atheneum). During his abortive stay in Price`s fictional Camp Juniper, the seraphic teenager nearly expires from a snakebite, only to recover and fall victim to an even more dreadful and permanent affliction.
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To judge by a summary description of its plot and background, expectant readers might mistakenly conclude that Price has written a book that does for summer camps what his fellow Southern novelists, Calder Willingham (”End as a Man”) and Pat Conroy (”Lords of Discipline”), have done for military schools, depicting them as citadels of sin, depravity and sadomasochism.
But Price, who will read from the novel in Chicago Monday, seemed aghast that anyone would confuse ”The Tongues of Angels” with Southern Gothic fiction or assume that it`s an allegory about children reverting to tribal savagery under primitive conditions. ”You might well think you`re in for an awful lot of `Lord of the Flies` sadism,” the author cautioned. ”But there are no beatings or lynchings.”
Like another central character in the book, Price also spent 10 weeks as a counselor at a North Carolina summer camp during the early `50s. That adventure left him with nothing but affectionate memories, said the author, speaking by phone from Durham, N.C., where he has lived for many years and teaches English at Duke University.
”I hadn`t realized quite what a nerve I was touching,” Price said. ”It seems that almost all my friends, certainly those who are middle-aged, have strong and pleasant memories of their weeks, sometimes their years, in summer camp. And they look back with a lot of fondness on the goofy but lovable institution that summer camp was in those days.”
In many respects, Price`s summer camp is a stereotypically male refuge, with swimming, archery, horseback riding, woodcraft and-especially for the purposes of his story-Indian lore. Campers and counselors battle snakes, spiders and ticks. They indulge in practical jokes, marathon contests involving passing gas, and other adolescent rites.
At the same time, Camp Juniper is as much a spiritual as a physical retreat, so that it may be scarcely recognizable to survivors of more earthy
(and earthly) summer camps. There is, for instance, a passionate dialogue between the ethereal teenager, Rafe, and his counselor, an artist, about the mysteries of the Creation, during which they discuss the crucial meaning of St. Paul`s quote, ”Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels. . . .” But Price`s numerous excursions into celestial and cerebral areas aren`t simply reflections of the religious shadings that distinguish his 19 books, which also include collections of stories, poetry and criticism. With what the author calls its ”powerful mixture of Christianity and outdoorsmanship,”
Camp Juniper is fairly representative of summer camps in the Deep South, he said, ”which tended to be operated by people who had begun their careers with the YMCA or working in religious education.”
Price`s appearance in Chicago is a benefit for the 25th anniversary of TriQuarterly, the Northwestern University literary magazine that has published a number of his stories. Unlike so many other novelists, Price would seem to be an ideal reader of his own work. His baritone has the stentorian flavor of Orson Welles, especially the Mississippi patriarch he played in ”The Long Hot Summer.”
`No Mexican jumping bean`
Though stricken with spinal cancer six years ago, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and forced to use a wheelchair, Price said the affliction has not limited his travels. ”I`m no Mexican jumping bean, but I still go where I want to go and where my work takes me,” he said, pointing out that he recently spent three months overseeing the production of his trilogy of plays at the Cleveland Playhouse.
”There`s been very little change since I became ill. The airlines, I must say, have worked out a really nifty method of dealing with people in wheelchairs. In some ways, it`s easier to travel by air in a wheelchair than on your own two feet, because they treat you much more gently and with much more individual concern.”
Price`s near-fatal illness also led to the most productive period in his career. After surgery and radiation treatment, he went back to work with a fury. He finished ”Kate Vaiden,” the novel that brought him a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986, and in the years since, he has written five other books, and has at least two others nearly ready for publication.
A native of Macon, N.C., who won a Faulkner Award in 1962 for his first novel, ”A Long and Happy Life,” Price has since been typecast, along with Eudora Welty and Walker Percy, as one of the country`s finest ”Southern writers,” a generic term he considers not only meaningless but denigrating.
`I thought I knew bad prose`
As if to peel off the label, Price makes pointed references to two of the South`s most revered masters in his new book. After a forced ”pilgrimage” to the Asheville home of Thomas Wolfe, the narrator reflects on the ”youthful sex and vaulting ambition” of ”Look Homeward Angel,” Wolfe`s best known novel: ”I thought I knew bad prose when I saw it. And I stopped for good at page fifty.”
Price said that pretty well sums up his own frustrating experience with Hurricane Thomas. ”I admire the passion in Wolfe, but I made a big mistake. I didn`t try to read `Look Homeward Angel` until I was full grown. By that time, it seemed awfully adolescent and kind of helpless in its inability to edit itself. So I`m afraid I do share my narrator`s lack of admiration for Wolfe, but I certainly don`t want to stop anyone else from reading him.”
Even more heretic, perhaps, are his narrator`s scathing observations on one of William Faulkner`s more famous quotes, when the Nobel Prize-winning author publicly said Keats` ”Ode on a Grecian Urn” was ”worth any number of maiden aunts.”
While he holds Faulkner in much higher esteem than Wolfe, Price said: ”I thought it was an awful thing to say when I first read that remark in the Paris Review back in the `60s. Faulkner`s obviously not recommending the incineration of old ladies, but along with several other things he said, it does seem to reveal an awful scorn and an inability to deal with people who were close to him.”
”As we know,” Price said, ”there`s not a huge necessity that great artists be great human beings. But I must say, the greatest artists I`ve known-the best novelists, poets, composers and actors-have also been wonderfully magnanimous human beings.”
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Reynolds Price will read at 6 p.m. Monday at the First Plaza Theater, 1 First National Plaza, with a reception and dinner at 7:30 p.m. in the Mid-Day Club on the 56th floor. Tickets are $10 for the reading only, $100 for the dinner. Call TriQuarterly at 708-491-7614 for information and reservations.