Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back [Hardcover]

Reynolds Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 2009

Award-winning novelist Reynolds Price provides a vivid portrait of his life in the mid-1950s leading up to the publication of his brilliant first novel A Long and Happy Life—detailing his time as a Rhodes scholar, writer, and a teacher.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this new memoir, award-winning novelist Price (Kate Vaiden) takes up where his 1989 Clear Pictures left off—with a young Price heading for England on a Rhodes scholarship, a young man lighting into new and unfamiliar territories and the lessons he learns about literature, life and love. Covering the years 1955 to 1961, Price chronicles the challenges of living in a strange place, his emotional insecurities and his anxieties about his ability to complete the thesis on Milton, his adventures in Europe with a close friend and his eventual return to his alma mater, Duke University, to teach writing and literature. Along the way, Price recalls his friendships with Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and his brief encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre and J.R.R. Tolkien. Price's memoir also displays the tenacious desire with which, after warm encouragement from Eudora Welty and William Styron, he embarks on a round of writing that produces his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, published to acclaim in 1962. Although the detail can be tiresomely meticulous, Price, as usual, powerfully articulates the strength of memory in shaping our lives and gracefully draws us into a literary life lived fully. Photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

In his third memoir (after A Whole New Life), award-winning author Price details his life from 1955 to 1961—his studies at Oxford, where he befriended W.H. Auden and met such writers as Robert Frost and Eudora Welty; his European travels; and the beginning of his Duke teaching career. The detailed stories he includes come from copies of letters he wrote to his mother and brother. Two underlying streams in this memoir are Price's homosexuality and the beginning of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, which he refers to as his "pregnant-girl story." Price's true friendship with an Oxford classmate, Michael Jordan, and his intimate relationship with Matyas, a British academic, reveal Price's personal growth during his studies. He outlines the universal writer's dilemma of working the "necessary job" to pay the bills while struggling to begin a writing career. Readers will identify with his journey and eventual satisfaction. Recommended for all academic collections.—Joyce Sparrow, JWB Children's Svcs. Council, Clearwater, FL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1St Edition edition (May 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743291891
• ISBN-13: 978-0743291897
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #248,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "This Memoir of High Adult Happiness", May 16, 2009

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (Hardcover)

Reynolds Price describes the period of his life he writes about here, those heady years from 1955 to 1961 as a time of "high adult happiness," and that although he has experienced sadness-- what adult has not-- that he has also known a "great deal of unmitigated joy," a good way to describe the pleasure of reading this his third memoir. I remember being so taken by his first CLEAR PICTURES, that covers his childhood and young life up to 1954, because he writes so lovingly and without a hint of reproach about his parents, something not always found in memoirs these days. (In this memoir he writes often of his grief of losing his father and describes him as "that good man.") Mr. Price's A WHOLE NEW LIFE, an account of his bout with cancer and healing and life thereafter, should be required reading for medical students. Now he has written about his time at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and his first years of teaching English at Duke and finishing his first novel A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE, that was published in 1961.

ARDENT SPIRITS-- a beautiful title, the origin of which Mr. Price reveals in his introduction-- is one of those books that you want to lope ahead in and can hardly put down. The author met so many fascinating people in England-- Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Vivien Leigh et al.-- spent time with some of them and traveled over much of Europe during vacations. With his writerly genius, he is able in a few words to persuade the reader of the sublimity of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and the horrors of Dachau, the two "most impressive" things he saw in his travels. Who would have wanted to miss Auden's characterization of Emily Dickinson's poetry as "'very little-bitty at times'"? Certainly no one would ever use those words to describe Mr. Auden's poems that often go on for page after page.

Mr. Price writes with candor about his relationships with men during this period of his life, notably his friend Michael Jordan, who was heterosexual and remains Price's friend to this day, ("I'd step forward without hesitation, if called, to lay down my life for the person [Jordan] in question") and a man named Matyas, eight years older than Mr. Price with whom he was very much in love. The two men had a brief physical relationship in which Price said he discovered the synonym for the word "rapture." If you are looking for a tell-all memoir, you will have to look elsewhere as this writer is nothing if not discreet. While his descriptions of his couplings are written in beautiful, erotic prose, not a single four-letter word slips through. Price's friend of many years-- speaking of discretion-- Eudora Welty would not be offended.

Price includes in the book many photographs of people and places during this period of his life, some of which he himself took. It was so refreshing to read that "I took a picture" rather than the now popular notion of "shooting a subject." When you hear that phrase, you almost want to look for the dead bodies. And the photographs of Mr. Price at the time, including the one from the dust cover, show him as handsome beyond measure, or as the young people these days would say, "drop-dead beautiful."

About Mr. Price's prose, no writer does it better. A simply marvelous passage where he describes a visit with his Aunt Ida is a perfect example of why we read Price and should be quoted in its entirety: "After a modest supper Ida and I would sit in our accustomed swing on the front porch, and the evening would slowly darken around us in its indigo way. The apparently immortal whipporwill would commence its maddeningly repetitive call across the road--maddening but indispensable. The house just behind us was quiet as the earth that would one day enfold it, with all its freight of love and tragedy--the deaths of both my maternal grandparents at early ages, of one of their children in infancy, the orphaned sadness of my mother's girlhood and who knew what other broken hearts among a household of children, my own hard birth, and Ida's ten-year suicidal depression (she jumped from a rapidly moving car, took a hard head wound, but survived and very slowly recovered)." No one should have a right to write so beautifully. But as President Jimmy Carter once said, life isn't fair.

I repeat: reading ARDENT SPIRITS brought me unmitigated joy.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reynolds Price continues to amaze, June 5, 2009

By 

M. Elizabeth Wilson "Wilson Books" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (Hardcover)

I have read most of Mr. Price's work -- ranging from poetry to essays to plays, fiction and, this most recent work, memoir. Each volume is better than the one before. It's almost unfair that anyone should be able to write so beautifully, with such grace, and with such -- what? Compassion, wisdom, insightfulness. His remembrances of his years as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University range from meeting the extraordinary luminaries of the time -- from Olivier and Gielgud, and most fondly Vivien Leigh,Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden -- to the everyday folk who populated his world: his "landlady," his college friends, his lover. I felt I was there with him every day -- that's how well his writing encompasses the reader.

There is, in addition to his commitment to a life as a writer, an equal commitment to being a teacher. He quotes from a speech he gave at the ripe old age of 17, and as he says, while it may sound "mildly absurd," it should be -- especially in today's age of twitter and facebook -- a mantra for any teacher:

"Dryden said, 'By education most have been misled'...The effectiveness of English teaching is in direct radio to the teacher's ability to bring students to the realization that English is life. The teacher must take his subject out of the classroom and into the world, for English is not a subject. It is life. So long as we remain heirs of the English heritage, whether we speak, think, act, see or hear, we must use the English language -- and we must employ it with accuracy, intelligence and understanding. Socrates said, 'The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest injury to the dead man at the very beginning of his journey thither.'...and you have souls in your hands."

Would we had more teachers today who believed in their profession with this passion.

Reynolds Price is truly one of the great American writers. Long may he continue!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ardent Spirits; ardent, honest and personal, June 16, 2009

By 

John Watters (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (Hardcover)

This book makes a significant contribution to the field of contemporary memoir. It is an outstanding autobiography. Price is a gifted writer who captures what it must have been like to leave home for the first time and embark on a journey of personal discovery in the hallowed colleges of Oxford. He mixes easily with Auden and Spender but he also descibes his landlady with equal affection. Above all there is a sensitive heart beating in this man and one is left with a tremendous sense of humanity and hope. I could not put this but down and as with all great reads, I was sorry when it was finished.