Customer Reviews

Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back

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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.

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!

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.

The first fifteen pages of Price's engaging memoir are truly memorable. They are thoughtful in that, a man who would meet with great success in his own later life, reflects in a credible way (if not particularly insightful way) on the road ahead of him.

The great problems begin to arise once he steps off of the boat at Oxford. As an old man, Price has evolved a certain perception of himself and the world that ultimately consumes his memoir and eventually totally alienates the reader. One problem is that the book is a memoir-as-travelogue (even those first worthwhile pages) without much in the way of serious self-analysis. Rather, I imagine this book is much like "And then I saw the pyramids. (three pages of description of the pyramids and how you explored them)" except "pyramids" might be replaced by all of the notables that Price happened upon in these middle-early years of his life.

He talks a lot about being alone for instance, but was never lonely. He had lovers (a lover), but he never loved. Or even, it seems, cared deeply enough to share what it was to be truly vulnerable to another person. In the end, we learn a lot about who and what Reynolds Price thinks is valuable (classical music, certain foods, certain plays, and authors) and what he thinks is wrong (laws against homosexuality, or the adoption of the word 'Gay' as a descriptive term) but ultimately anything worth finding out about the man is hidden beneath a suit of lyric armor. Sure, in our thrusts-and-parries with the narrative we find a few gems (Reynolds liked New Criticism?! -- conveniently they are often set off just this way from the main text) but all that is conveniently stashed away in the romantic haze of this (likely last) reflection on his life.

But the alienation also, inadvertently, arises in those gems, for they are often the points at which Reynolds-as-an-old-man interjects. A passage in which he talks about how good a particular class or student in 1958 was includes a short quip about how none of his many students have matched since. He says he loves teaching then shows that he was clearly an awful teacher to many of his pupils -- but blames their inadequacy. He alternately rails against and praises the tragic life of William Blackburn but never truly understands him (in fact, quite often he comes off as incredibly unsympathetic because he is unconscious of his own inability to extend empathy) -- though Blackburn was by far the better teacher of the two men, something even this memoir inadvertently makes clear.

This self-absorption without a core on which to latch (and perhaps his many, many, many, prior works have already established this deeply compassionate and sympathetic core) creates a distance I ultimately could never overcome.

Even when he talks about his consuming desire to write, he never seriously considers criticism. Rather, he (luckily) finds another publisher. Yet that criticism (that "A Long and Happy Life" is buried beneath its words, as it actually is buried) is again, a quickly discarded quip which Reynolds brushes off and never gives a second thought. Thus, it becomes clear that this is a novel for the fan-club -- for one must be convinced of the immutable quality of Price's writing to feel sympathetic to this sort of self-righteousness.

As a young man of almost precisely the age of Reynolds in the course of these events, I have certainly learned a great deal about what it is to be blind about myself at this age -- and perhaps I shall handle it better than the flawed, status-seeking man in this novel did then.

Great book; I don't usually write book reviews because unlike product reviews book reviews are virtually 100% subjective, but I sure enjoyed the heck out of this book. This man is a true national treasure and everything that he writes is a joy to read. I am very jealous of anyone who has been lucky enough to be one of his students.

For anyone who was a follower of Reynolds Price, this is a must have book. In it he reveals a personality that many of us were already aware of. "Ardent Spirits" is for anyone who knew or would like to know Price.

"Wonderful, amazing book: Warm and funny and real. I got to live the life of a dashing young intellectual for the week I was reading it. I love his memoirs, they are about him but not "about him" so much as about the culture, language, food, people of the time.

This is an absolutely fascinating memoir of England and Oxford in particular seen by a Rhodes scholar in the 1950s who became a celebrated writer and teacher.

Since I'm a gay man of similar age and similar European educational experiences to Price, I probably expected too much. The writing strikes me as clumsy for a man who taught college English all his adult life. He seems to carry a lot of unresolved "gay" issues. The homosexual descriptions are cluttered with terms like "decent" and "honorable." In any case one can't truly be objective in writing about one's own life, but this book veers toward an apology rather than an autobiography. Basta! I think you can tell I hated it!