Reynolds Price 1-- Notebooks + Chain of Love

Q: Is it necessary to keep this kind of journal and go through all these levels of dialectic to be a good writer?

A: No!!!!

In reading the notes for A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE you'll be moved to wonder how he ever wrote anything else. For one thing, the time it must have taken to maintain this sort of journal... when does he actually sit down and start writing the narrative proper? There's also a real risk that all the cogitation the notebooks record might just strangle the story itself as it tries to get born. Price is certainly aware of the risk in hindsight. xvi: "...I realized that my early impulses--with all their meticulous long range planning--had become a kind of halter and bit that meant to control my every step, when what I was only beginning to learn was that more than half the pleasure of generating a fictional narrative lies in the moment by moment invention of speech and act, the feeling out of a new trail to take, not the forced observance of a rigid old map. That realization, though, didn't remotely suggest that I abandon note-making (and it still never has. Even the coldest out-of-date map, I could now see, had again fed the unconscious workings of the story deep in my mind as it grew its own limbs and took its own steps."

I'd add to these statements that the unconscious workings of the story, at risk of being inhibited when plans are too consciously worked out in advance, depend on that sense of the discovery in the writing itself which Price also describes... a sense which isn't just about "pleasure" but the essential catalyst which makes the story come to life.

But Price believed, and clearly it worked for him, that his exhaustive note-taking would function as "an almost literally athletic training that would teach me the skills of pacing, of body and mental fitness, and of access to my unconscious faculties (if any were there). That is to say (and he says it above) that in his scheme of things all the elaborate conscious effort works to feed the unconscious process which he acknowledges to be the more important of the two.

In the earliest pages of the notebooks though, you find him mainly recording-- trying to capture details of the social situation he comes from as well as the forms of expression-- "local color" detail and episodes. The early pages are a scrapbook of found material: anecdote and felicitously phrased remarks and descriptions. A bit later on you find him working more self-consciously with his list of metaphors... on page 25 you see him beginning to reshape the material he's heard and recorded to make new phrasing which is more his own.

It's not at all a bad idea to keep a bag full of stuff like this. Each shard of anecdote or speech, as you insert them between the folds of your brain, may work like the grain of sand in the oyster. Other stuff may stick to each one; they may begin to stick together. From any one of this little bits, be it an anecdote, flash of a scene, line of dialogue or just a nice imagistic phrase, may become the "seed" of a whole story.

Most writers do, one way or another, go through all these processes of accumulating and sorting, weighing and rejecting or accepting different technical and structural approaches (as well as specific plot bits and turns of phrase). Not all writers write it all down though, and few of them write as much of it down as Price, who made this entire mental process take place on paper. No problem with that if it works for you. But it would be insane to tell yourself you have to do all this stuff on paper. Most of the stuff has to get done one way or another but for writers at the other extreme from Price all of it happens below the threshold of consciousness and none of it is recorded... or in the ground between these two extremes the process is partially recorded in much more fragmentary jottings, which only the note-taker is likely to fully understand.

The thing is not to adopt somebody else's system precast and precut, but to work out a method that's right for you. The most sensible thing Price has to say about it all (xii) concerns the need to "understand one's personal creative metabolism and how to maintain it, even-keeled, for long stretches of work in the absence of any exterior goad."

"A Chain of Love"

Price's motive for writing this very early story is tossed off rather casually in the intro to the notebooks: (xiii) "in the spring, from the events of my father's recent death, I drafted a long story...." Consider how indirectly that personal experience is reflected in the finished work.

This story was written, as the introduction to the notebooks record, when Price was a college student... before the notebooks became the complex laboratory into which they evolved when he began contemplating A Long and Happy Life. But it does involve deployment of the sort of material gathered in the notebooks as "Expressions and Anecdotes" -- mostly "found" material from events and sayings of friends and neighbors-- or as "Metaphors" -- material less found, more shaped, created out of language by the writer.

The notebooks had not yet developed the audacious attitude to literary influence that they do later. In this early period literary influence is not discussed. But it shows anyway: most prominently the influences of Eudora Welty and Faulkner. The Eudora Welty influence is more prominent and influences the comic tone and the comic sense of character. This influence Price acknowledges (apparently he was personally acquainted with her around this time). The story bears some resemblance, in the broadly comic outline, to Welty's "Why I live at the P.O." But it has a more serious dimension than that particular Welty story, and for that dimension and the higher level of rhetoric which carries it, the story tilts in the direction of Faulkner.

Price's attitude to Faulkner is basically a defensive one (not unreasonable at the time). In the late fifties and early sixties it was just about impossible to avoid the Faulknerian influence even if you didn't read his work-- it would percolate through the other writers influenced by what he was doing. Price struck an attitude which involved underestimating Faulkner (as the notebooks later show) concentrating on his weaknesses rather than his strengths. Nevertheless, both here and in A Long and Happy Life, when the prose gets more serious, more highflying, more "poetic," it also gets, somewhat helplessly, more Faulknerian.

Plot:

There's a double story at work here-- two similar narratives paired-- one has a comic tone and a happy ending, and the other has a tragic tone and a tragic ending. In terms of event, they run closely side by side.

Present action

The comic line is the main line of the story: Papa, patriarch of a large "colorful" comical Welty-esque family, is not really all that sick. There's no threat in his illness and the family excursion to the hospital is more like a family vacation-- an adventure for Rosacoke and Rato especially, who get to be on their own for a couple of days in a new place. Yet in a sense he is dodging death, by dodging the room across the hall where death takes place. He eludes the danger and will get to go home unaltered.

Across the hall, the story line is tragic: here the paterfamilias is sick unto death, receives extreme unction and dies in the company of his much smaller family, especially before the eyes of the son, who functions as Rosacoke's alter-ego in the parallel situation (and also as the author's).

The action provides two bridges between these two narrative lines, one comic, one much less so. Rato's nosy observation, which provides the information, also produces comic moments, while Rosacoke's emotional, affective connection to what it taking place across the hall is much more seriously resonant.

Backstory:

The backstory of the main, comic line of the narrative darkens its background considerably, being full of death, both timely (Papa's wife, Pauline) and untimely (Rosacoke's dissolute father). The pressure of those episodes reminds us that eventually Papa will really be sick and moribund and that will be more sad than funny. This darkening and deepening of the context builds a background connection between the comic narrative line and the tragic one about the Ledwell family.

Character:

Price records himself worrying about this issue a lot in the notebooks for A Long and Happy Life-- he says that all the characters in this story are "flat," except for Rosacoke herself. A case could certainly be made for that. "...it is and was meant to be and ought to be a story about Rosacoke, a story in which she can stand up straight and move freely. No one must take the story out of her hands-- except death, and in her way she conquers that-- and when Mama and Rato or anybody else takes the stage for a while, they take it to teach us something about Rosacoke. (And to call them "Flat" is not to call them lifeless. They are intensely real, one might meet them anytime. No, they are flat, "humorous" characters because the story can only afford to see them from one side." (p.81)-- in fact this is a pretty astute analysis, especially the very last comment.

Price's other retrospective remark on the character question(103): "Maybe a comic vison, even at its most humane-- as in Huck Finn or The Ponder Heart [Welty] or Chekhov-- must always condescend: because the author-- perceiving and revealing the comic weaknesses of his people-- implies (unconsciously usually I guess) the absence of those foibles (however gentle) in himself."

Maybe so, maybe not-- this could be a symptom of thinking too much, overprocessing the act of composition at the level of abstract thought. Price is describing a real risk here though-- more for himself and Welty than for Twain and Chekhov, let it be said: that writing which to some degree exploits "local color" and the "quaintness" of characters may turn into pure cartoon, the characters all becoming caricatures.

This does not quite happen. In Twain for example, the problem is solved by the credibility of Huck's voice and the fact that everything is filtered through Huck's character-- the antics of Nigger Jim might come off as demeaning black-face comedy if Huck's response to them didn't bring out their pathos and dignity. Rosacoke's point of view works the same way here, e.g. the description of Rato p. 498: "...she could look over and see her brother stretched sideways in his chair, still dressed, with his long hands caught between his drawn up knees and his head rolled back on his great thin neck and his mouth fallen open. Most people seemed to be somone else when they were asleep. But not Rato. Rato went to sleep the way you expected he would, like himself who had stopped looking for a while."

I'd argue that Rato, generally handled as a comic figure, is "unflattened" by this description. Generally Price's own appraisal is right-- even though the story only examines the supporting cast in one dimension, the feeling of their deeper reality is sustained.

The nicely detailed and witty observation is sourced in the notebooks. That brings the vividness to the character. Notice too how many of the comic subroutines between minor characters-- e.g. Papa's tiff and make-up with Snowball-- simultaneously serve to advance more important and less comical aspects of the story line.

Generally the characters are comically but sympathetically drawn, presented to us as a member of the family might see them, and of course it is Rosacoke who does most of the seeing.

Then there is the off-stage character, Wesley whose power of personality is expressed through absence. His character will be developed along this line in the novel-- Wesley exerts his greatest influence by not being there.

Tone:

Sad and funny at the same time-- this mixture of tone must be delicately achieved. Price has learned a good deal from Welty in this department (from stories with a more serious edge than "Why I live at the P.O.). And it's the same fine mixture that Anne Tyler (admirer of Welty and student of Price) has used so successfully.

Within the story there's a fairly wide range of tone with smooth modulation along the way. The tone established in the first paragraphs is funny, sassy, witty sometimes-- it rattles on at great rate, like a garrulous gossip talking over the back fence. The story gets its feeling of fast momentum from this tone (the pace of events is actually rather slow).

The tone moves toward a greater seriousness and a higher level of rhetoric through Rosacoke's moments of introspection more often than not, e.g. p. 499, the two paragraphs: "Then she got up in her bare feet.... because you hadn't ever been that sick or old or alone before in all your life and you wished they hadn't been either." There's a smooth modulation from the light comedy of the 4-H Fall Dress Revue to the much more darkly thoughtful part at the end of the passage. Combining these tones in a way that doesn't jangle, doesn't strike the reader as dissonant, is the difficult part, and the part at which Price most excels.

Point of View:

As Price tosses off that the inspiration of this story came from the circumstances of his own father's death-- we can see that a major displacement has occurred as this event from life made its way into art. The author moves the point of view from the protagonist of the real-life event (Ledwell's son/Price himself) and puts it inside Rosacoke-- a mere bystander to the precipitating incident.

Once that's been done, the story stops being centrally about the real event that motivated it-- though that remains important-- but the center of the story moves to Rosacoke, point of view character and protagonist. A good example of the degree of transformation likely to occur when moving the most thorny events of the author's life into the realm of fiction.

Form:

The ladder-like arrangement of the two plots-- what's going on in those rooms across the hall from each other, connected by the encounters and observations of Rato and Rosacoke-- creates the basic form of the story. The formal positioning of the two story lines is what brings out the meaning: Rosacoke's somewhat resentful recognition of the power of death: "it just don't seem right...."

There's another formal pattern at work in the story, involving Wesley Beavers, a character who is never on stage in this story but becomes a center of attention in the novel which follows. Rosacoke's make-out sessions with Wesley would seem to have little to do with the morbid subject at hand, but the references to them are placed very near the beginning and exactly at the end, and are anchored by the third point in the middle where Rosacoke embarrasses herself by addressing Ledwell's grieving son as Wesley.

These formal patterns, which may look extraneous as far as the subject goes, works subtlely to move Rosacoke into the place of Ledwell's son, now enduring the real grief and suffering which she herself, this time has escaped. (Apparently, as the notebooks suggest, Ledwell's son is Price's own analogue, playing the role he played in his own father's death. So the story's first motives are inside him).

Also there's an element of attraction, expressed in the confusion of Ledwell Jr. with Wesley. Partly it's sympathetic-- there but for the grace of God go I-- but there's a tinge of eroticism reinforced by the Wesley bits at beginning and in. This early, Price is able to connect with the big subjects-- such as the peculiar blending of eros and thanatos that such crises offer. For Rosacoke the story is about confronting death-- witnessing it, but just as much about escaping death, this time at least, back into her own life with its as yet unrealized potential for love.

As you read the notebook entries for the early phase of A Long and Happy Life, pay attention to how the idea for a full length novel evolves out of the pre-existing story and the idea (at first) for a sequel at short story length.