Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides

by Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, author of the bestseller "Kate Vaiden" and the recent "Roxanna Slade", is one of the most accomplished writers ever to come out of the South. He is an author rooted in its old life and ways; and this is his vivid, powerful memoir of his first twenty-one years growing up in North Carolina. Spanning the years from 1933 to 1954, Price accurately captures the spirit of a community recovering from the Depression, living through World War II and then facing the economic and social changes of the 1950s. In closely linked chapters focusing on individuals, Price describes with compassion and honesty the white and black men and women who shaped his youth. The cast includes his young, devoted parents; a loving aunt; his younger brother Bill; childhood friends and enemies and the teachers who fostered and encouraged his love of writing. "Clear Pictures" is an autobiography set apart from others by the author's clarity of vision, the power of his characters and the richness of his writing.

Genres: Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, Literature

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

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 taught at Duke since 1958 and was 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 was 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.

Photo courtesy of Reynolds Price's author page on Amazon.com

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have moved to Virginia twice in my life. So far. Once when I was in my 30s and once when I was in my 50s. First time it was so my wife could take a job at Radford College. Second time was so my daughter could safely ride her bike on the Blackwater Creek Trail rather than across the six lane intersection of Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue. Now, we are not talking Northern Virginia here. We’re talking part of what some people call the Bible Belt. Fundamentalist, born again Christians. Friendly people, some of whom would like to help you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Each time I moved here I tried to acclimate myself to life in the South. I tried to ignore that the city I live in filled the public swimming pool with dirt rather than integrate. I tried to ignore the fact that some of the city fathers had played lead roles in Virginia’s infamous Massive Resistance to school integration. I tried to experience some of the good things about Virginia: the Blue Ridge Parkway, bluegrass, four seasons each three months long and mild winters, a slower pace of life and my view of the James River out my window.

So when I heard that Southern writer Reynolds Price had died having lived most of his life in Macon, North Carolina, just across the Virginia/NC border, I thought I should check out his writing. The NY Times obituary identified him as a man “whose novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/boo...

Members of GoodReads had mostly ignored him as far as I could tell. Clear Pictures, the book I set out to read, had one review and 10 ratings. His first published work, A Long and Happy Life, has garnered 27 reviews and 126 ratings. His most popular book, Kate Vaiden had 46 reviews and 304 ratings, respectable numbers but nothing that would warrant the label of “one of the most important voices . . .”

Clear Pictures is a memoir of the author’s first 22 years. He has an amazing recall of events from a very young age, aided by hypnosis therapy. The novel carries him through the death of both parents. Price writes in a calm focused voice of his father’s alcoholism, his life growing up with 'Negroes', his introduction to writing via poetry in high school, his search for religion through pantheism and mysticism and the Episcopal church. He saw himself as an observer and a reflector of reality who could successfully commit his observations to paper in drawings and words. He lived his entire life in the same region of the southeast with the exception of several years in Britain as a graduate student at Oxford. He drew heavily from his life saying,

. . . I’ve never been forced to hate my homeplace, as many of my writing friends came to do. Their inability to live near their homes in a racially divided region compelled them to sever the feeder-roots of their work, with tragic results – their work underwent the slow death of cut flowers. Whatever my staying cost me in immediate pleasure and international glamor was offset, for me, by the chance to stay in a place that I knew like my hand and to watch it slowly till I’d seen it move and change through decades.

Except for the four years in England, I’ve never lived outside North Carolina, the state that sent more men to the Confederate Army than any other. Unlike a number of Southern writers in my generation, I never felt driven out of my region, whatever its wrongs. Despite the heat of close-up witness, I’m more than glad the chances and temperament let me stay. I monitored the civil rights movement with passionate sympathy from the first sit-in, which occurred just down the highway from here, at the Greensboro Woolworth’s from which I bought my boyhood tin soldiers. And I sat through hours of the impotent rant of kin, even loved ones – sad but useful hours in which I learned a lot about ignorance and all its links with fear and hope.

Clear Pictures is a quiet book but with a quiet power of the carefully chosen and artfully arranged word pictures. In reading this book I found bits of my complicated love-hate relationship with the South becoming clearer.

[Rae · Rating 2 out of 5]

I give it 2 stars because it held my interest for the first 100 pages. I found this book largely self-serving and boggy.

I like memoirs. If you like memoirs, read This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff. Or read Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. Glass Castle is a great one, by Jeanette Walls. If you have enjoyed anything by either Andre Dubus (father or son), then I highly recommend Townie, by Andre Dubus III.

[Rasma Haidri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a Sunday afternoon sitting around listening to the grownups talk... you only get all the details after listening again and again over time. It's a book I will reread and enjoy more of each time. It is rich in detail of the genteel white gentry of the Jim Crow South. In between the lines of his matter-of-fact writing style is a heartbreaking portrayal of the wear and tear of segregation on the human spirit. Yet that, as everything else, is but an aside in the onward march of Price's autobiography. Reynolds Price was no ordinary child, that comes across from the onset, and the forces that led to his becoming a writer are clearly delineated. I could wish for more story and less biography sometimes, more show not tell. He doesn't always give us the heart of the matter, the emotion. It's a "Just the facts ma'am" account, so I am less likely to think of it as a memoir than an autobiography. I am left with insight into a regional history very few could tell, a peek through the window on a South that was already fading when I lived there thirty years after Price.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing a memoir on childhood memories is not for the faint of heart. Price does it eloquently. He writes about his parents family history like how they met, their separate lives, etc. along with his first memories of home. He writes about being three (father, mother, son) then changing into four with the addition of his little brother.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a similar vein I am reading Reynolds Price Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides (New York: Atheneum, 1989). Like Mendelsohn's search to map desire, Reynolds book is an attempt to pay tribute to his own development as a writer and to a less degree as a gay man.

[Dyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A leisurely, thoughtful, detailed and probing memoir of Price's life. Uniquely Southern, he touches on all those people whose lives made a lasting impact on his own life -- parents, teachers, relatives, in particular.

His understanding and analysis of the relations between Southern whites and blacks is well worth reading, giving insight into the shared blindness and guilt in whites' acceptance of separate but very unequal lives.