The Mind Roams Free

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III/DURHAM

Reynolds Price still has the letters people sent him when they thought he was about to die. Some move him to tears. The most formal and solemn give him, characteristically, the giggles. All of them fill him with triumph -- he is, after all, still around to read them.

A decade has passed since spinal cancer seemed sure to foreclose one of the most esteemed careers in contemporary American writing. At that time a physician cousin told the family that Price's prospects were "six months to paraplegia, six months to quadriplegia, six months to death." He endured multiple surgeries, steroids that distorted his mind and body, torturous physical therapy that proved unavailing, massive leaks of spinal fluid and altogether understandable despair. When the battle was over, when the addictive pain-killers and useless back braces and countless other palliatives were tossed aside, he was paralyzed and in perpetual pain. The cancer seems dormant now, but the doctors make no promises. Yet Price insists that in all but the worst few months "mine has been a happy life."

The proof is in the output. A writer's happiness is writing. In the 51 years of living that preceded the cancer, Price produced 13 books, beginning with the 1962 novel A Long and Happy Life, which was reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire as "this lovely novel, meticulously observed, beautifully told" and has been continuously in print. In the 10 years since the onset of his illness, Price has written an additional 13 books -- novels, plays, memoirs, collections of stories, poems and essays. These works include his most acclaimed novel, Kate Vaiden, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the autobiography Clear Pictures and a trilogy of full-length plays, collectively titled New Music, which have been produced across the U.S. In April Price's The Collected Stories was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. At the same time, his play Full Moon was having its first major staging, at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater.

This flurry of achievement and attention is peaking with the publication last week of Price's most distinctive and haunting work, an account of his affliction and renewal titled A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing. Reviewers are being even more generous than usual, and TV talk masters Larry King, Charlie Rose and Oprah Winfrey are beckoning. Price wrote the book, he says, because when he was hospitalized and searching for hope, "I couldn't find anything like it. There were stories from wives, from children, but no stories from survivors. I wanted to tell how one person got through a ghastly ordeal."

Joltingly frank, the dryly written tale ranges from religious visions -- Price heard a voice urging him onward and had a dreamlike encounter with Jesus -- to matter-of-fact discussions of the mechanics of paraplegic excretion. Price recalls gratefully how friends offered to take him into their homes for as long as he lived, or to move into his, and he candidly confronts his discomfort at feeling gratitude. He recounts in detail the growing numbness in his genitals and his surprise at how little he missed the sexual urge that had at one time been perhaps the most powerful force in his life. The topics are not new to conversation in households where someone has been seriously ill. But they are all but unknown to literature. Rarely if ever has a patient of Price's writerly gifts taken on the story of physical devastation. The weight of the subject has somewhat muted and simplified his normally fizzy prose. But the events emerge with awful clarity: "An even more visible mark stared at me one morning as I staggered into Marcia and Paul's big bathroom and glimpsed my naked waist in the mirror. Overnight my gut had collapsed. My waist was suddenly 10 inches bigger than it'd been the previous night. In those few hours, with no prior weakness, I'd lost all power to contract the abdominal muscles that ringed and contained my guts; and I've never got it back."

Price's message is simple: Recovery begins when one gets past pity and regret. "The kindest thing anyone could have done for me, once I'd finished five weeks' radiation," he writes, "would have been to look me square in the eye and say this clearly, 'Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now?' "

The healthy Reynolds Price was fiercely independent and private. He lived alone by choice. Now he has an assistant with him around the clock who must help him dress and undress and share in other intimate chores. The old Reynolds Price prided himself on being a Southern gentleman. This one understands the tactical advantages of "a man in a wheelchair pitching a public fit" when some promise is broken, some convenience denied. And of course, the erstwhile Reynolds Price considered exercise a waste of time, Scotch a benison and occasional gourmandising a right. The current Reynolds Price must devote 90 minutes a day just to squeezing fluid out of his legs -- he enthusiastically points out the "extremity pump," a compressor attached to what looks like waders -- and scrupulously count calories to avoid becoming a heavier object than he and his assistant can maneuver.

Some compromises were too much. Price refused to give up his home, a brick and timber hideaway up an unpaved road on hilly, woodsy North Carolina terrain a few miles from the campus of Duke University, where he teaches. Price adapted the house with ramps and expanded it to compensate for the levels he could no longer reach. Although he was offered a disability retirement and doesn't need his teaching salary anyway, he insisted on returning to the classroom for his usual one semester a year; he normally teaches a course in writing and one in Milton, but recently has taught the Gospels as literature.

Price lives in the state where he was born, teaches at the school where he was a student and writes about the towns he knows -- every day of the week but Wednesday, when the cleaning woman comes. "What she does is vastly more essential than anything I do," he says, "so at all costs I avoid getting in her way." His next book is a novel, tentatively titled The Promise of Rest and on schedule to be finished by Labor Day. "It deals with the complex situation that develops when a man in his early 30s comes home to Durham to his recently separated parents to die of AIDS. I think of it as my stint as an AIDS nurse. Because of my condition, I could not enter into that unbelievably grueling but fascinating process when my friends were dying."

In A Whole New Life, Price recalls three such deaths and adds that when the cancer first hit him, he was widely rumored to be dying of AIDS too. That remark and a couple of faintly homoerotic images in some poems at the end of the volume are the closest he comes to addressing his sexuality. Price is adamant on the importance of reticence: "There are writers who have a need for the explicit and confrontational. When I read John Updike describing sex, it just makes me uncomfortable. I would think that anyone who has seriously read my work could come up with a sense of my interests. But I resent the demand of our times that one is compelled to provide the Polaroids of intimate moments. People make commitments to be a part of your life without committing to being in your works."

That discretion applies even to doctors who infuriated him. While he names many people who were kind, and dedicates the book to a surgeon (along with his brother and his first post-paralysis assistant, Daniel Voll), he omits, for example, the name of an oncologist whom he found condescending and chilly. The exclusion is not to avoid a libel suit, Price says. It's just good manners.

This gentility is part of what makes A Whole New Life fascinating. With civility and without self-pity, Price forces himself to relive a period of raw emotion, desperation and agony. He is never distant from what he felt then, yet he is always in control.