an attack of the heart
by Douglas Messerli
Reynolds Price The
Tongues of Angels (New York: Atheneum, 1990)
But way back in 1978 I simply could not confess to that, and replied:
"No, not at all. As you've noted, I've turned more recently to writing on
what some might describe as "postmodern" authors. But I still believe
there's much to be written about on writers like Doris Betts (a professor at
the nearby University of North Carolina) and you, Mr. Price." I don't know
if he bought that or not, but the others seemed genuinely pleased by my reply.
Unfortunately, Price never lived to see the honesty of my statement. He
died early this year on January 20th. Immediately I determined to write
something. But the only book I had previously read, A Long and Happy Life, was in the mid-1960s, a few years after it
was published in 1962. I would have been happy to reread it, but our local
Beverly Hills Library did not own a copy. So I chose, instead, a fiction from
Reynolds' mid-career, coming after some of his better known works, A Generous Man, The Surface of Earth, and
Kate Vaiden and before his completion
of his Great Circle trilogy.
Accordingly, I'm not sure that this book is truly representative of
Price's work, but it does seem honest and somewhat autobiographically based,
or, perhaps, I should say it seems largely authentic, filled with the detail of
a 1954 boys' camp in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, where the 21-year-old
"hero," Bridge Boatner, takes on the responsibilities of caring for
several rowdy boys, living in large room in a summer camp. In that sense,
Price's fiction might almost be read as an all-male version of his mentor,
Eudora Welty's long story, "Moon Lake."
Like Welty's story, wherein one young orphan girl, Easter, seems far
more mature and daring than the other giggling schoolgirls, in The Tongues of Angels, one young boy,
Rafe Noren, also a kind of orphan (he has seen his mother and her maid
murdered) possesses talents and knowledge that awe both the other "reedy
voiced" boys and the young Boatner, a budding painter trying to lay to
rest his own demons connected with father's recent death.
Rafe, blessed with a beautiful smile, but also mercurial and far too
deep of a thinker for a boy of his age, helps Boatner to find his way not only
in his painting, spurring him to do far greater things and simply to see far more that he has before, but
also to deal with the past. Like most 21-year-olds Boatner is, in several ways,
no more mature than the boys whom he must teach and care for. First of all, he
is still a virgin. Secondly he
is—somewhat like the author of this book—a sentimentalist; as he describes himself,
he is an "easy weeper."
My eyes tear
freely at the least intensification of gladness,
almost never at
anger or grief. I fog up for instance at TV
commercials that
advertise long-distance phone calls—sons
calling their
mothers who drown in tears.
And finally, Bridge Boatner is
simply unprepared for life. As an only child, he has been coddled and kept safe
from the dangers that lurk in the corners of his young charge's eyes. A visit
with another camp counselor to the Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville, almost
leads him to promise to marry the young country girl living within. His friend
Kev pulls him safely away from self-destruction.
So it is no surprise that a figure like Rafe Noren, the son of a wealthy
plantation owner, who quotes the Corinthians bible passage behind the fiction's
title—"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling
cymbal."—should be somewhat incomprehensible
to his elder; and, while Boatner is able to save the boy from a poisonous
snakebite, in the end he is unable to charitably give Rafe the love he truly
needs.
There is almost a bitterness in Boatner's statement that the
"really rich are different from
you and me—they're starved. And what they crave of course is what we never give
them. The way other people want peace and quiet, the rich want absolute love
and loyalty in spite of their
money."
It is his inability to show his love to Rafe that Boatner truly fails.
But in presenting this figure the way he does, Price also takes an easy way
out. The story he tells, apparently, is told to the narrator's sons, years
later, as an explanation of the painting upon his wall and a kind of confession
for what he sees were his failures. Yet, it is just not believable, given the
character Price has created in Boatner, that he is a heterosexual with a
sensitive past.
I can well understand why the author, himself gay, did not wish to
implant a gay man in a room with young boys for several weeks. The
complications of what that might suggest, and the critical reverberations would
be more than painful. But yet the way Price tells this story calls out for that
explanation for both the deep bonding of the two and the later withholding of
love. It is as if Price has refused the implications of his own tale. I cannot
for one moment believe Boatner's desire for a young woman named Viemme, who,
the one time he calls, betrays him by staying out all night in a place she
cannot be reached. Everything that moves him, that energizes Boatner and pushes
him into ecstatic delights lies in the boy's camp, encapsulated in Rafe Noren
and in the Indian lore taught by a Native American named Day, both representing
something "outside" the normative community. Finally, it is difficult
to comprehend why the painter's request to "draw the boy" should
invoke such guilt as Boatner displays if that offer did not implicitly contain
the sexual implications the phrase often suggests. There is no real connection
between his request and Rafael's subsequently being bitten by a rattler—unless
it's a symbolic one.
It seems to me that Bridge Boatner needed far more understanding of
himself than his creator has allowed him. Certainly his sexuality and his need
to contain that in the situation in which he has found himself, would help to
clarify the book's sad ending, in which the young beloved boy (seen as a true
angel by everyone in camp) is found dead of a stroke at the sacred Indian
prayer circle above their cabins. Price describes it as a stroke, while the
reader understands it as an attack of the heart.
Los Angeles, March 6, 2011
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions
(March 2011).
