Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (137 page)

Caltech was too demanding – or his political activities too distracting – and Pierce moved on to Colorado, where he acquired his Ph.D. in physics. The subject was ‘nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole interactions in a GaAs crystal’. Now a certified ‘rocket scientist’ (a breed few and far between among neo-Nazis), Pierce taught at college level for a while, before sacrificing his academic career ‘to devote himself to the service of his people’. The turning point was disgust at a colleague in his department who had chosen to marry a ‘mulatto woman’ (Pierce’s term). In a flash he saw the future – it was Brazil – mixed race hell. Not his people at all. To prevent that awful descent into miscegenation Pierce entered the service of the ‘American Führer’, George Lincoln Rockwell. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce went independent, with his ‘National Alliance’, later ‘National Vanguard’ movement, based in the mountainous back country of Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The population was ‘sparse and all white’. In his neo-Nazi fastness Pierce ran a profitable publishing business, a radio station, and a clearing house for co-ideologues – spreading his word far and wide. It had the added advantage that the federal officials didn’t come snooping around asking about the immigration status of his wives who, in his later years, were acquired over the internet from Eastern Europe. For tax purposes his HQ was registered as a church preaching what the Revd Pierce called ‘Cosmotheism’: its symbol was the ‘life rune’. Pierce regarded Christianity as a hopelessly Jew-contaminated doctrine and ‘the major spiritual illness of our people’. If you had to ask who ‘our people’ were, you weren’t one of them.

Pierce spread his word most effectively as ‘Andrew Macdonald’, under which pen name he (self-) published the underground bestseller,
The Turner Diaries
(1978). The plot derives, transparently, from Jack London’s ‘Revolutionary Memoir’,
The Iron Heel
(1907). (Pierce claimed that London was ‘a National Socialist before his time’.)
The Turner Diaries
went on to become what the FBI called the ‘Bible of the Racist Right’, selling over half a million copies – and still selling. Pierce impudently used the FBI warning as a shoutline on his reprints. The ‘diaries’ are those of Earl Turner, the martyr who crowns a proud career of race vigilantism with a suicide bombing raid in an armed dust-crop plane on the ‘Jewish capital’, Washington DC.
(Tom Clancy wasn’t the first to anticipate 9/11 in fiction, as Pierce and his followers indignantly claimed, after the outrage.) The heroic corps of American Nazis take over the USAF silos and nuke the other Jewish capital, Tel Aviv, and clean up the West Coast, their main base, with ‘the Day of the Rope’. Hundreds of thousands of ‘mestizos’ (Hispanics) are marched into canyons to perish. Jews are shot out of hand – without even starving time allowed. At every intersection in Los Angeles, there dangles a corpse bearing one of two placards: ‘I betrayed my race’ (for traitors) or ‘I defiled my race’ (for women ‘who were married to or living with blacks, with Jews, or other non-white males’). National Vanguard actually created a ‘Day of the Rope’ musical which outdoes Mel Brooks’s ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in surrealist excess.

Many reprints of
The Turner Diaries
were called for. Skinheads pored laboriously over its pages, their lips moving as they struggled with the occasional polysyllable such as ‘Hebrew’ or ‘miscegenation’. It sold, over the years, half a million copies, mainly through non-bookstore outlets. Famously, Timothy McVeigh – who sold the
Diaries
, cut-price, at gun shows, where military hardware could be bought, few questions asked – had seven, strategically highlighted, pages of the novel in his getaway car from the Alfred P. Murrah building bombing. One such passage instructed: ‘The real value of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties.’ The novel was plausibly linked to many other acts of domestic terrorism with huge psychological impact. Pierce blandly disowned them each and every one. It was ‘only a novel’, as Jane Austen would have said, but it sold particularly well among serving soldiers and vets, he was always pleased to note.

Even more poisonous than
The Turner Diaries
was the follow-up,
Hunter
(1984). Pierce-Macdonald’s second novel is a neo-Nazi
hommage
to Brian Garfield’s
Death Wish
, a pulp thriller about a citizen-vigilante in New York. In
Hunter
, the vigilante-hero is Oscar Yeager, a tall, blond Aryan. He’s an ex-Vietnam fighter pilot (why, one wonders, didn’t Chuck Yeager, he of Tom Wolfe’s
The Right Stuff
(1979), sue Pierce?). Oscar has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado – like his creator, Dr William Pierce. Viscerally disgusted by ‘race mixing’ and the ‘mud mongrels’ it spawns, Yeager assassinates interracial couples: by rifle, knife, garrotte and bomb. Why? He just don’t like ’em. Street-cleaning, you might call it – or mindless racist inhumanity.

Fiction, too, has its chamber of horrors and in it are works such as Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic vision of Europe swamped by unrestricted immigration from the East,
The Camp of the Saints
(1973), much admired by Jean-Marie Le Pen; O. T. Gunnarsson’s
Hear the Cradle Song
(1993) Nazi putsch takes over California; and Colin Jordan’s
The Uprising
(2004) British heroes rise up against their ZOG – Zionist
Occupation Government. Top of the (dung) heap, however, will always be
The Turner Diaries
: a novel to make fiction ashamed of itself.

Mr Price hasn’t exactly hidden the fact that he is gay; he is simply a private person who hasn’t tattooed this information, in curly script, on one of his biceps.
Dwight Garner

Reynolds Price was one of that golden generation of American novelists (Gore Vidal, William Styron and Truman Capote are others) who seemed to have been blessed in the cradle with genius, physical grace and – what writers need above all – good luck at the outset of their careers. Price was born, lower middle class, in Macon, North Carolina, a region devastated by the Depression. In his first volume of memoirs,
Clear Pictures
(1989), he recalls a family dominated by a loved, but alcoholic father and a loved, but fussily nervous mother.

The world he was brought up in was complacently racist and sternly Methodist. Price would lose the one, and cleave to the other. In a late-life interview he recalled: ‘I think I had as miserable an adolescence as any human being can ever have had – at least outside the novels of Dickens … My problems were simply the problems of being an unpopular kid in a small town who was always being beaten up – partly through my own fault but to a large extent through just the malice of my contemporaries.’ It did not help that while at high school he realised that the ‘magnetic core’ of his personality was homosexual. It did help him escape – to more liberal places – and he won scholarships effortlessly. He took his first degree at Duke University, graduating in 1955,
summa cum laude
and Phi Beta Kappa. His notebooks indicate that he was determined from the first to write fiction, but he shrewdly qualified himself for an academic career as well: it would be his writer’s crutch.

Price won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1956. He was overcome with the beauty of the university town, but astonished at the filth of the Merton College ‘bogs’ (aptly so-called). He enrolled for a B.Litt. on
Samson Agonistes
with the congenial Lord David Cecil (Dame Helen Gardner proved less congenial). Most valuably, his time at Oxford coincided with W. H. Auden’s as Professor of Poetry (Wystan’s sanitary arrangements, he recalled, were as astonishing as Merton’s). Auden made
himself accessible to students, every morning at coffee time; he took to the exquisitely well-mannered young American. Price had come to Oxford a virgin and while there had a painfully inhibited relationship with a fellow student, Michael Jordan. He lost his virginity to a young academic called, in his second volume of memoirs, ‘Matyas’. That relationship, too, was unhappy. Less unhappily, Price sent a batch of his unpublished stories to Stephen Spender, then literary editor of
Encounter
, on the whimsical grounds that he thought the poet had ‘the kindest face I have ever seen’. Editorial kindness rarely extends to indulging the egos of hopeful postgraduates, but Spender realised that an unusual talent had landed in his in-tray. He rushed the stories into print and helped get Price’s novel-in-progress placed. Half the first sentence of
A Long and Happy Life
(1962) (Price loves long sentences) will convey the quality Spender’s editorial eye perceived –though quite how that eye pictured ‘spraddle-legged’ is uncertain:

Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line …

Reynolds Price awoke and found himself famous. Within eighteen months, and at the age of twenty-eight,
A Long and Happy Life
was hailed as a major literary event. It won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel and has never, since 1962, been out of print. The story of Rosacoke Mustian’s dreams, disillusionment and eventual spiritual growth, the novel expanded into a trilogy and completed a quarter of a century on with
Good Hearts
(1988). His early career went swimmingly and he returned to take up a position teaching creative writing at Duke in 1958. By 1977, he was James B. Duke Professor of English, a chair endowed in the name of the university’s tobacco-enriched founder. He wrote a string of novels, winning prizes and every fellowship he cared to apply for. He made money, built himself a fine house in the woods and had, it seemed, a charmed life. Charm and a bubbling wit were what everyone noted about him. ‘You make any house you are in golden,’ Spender once told him.

Around him, the Duke English Department was rising to prominence under the chairmanship of the charismatic Stanley Fish. At the same time the region was developing into the North Carolina ‘Research Triangle’ – a magnet for scholars worldwide. Among all this change, Price – North Carolinian, man and boy – embodied continuity. He knew everyone on and off the campus. Going into a Durham
restaurant with Reynolds was frustrating: so many people had to be conversed with before you reached the table.

But in 1984, Price’s world disintegrated. It began when a friend noted something odd about his gait. He was diagnosed with cancer – a one-foot-long, slimy growth ‘as thick as a pencil’ had braided itself around his upper spinal cord: he called it ‘the eel’. Duke’s medical school led the world in the surgical treatment of cancer. Its expert scalpel and radiotherapy killed the eel – that was the good news. The bad news was that the 4,000 rads bombarded into Price’s neck destroyed his nervous system. It was the cruellest of cures. At fifty-one, Price found himself cancer-free but paraplegic. Where other Americans might have enriched themselves with a vindictive malpractice suit, Reynolds confronted his condition not as an aggrieved patient, but as an author and a devout Christian. Although in constant pain, he refused painkillers, other than the evening martini, on the grounds that they dulled his mind. Out of the experience of losing his lower body, he wrote a book with the ironic title
A Whole New Life
(1994). As ‘an American with disability’ (as the 1976 federal statute defined it), Price preferred the honest Anglo-Saxon terms ‘gimp’ and ‘cripple’. For the same reason, he always favoured the term ‘queer’ over ‘gay.’ He despised minced words.

Religion was, from the beginning, a central element in Price’s fiction.
A Long and Happy Life
opens with an extended description of a ‘Negro funeral service’ and ends with an even more extended description of a Christmas service. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to theology and the suffering of Christ – writing translations of the Gospels and the religious meditation,
A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined
(2003). In the 1990s he also cultivated a nationwide presence as a radio-essayist on the National Public Radio broadcasting service – many of which were amiably secular sermons. As the decades after Stonewall rolled by, Price was criticised by more militantly gay writers such as David Leavitt for rarely dealing directly with queer themes in his fiction. Typically Price – as with the Rosacoke trilogy and his bestseller
Kate Vaiden
– employed female centres of consciousness. He shrugged off the objection with the excuse that the mass of ungay readers were not interested in gay fiction – and he liked having a lot of readers. Quietly, behind the scenes, he moved to get the traditionally conservative Duke to solemnise gay unions in its vast chapel.

Which of Price’s forty-odd books will last? Certainly
A Whole New Life
and
A Long and Happy Life
. His own life was, as it happened, both long and – although less than whole for thirty years – not unhappy.