I've spent the week interviewing Reynolds Price and investigating his literary papers. Price, born in 1933, 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.
A Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1956, Price sent a batch of his unpublished stories to Stephen Spender (then the editor of the magazine Encounter) on the whimsical grounds that he thought the great poet had "the kindest face I have ever seen".
Editorial kindness rarely extends to indulging the egos of hopeful undergraduates, even those with faces as beautiful as the young Price. But Spender read the manuscripts and realising, from page one, that he had discovered a great writer, rushed the stories into print. Like Byron, Reynolds Price awoke and found himself famous. Within 18 months, and at the age of 24, he was hailed as one of the major novelists of his time with A Long and Happy Life (a work which has never been out of print in America since 1962).
Price's career thereafter went swimmingly. He returned to his native North Carolina to take up a position teaching creative writing at his alma mater, Duke University. He wrote novels, won prizes, made heaps of money 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.
In 1984, Price's world disintegrated. He was diagnosed with cancer - a one-foot-long, slimy growth "as thick as a pencil" had braided itself round his spinal cord. He called it "the eel". Price was, literally, at the cutting edge of oncology. 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 (units of radiation) bombarded into Price's neck destroyed his nervous system.
It was the cruellest of cures. At 51, Price found himself cancer-free but paraplegic. Other Americans might have enriched themselves with a vindictive malpractice suit. Reynolds confronted his condition not as an aggrieved patient, but as an author. Out of the experience of losing his lower body, he wrote a book with the ironic title A Whole New Life.
Reading it is painful, humbling and intensely uplifting. As "an American with disability" (as the federal statute puts it), Price prefers the honest Anglo-Saxon terms "gimp" and "cripple". The most eloquent of writers, when occasion calls, he uses language with a thug's brutality. Talking of his sanitary arrangements he notes: "Since the muscles that expel faeces from the lower intestines are inactive in most of the paralysed, some form of rubber-gloved manual removal is generally required. Whatever the individual gimp hits on for a workable method, he or she quickly becomes as familiar with his own piss and shit as any Paleolithic cave-dweller."
If - as I have been doing over the last week - you converse with Price, you are aware of two things. He smiles and cracks jokes (hilariously funny jokes) continuously. And he writhes with pain continuously. His spine is destroyed, but still hurts excruciatingly: the eel's revenge. He refuses to use painkillers on the grounds that they dull his mind.
S ince embarking on his whole new life, Price has, in most critics' judgment, written even better than he did in his old life. It's an extraordinary achievement. We ritually salute handicapped bravery - but often with a secret condescension. We know that those athletes in the Paralympics couldn't really compete with their unhandicapped colleagues.
Last week some magnificently obstinate wheelchair-using American hikers battled their way to a peak in New Hampshire to force the Appalachian Mountain Club to do their legal duty and install a handicapped toilet, with grab bars, at 3,800 feet. But, in our hearts, we know that a mountaineer in a wheelchair is never going to be as good as someone with the use of his legs.
With Price (and, I suspect, with Stephen Hawking) it is different. The human mind can conquer disability and soar above it. But don't take my word for it, get hold of one of the 20-odd books that Reynolds Price has written since 1984 and find out for yourself.
