A Common Room: Essays 1954-1987 (review)

Thing to Tell You," one of the most powerful pieces he ever wrote-objective, rapid, straightforward narrative centered sharply on its revelation of the state of Germany. Holman notes, "Nothing Wolfe ever wrote has greater narrative drive or more straightforward action than this novella." The version of No Door published in The Short Novels assembles the original text as prepared for magazine publication for the first time. As opposed to versions Carter incorporated as parts of other books, here No Door is noteworthy for its tight thematic structure. Holman suggests, "In many respects, it is Wolfe s most interesting publication ." In the summer of 1937 while working at Oteen in North Carolina, Wolfe revised , rewrote, and conquered the structural problems of a book "elaborate in design .... the most densely woven piece of writing I have attempted." The prose is taut, the movement rapid, a statement of social doctrine implicit, organic. Using the form of the short novel, Wolfe molded The Party at Jack's into "a single thing, as much a single thing as I have ever written." These two volumes demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, Wolfe was not only capable of writing short fiction but that he did perhaps his most successful work in shorter form. Together they make available not only some of the best writing but the last writing of the North Carolina author who was called "the most promising writer of his generation ." Price, Reynolds. A Common Room: Essays 1954-1987. New York: Atheneum. 405 pages. Hardback: $23.95. Paper: $11.95. Few writers are as generous in sharing themselves and their experiences as Reynolds Price. In Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides, he shared a childhood, an adolescence, and an early manhood-the first twenty years of his life, the happenings and the people who touched him, and his feelings about them. In A Common Room: Essay 19541987 , he shares opinions, convictions, and feelings expressed in essays written over the next thirty-three years of his life, the selections taken from "a great stalagmite of papers in my office." All of the essays emerged in response to a requirement or an invitation. They range from a paper authored by a fervent 20year -old in the spring of 1953 for a sophomore English course at Duke University to a credo of deeply-held convictions published in 1987 by a man in his 50s, no less fervent, his convictions having stood the test of time and tragedy -the two rendering his beliefs all the more eloquent. Moreover, the older man does not tamper with the work of the younger. Price shares the person he has been at different points in his life. The order of the essays is generally chronological, and a growing human being and sensibility comes to life for the reader. In a graceful and perceptive preface, Price notes, "While readers should understand that the opinions in old essays may no longer be those held by the writer who continues to sign himself with the same name, I mostly tend to agree with my other selves. I have not revised or homogenized the essays .... Good or bad the pieces appear as I first released them .... The decision not to assist, repair, or sophisticate my younger selves confronts me with matters of style and opinion at which I now occasionally may wince. But better a current wince than the permanent mistake of imposing an inappropriate later style and thought on headlong youthful work. My own Erinciple is-print it as conceived; stand ? it or discard it. But don't forget the altered sensibility of someone who now calls himself Reynolds Price onto the work of a younger and often substan68 tially different writer." "In any case," he observes, "the stalagmite in my office has yielded after all a book as personal as a novel or a sequence of poems .... A man appears. It is not an entire man ... it is at least the dressed and honest public-figure, saying a good part of what the entire man believes." In the essays Price examines his own motives as a writer and his artistic intent through a rich and varied career of extraordinary versatility: novels, short stories...