Too discreet

I picked up Reynolds Price's memoir Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, largely because the first review I read of it noted that the book contained some interesting stuff about affairs he carried on with other men in his youth. The review made it sound quite steamy, so I was expecting, if not exactly porn, then some spicy passages on love and lust. Much to my disappointment, Price winds up being too discreet.

I've never read any fiction by Price, though I keep thinking I should, so I am not the ideal audience for this book, though as a former (and still recovering) academic, I do have an interest in his memoir, which covers the years in the mid-50's when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford then returned to the States and took a teaching job at Duke (where he has remained to the present day). The first part of the book, covering his first year at Oxford as he acclimates himself to surroundings very different from what he was used to in North Carolina, is interesting, but the rest of the memoir, covering his friendships (with folks like Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden) and travels in Europe, gets repetitious.

By the time he gets around to actually having sex, at the age of 24, it's page 268 out of 400, and it's described like this: "[We] turned out prior uncertainty into an actual intimacy--it was my first experience of employing my body in one of my grandest jobs." And that's about it. It took him until he was into his 70's to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, and he still disapproves of using the word "gay" to refer to homosexuals; I'm thinking based on what he says in this book about his intimate relations over the years that he's got a little self-loathing going on. [This observation, by the way, has little to do with the lack of explicitness in his description of sex; I'm more or less joking about wanting more details, though based on the pictures of him in the book, he was something of a hottie back then!] He also states that he has rarely written about gay people because they tend not to bond for long periods of time and are not good subjects for narratives about families or covering long time arcs. How very strange, and sad for him. I'm still tempted to read one of his novels, but much less so than I was before I picked up this memoir.