Reynolds Price is not a writer in whose work nature and the relation of man and nature seem of the first importance, as they do, in different senses, in the fiction of Faulkner, Warren, Wolfe, O'Connor, or Dickey. Whatever the difficulties, though not because of them, Price is not given to celebrating nature. Beyond the dark pastoral of A Long and Happy Life (1962) and the jokes-in-character turned rather grim romance of A Generous Man (1966), an engagement with nature is consistently evident in Price's fiction through which characters receive or miss messengers, signs, emblems from the world of nature, whole lives changed in the process. "It was messenger, sign" [Reynolds Price, Permanent Errors (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Subsequent references are to this edition.] registers the protagonist's perception that a dying bat he has discovered on the lawn, lice-covered, weak, frightening, subsequently killed and buried, intimates his wife's approaching suicide. She does kill herself: the sign is true. So indeed are they all, though some are inconsequential and many are misapprehended. Where do these signs originate? "The world of nature" is an answer, true as far as it goes but incomplete. More comprehensively, one says the Great World, the supernatural, whose existence, presence, and force are intimated, even affirmed, most clearly in Price's recent work. One might indeed consider the stories collected in Permanent Errors (1970) or Love and Work (1968), the author's best novel, as religious statements, though not of a conventional variety.

When to the dying bat of Price's story one adds certain prominent deer, dogs, snakes, hawks, herons, and blood suckers, one may begin to visualize a company out of Thornton W. Burgess. Such is not to be found, of course; nor are any gigantic, ageless bears or enormous heroic marlin in residence. Price is not ecological nor allegorical nor consistently symbolical. . . .

Price's two volumes of short stories, The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963) and Permanent Errors, illustrate several strategies in the delineation of man's relation to nature, man's heightened perception of his own identity in that relation. With the exception of "A Chain of Love" and the title story, The Names and Faces of Heroes seems an effort, largely successful, at the revivification of cliches, Price undertaking to make the worn and familiar new and his own. In "The Anniversary" Miss Lillian Belle decorates the grave of one William (Pretty Billy) Williams, who died, under not so mysterious circumstances, on the day before their wedding, years before. To receive her narrative and to offer increasingly broad hints of Billy's regular destination in his unaccompanied, all-day horseback rides in the week preceding the wedding, a young Negro boy, Wash, is introduced. Although Miss Lillian Belle, by her own assertion, is "a mighty good forgetter," Nettie Pitchford, in whose house he expired, was clearly on Pretty Billy's mind. As the story closes, Miss Lillian Belle returns home

towards what she could see—the light, that was all, the sun on the spilled paint, the sudden flashing reaching out to her even down here, shining like Christmas all those years ago or like her own old eyes as bright now in remembering as some proud mountain yielding the sun its flanks of snow or some white bird settling its slender wings with the softest cry into dying light.

The two similes at the end (eyes/ proud mountain/ white bird) serve largely to decorate, seem an ill-considered grace note. We do not require to be told who or what Miss Lillian Belle is or resembles; the passage is cited, then, not so much because it fails to do what was done elsewhere—Rosacoke and the hawk, Milo and the weasel skull—but because it represents another strategy, considerably less successful.

Permanent Errors, as Price notes in a foreword, represents "the attempt to isolate in a number of lives the central error of act, will, understanding which, once made, has been permanent, incurable, but whose diagnosis and palliation are the hopes of continuance." By and large the stories are fine, intense, complex, sterner stuff than those in The Names and Faces of Heroes. Two of them will display different yet complementary perspectives on man and nature. In "Good and Bad Dreams," a six-part sequence, the first, "A Sign of Blood," introduces a husband and wife, well into the worst of times, the wife ultimately to commit suicide, the husband to survive. The wife departs the house in the first sentence yet neither escapes the other in what follows. He, feigning sleep until she is safely away, anticipates with narcissistic pleasure a free, solitary day, nine hours alone, reading, drawing, listening to music. Standing before the mirror, "an archaic Apollo," he communes with his image: "You must change your life. " Not in the mirror but out in the yard his eye catches something, unidentifiable at a distance, to be—potentially—an agent of change, and "he felt the day begin to leak from his grip."

It is a bat, broken, nearly—or as he thinks at first, wholly—dead, lice-infested, the first he has ever seen up close. "He felt instantly stripped again and vulnerable, precisely in his eyes and throat." Once prodded, it stretches its wings, bares pink gums and needle teeth, "and—surely—screamed."

He knew it would rush at his face—his eyes—and he dropped the shovel to run; ran three steps. Then he stopped to see, remembering her—as though she were there in the window above him, his panic slamming at her.

Here the complex and central structure of association which directs the story is identified. Without exercising excessive ingenuity, one may say that the bat, near death, intimates the wife, approaching suicide; that the husband's instinctive fear for his eyes and throat, the image in the mirror, relates to his need to protect himself from his wife, from her pain; and that in dispatching the bat, as he shortly does, he is, in his panic, "slamming at her."

Not yet a "permanent error," the husband's extant errors are, possibly, still correctable. Restoring himself through reflection on why the bat so frightens him—"Childhood icons? Halloween, vampires? Or older even, archetypal?"—the husband concludes that the bat must be removed before his wife returns, because, as he is pleased to think with perhaps some self-serving justice, the sight would be too much for her. But why, he asks, ought he have to protect her? "Let her grow her own rind or shrink from sight. God knew he'd grown his."

He kills the bat, easily, buries it, and shortly discovers why, as he thinks, it would change his life: "It was messenger, sign." "She will kill herself." Messenger perhaps, and reflecting, again perhaps, "the celestial joker's usual taste." To read the bat's advent thus is both legitimate in the story and validated by the author's practice elsewhere. The reader is also at liberty, even compelled, to consider this climactic revelation in light of the husband's known fears and desires, in terms of the association previously developed, and with respect for his insulated self-regard. That things will happen, that his wife is to die, may obviate certain problems for a man likely to be in attendance, even as the awareness creates others.

"A Sign of Blood" is not only amenable to comprehensible summary and fairly close analysis but represents a kind of locus classicus. The setting is not notably rural, as might be observed by way of objection to my remarks on Price's first two novels (deer, hawks, weasels, and herons live near Rosacoke and Milo). The story illuminates, complexly but clearly, one point of connection between man and nature. We see both how and why the husband interprets the sign and are left not with ultimate truth but with complementary possibilities.

The last story, of some ninety-five pages, to be considered is "Walking Lessons," which treats a young man, much resembling the protagonist of "A Sign of Blood," whose wife has recently committed suicide. To outdistance his grief he goes to visit a friend, a lapsed medical student, Blix Cunningham, now a VISTA worker among the Navajo, who has taken up with Dora Badonie, a young Navajo girl suffering through the early stages of multiple sclerosis. Understanding among the three is marginal, discontinuous; their futures bleak; the Arizona setting beautiful, awesome, ultimately desolate, terrible. The Indians are, by the VISTA man's testimony, "weirder than snakes" and survive, barely and miserably, on Coke, Roma Tokay, Skoal Wintergreen Flavored Chewing Tobacco and other unknown resources. To the Indians the writer-protagonist is simply another affliction, husband of a suicide whose ghost, according to their belief, will follow him by night. He is a witch, dangerous. To Cunningham, he is an unfeeling monster, fatal.

The crisis and climax of the story evolve from the attempt of Blix, the narrator, Dora, and a few drunken hangers-on to recover Dora's grandmother's pickup truck, stuck in the mud somewhere far up the Zuni road. After failing and losing their own truck, the original three walk out, while the narrator has cause to wonder whether he will be able to make it, be deserted, or simply be killed. The long march across country, through an alien and hostile environment, is important not as it represents a struggle of man with nature but as it affects mental processes, psychological displacement. Through the first hour of walking the cloud cover holds, the cold is bearable, even exhilarating, and keeps the snow frozen. "I had won, would win. Won what?—freedom, competence." Another hour brings more penetrating cold, a new rhythm, "the coded message any fool could read: It is possible to die. Here. Soon." Such awareness brings closer to acceptance ties that have not previously bound the narrator to his wife, dead; to Dora, knowing of her death, though she ascribes her illness to touching a snake; to Blix and Dora and their doomed union, recalling and chastising his own marriage. But the end is not yet: during a break Cunningham asks what he must do, not about getting out, but about Dora and the rest of his life; the narrator can only say that he had made his way out because he wanted to.

The sky opens "like a gullet, black and bottomless," the "fierce stars" by the tens of thousands stream their "titanic ray-therapy," the power line, inviolate, hums overhead, the airport beacon at Gallup lifts away. The saving truth offers itself, but not as a means of escape: the narrator wanted his wife dead, but he cannot, as he is invited to do by his would-be victim, kill Dora. Finally, he asks forgiveness of his dead wife's surrogate, and—as someone begins to shoot at them from a house nearby—he steps in front of Blix. He is happy, "if being past fear and with all debts paid is a brand of happiness." There remains only the last confession: "She is dead and dumb. Hammer-dead. Her name was Beth."

The end, when it comes, is as radical a conversion and nearly as mystical: a new man emerges and departs for the motel. Such communication as has occurred is a triumph, framed, drawn out, properly diminished and almost cut off by miles and miles of the Zuni road up to 7,000 feet, mud, snow, freezing cold, moonlight, cliffs. All of nature is more than backdrop, other than animate force, more concrete than influence: it is there, to be known, contended with, powerful, alien, instinct with life, with that of the narrator's wife among them, and clearly it is not—for a man like the narrator—to be lived with too long.