[In the following excerpt, Price discusses his early career, Eudora Welty's influence on his career and work, and gives his reaction to being labeled a Southern writer.]

[Kaufman]: . . . . Most reviewers now consider you as a Southern writer. What do you think your relationship is to the first generation of modern Southern novelists? People like Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty?

[Price]: I should say that my relation to all those names, except Eudora Welty, is a relationship of varied admiration and respect. But a distant relation. Those were not the people I was reading when I was young and formable. Those were not, and have not become, the people I have returned to and read continually at moments of curiosity and leisure in my life. Faulkner, of course, is a special and enormous case. All Southern writers who have written in the last twenty years have had to bear the burden of being called Faulknerian. But the truth, if anyone is interested, is this, certainly and simply: they write about the South, which is their home as well as Faulkner's. Reviewers who lament the "influence" of Faulkner are really only asking that all other Southern writers arrange to be born outside the South. It is a curse, of a sort, to be born a writer in the same region and at the same time as a great regional novelist. Imagine being born in southwest England in the lifetime of Thomas Hardy and trying to write your own novels about Wessex, the world that you also knew. You would have been cursed with being "influenced by Hardy" for the rest of your life, called that at least. I am serious in speaking of "a curse" only to the extent that the cry of Faulknerian influence has become a conditioned reflex among literary journalists, even serious critics; the application of influence labels being—as any college English major knows—the easiest way to (a) write your 3,000 words and (b) to avoid at all costs facing a work of art, its new vision, its new and necessarily terrible way of stating the injunction of Rilke's Apollo: "You must change your life!" I can say, quite accurately, that Faulkner has been no influence, technical or otherwise, on my work. I admire the work of Faulkner that I know—by no means all—but with a cold, distant admiration for a genius whom I know to be grand but who has proved irrelevant to my own obsessions, my own ambitions. The writer in your list who did affect me greatly, and continues to do so, is Eudora Welty. I had read a few of her stories in high school. I remember especially that "A Worn Path" was in one of our high school anthologies, but it was in my senior year in college that I read her stories in quantity. They were an instantaneous revelation and a revelation about my life, not about literature nor the methods and techniques of fiction. They revealed to me what is most essential for any beginning novelist—which is that his world, the world he has known from birth, the world that has not seemed to him in any way extraordinary is in fact a perfectly possible world, base, subject for serious fiction. I recognized in those stores of Eudora Welty's which I read as a senior in college a great many of the features of the world I had known as a child in rural eastern North Carolina, and so I felt confirmed by her example in the validity of my own experience as a source of art. That was her great service to me, and I shall always be grateful to her for that service she rendered me unknowingly but most deeply grateful for the fact that she came to Duke to give a lecture—"Place in Fiction"—in the second semester of my senior year and kindly asked to see some student writing. One of my stories (the only serious story that I had written, "Michael Egerton") was given to her by William Blackburn. She read it, encouraged me, offered to send the story to her agent Diarmuid Russell, who has since been my agent, and championed my work in the early years when no one in America was interested in publishing it. What she offered me was what any young writer demands in varying ways at various times in his career—adequate judgment. I knew that she was a sound judge; and I knew it because she was judging my work as art, not as the product of a favorite student or a friend. Her mind was filled with the example of her own work and all the work she had seen and read in her life, and she was still able to say to me what was utterly valuable, utterly meaningful at that time—that my story was a good story. Not "This is the best story by a college senior which I have read in the past five years," but "This is an excellent story. Let me see the rest of your stories." I said truthfully that there were no other stories because to that time I had only written eight pages of fiction; but at her request I very rapidly went to work and began writing another story—"A Chain of Love." And in the next three years, the years of my study at Oxford, I produced about a hundred pages of short stories, all of which were later published in a volume called The Names and Faces of Heroes.

What about the new Southern writers, your contemporaries like William Styron and Walker Percy, Fred Chappell and Shirley Ann Grau? Do you read these people conscientiously? Are you conscious of them as Southern writers?

I read them because I think they are serious writers but very different writers. I feel no duty to read them because they are in any sense "fellow Southern novelists." I have never felt myself a "Southern novelist." I am a novelist—who was reared and has lived most of his life in the South. Insofar as the South is a unique world, my work reflects that uniqueness; but my work is not, has never been about the South. Some of the Agrarians in the 20's, early 30's may have thought of themselves briefly as "Southern"; but I don't think it's been the feeling of anyone in the last twenty years, not any serious writer certainly. No, I read the writers you mentioned, and two or three of them are friends of mine, but I don't feel that their work has any special relationship with my work. I don't feel any dialogue between my work and theirs, except that dialogue which exists between all honest artistry—a relationship not of imitation but of emulation. One reads good work and that good work invites not imitation but a parallel effort of quality.

Why do you still live in the South? You often make trips away from it. What does the South offer you as a writer? Does it offer you something culturally or something more intangible?

Because the South is my home. It is where I was born. It is where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life and where I've spent the rest of my life with the exception of four years in Europe. The South is a place; and that place has been the scene of most of the crucial events of my life, both external and internal. Therefore I remain in that part of the world which has been—and seems likely to be—the site of my life.

Both your novels and the stories take place in the South, mainly in the area where you grew up. How close does the material in your fiction come to real people and real events? I guess what I'm asking is—to what degree are you a chronicler?

Every character in the novels is invented; and even the stories which appear to be autobiographical are really a kind of historical fiction, a drastic arrangement, re-invention of memory. No, I have no sense of being a conscious chronicler—either of Southern life or of human life as I've known it in my lifetime, which has after all been an enormous time in human history (I was born in 1933). What I've chronicled is my own world, that world which has seemed to me (since I began to see at all) to exist beneath the world perceived by other people, that world which seems to me to impinge upon, to color, to shape, the daily world we inhabit. . . .

[You] introduce the supernatural into The Names and Faces of Heroes. Do you believe in the supernatural? And how can you create it if you don't really understand what it is?

There are a great many things in the universe which we don't understand but make constant use of—electricity, the energy of the atom. We make use of our bodies every moment of our lives; and we certainly don't understand a tenth that there is to know about our eyes, our hearts, our kidneys. I suppose what you're referring to in The Names and Faces of Heroes would be that in the end of the title story, the child has a vision of the twelve years which wait between now and his father's death. And in A Generous Man there is the appearance to Milo of someone who has been dead for years, whom Milo had never seen in that person's earthly life. It's obviously difficult to discuss one's own relation to what you call the supernatural without sounding fishy in the extreme. I'd rather say this much and then pass on: that I do strongly suspect, even avow the existence and presence of forms of reality quite beyond those forms which we encounter in our daily routines. And whether or not those forms do manifest themselves—ever, in observable, sensually perceptible ways—certainly there can be no question that the dead linger, most powerfully, in our lives; the meaningful dead, those people who by the time most men have reached the age of twenty-one stand as one's ancestors on the black side of death in relation to our present continuing lives. That's all.

Where do you think all this strange stuff belongs in the larger context of literature? . . . What about your contemporaries and other twentieth-century writers? Where do you think the supernatural or at least the extranatural fits in?

There's a long and continuing tradition of the supernatural, not only in the epic, the lyric, and poetic drama but in the novel itself. Very obviously, the novel before the late 19th century was not committed to realism. The novels of 18th century England, the great Victorian novels—the Brontes, Dickens—are highly "unrealistic" visions of human existence. Dickens makes as profound and revealing and convincing use of the supernatural as Kafka. His coincidences alone are acts of God. And to mention Kafka is to mention the great modern student of the supernatural. I wouldn't claim that there are many serious novelists who are presently employing ghosts in their novels—there is a credible and necessary ghost in Agee's A Death in the Family, and there are the ghosts and demons in Isaac Singer—but I do claim that the supernatural in the form of ghosts is still a possible, occasionally a necessary component of a serious novelist's vision.

Most of your work is quite serious fiction, yet in all of it there's a great deal of comedy. In fact, I believe A Generous Man started as an attempt at a comic novel What role do you see comedy playing in your work?

All my work is comic—not by conscious choice but because in attempting to embody the world that I've known, I have portrayed a comic world. Comedy is almost always a function of experience, a function of life. Even in the intensest moments of despair, pain, grief, wild bursts of laughter will insist upon rising and asserting themselves. And any literary form which abolishes or ignores the laughter at the heart of human life—even the laughter on the edges of human life—does so at the expense of its own truthfulness. Certain very large and important kinds of literary art have eliminated comedy, at least so far as we can see. For instance, with the possible exception of two or three scenes, there seem to be no elements of the comic in Greek tragedy. The laughter of life was simply postponed for plays which were comedies or for the satyr plays which were performed in cycle with the tragedies. But the fullest, therefore truest, most useful picture of human life is a picture which will necessarily and gladly contain much that is hilarious, mocking and satyric—satyric in the oldest sense: a picture of satyrs, grinning, hairy, ithyphallic dancers, cruel (no, indifferent) witnesses of man's only-partially-relevant existence.