{"id":208,"date":"2008-11-07T21:10:30","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T21:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gandgmag.wpengine.com\/articles\/uncategorized\/ben-long\/"},"modified":"2017-08-04T13:59:54","modified_gmt":"2017-08-04T17:59:54","slug":"ben-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenandgun.com\/articles\/ben-long","title":{"rendered":"Ben Long"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the second semester of 1965, I was visiting writer in residence at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.\u202f My chief duty consisted of teaching a narrative writing course and making myself available to any student who might choose to drop in at the office I shared with the great Jessie Rehder.\u202f When the class commenced in early January, I made a brief and hardly strenuous assignment for our second meeting \u2014 I forget the subject \u2014 and was fairly amazed by the response:\u202fmaybe five students out of fifteen brought me literally nothing.\u202f When I expressed my surprise, and trusted these refusals would not occur again, one of the empty-handed students said, more or less, \u201cRelax, Mr. Price, this is Chapel Hill, not Duke.\u202f We\u2019re a little more laid back over here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Brownie Harris<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I was not amused, but I kept my own counsel; and as January lagged on through one of the grim winters we expected four decades ago, more and more of the students conceded that I was unfortunately but irredeemably from Duke \u2014 those eight miles away that often seemed like a thousand \u2014 and their papers grew steadily regular.\u202f Given the fact that, today, I\u2019ve taught nearly fifty years \u2014 and some three thousand students \u2014 it\u2019s remarkable that I recall at least two stories from that one course, both autobiographical and eloquently powerful.<\/p>\n

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Art Courtesy of Ann Long Fine Art<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Neither of those highly original stories, however, was by a young man who sat near the back and seldom spoke, though his striking face and eyes were plainly not missing a word.\u202f When I\u2019d ask for his response to the story of the day, he tended to blush before speaking up memorably.\u202f His name was Ben Long; he\u2019d grown up in Statesville, and though he never told me that year, I\u2019d eventually learn of his gifted and fascinating grandfather who painted large pictures with biblical imagery at least as arresting as that of any short story we discussed in our class. It\u2019s odd to record, more than forty years later, that I don\u2019t recall the writing Ben submitted in that course (but what did all the other stories do to his growing imagination?).<\/p>\n

This all-but-silent boy … had laid down page after page of drawings of a calmly assured and already enormous skill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I do remember, very clearly, is the fact that when I invited the class to my home \u2014\u00a0 where dozens of paintings and drawings were hung about all the available walls \u2014 I noticed that Ben was immediately engaged in an activity that almost no student \u2014 and almost no other visitor of any sort \u2014 had performed.\u202f He was intently moving slowly from one picture to the next and consuming them with his large eyes.\u202f He said nothing, then and there; but when I returned to my Chapel Hill office a day or so later, Ben turned up with a light tap on the doorframe. Was I free to talk a little while?\u202f I told him I was free to talk as long as he liked; so he crossed the door sill, and as he advanced toward the empty chair by my desk, I noticed that he was carrying a spiral bound sketchbook in his left hand.\u202f What was I about to see?<\/p>\n

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Art Courtesy of Ann Long Fine Art<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

First, though, he wanted to talk about my house and its wide array of pictures.\u202f What was the history of my interest in art?\u202f Did I myself draw and paint?\u202f How did I acquire most of my pictures?\u202f And on and on.\u202f I told him the truth \u2014 that from about the age of five or six onward, I\u2019d been obsessed with the idea of reproducing with crayons, pencil, and, eventually, oil paints, objects I loved in the external world. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I\u2019d very much decided on art as a lifelong career; but as I aged a little more \u2014 and saw more and more pictures by famous professional artists \u2014 I began to suspect that my own gifts were insufficient. If I pursued a career in art, I was likely to be nothing better than a competent copyist. I began then to buy the pictures of other and far better painters.\u202f Luckily, the realization of my insufficiency coincided with my having superb English teachers in the eighth and eleventh grades \u2014 women who liked my drawings but liked my prose and poetry better.\u202f Always eager for praise, by the time I left high school I\u2019d turned toward writing as my lifetime\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

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Brownie Harris<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By then I couldn\u2019t resist asking Ben about his sketchbook.\u202f Was there anything in it that he\u2019d let me see?\u202f Of course he blushed, but he handed me the pad and I slowly leafed through it.\u202f My clear memory still is chiefly one of pleased amazement.\u202f This all-but-silent boy from the Carolina foothills had recently laid down page after page of drawings \u2014 mainly portrait drawings \u2014 of a calmly assured and already enormous skill.\u202f I\u2019ve never been a teacher who withholds praise when praise has been earned, though I\u2019ve always tried not to insult the obviously talented student with over-praise (six years before I taught Ben, I\u2019d taught Anne Tyler). Once more, then, I had the big privilege of telling an extraordinarily young artist \u2014 and telling him at length \u2014 that he was dead right to be forging on with his new main hope (he\u2019d also thought of being a poet).\u202f He told me that he was hoping to visit Andrew Wyeth in the coming summer of\u00a0 \u201965, and maybe to volunteer his services as the man who swept the studio floor \u2014 any free service if only he could silently inhabit the same working space as a painter he much admired.
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Photo: Charles Gilbert Kapsner<\/p>

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Ben Long working on the Resurrection<\/em> fresco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.<\/p> \n <\/div>\n\n

We parted happily that afternoon; the semester moved onward toward its close in May, and my excellent covey of remarkable students scattered like starlings; and \u2014 almost as always \u2014 I lost all of them (but for one who became a steady friend).\u202f I\u2019ve never tried to pursue gifted students.\u202f If they wish to maintain contact with me, all the better; I\u2019ll return the serve. But I\u2019m fearful of pressing my own hopes for them in some unwanted fashion: So very few artistically talented students \u2014 writers, painters, whatever \u2014 wind up actually accepting the immensely hard labor and potentially devastating solitude of a life in the arts, ferocious mistresses that all of them are.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Charles Gilbert Kapsner<\/p>

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Detail of the resurrected Christ.<\/p> \n <\/div>\n\n

I lost all touch with young Ben Long for maybe ten years.\u202f I didn\u2019t know of his early marriage, his years in Vietnam, his return to the States, and then Italy, to plunge head foremost into serious study of drawing and painting.\u202f Then, in the early 1970s, a Duke colleague of mine sent me a postcard from the Abbey of Montecassino, in Italy.\u202f The handwritten message said, in effect, \u201cYour old student Ben Long is working here and sends you good wishes.\u201d\u202f Only then did I realize that the color image on the other side of the card was a reproduction of one of the frescoes Ben had added to a newly restored building that had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944.\u202f How could I have failed to detect \u2014 even in a postcard\u2019s cramped size and untrue colors \u2014 the hand I\u2019d admired nearly ten years earlier in Chapel Hill?<\/p>\n

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Photo: Art Courtesy of Ann Long Fine Art<\/p>

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Girl in a Red Hat (Katie)<\/em>, oil on panel<\/p> \n <\/div>\n\n

Despite my failure, in the early 1980s I slowly rediscovered Benjamin Long.\u202f We met again \u2014 in Blowing Rock and Glendale Springs \u2014 and have gone on meeting, far too seldom but always memorably, ever since.\u202f We even, in the mid \u201880s, spent many dozen hours intently together as Ben drew and painted me.\u202f Those hours deepened not only my admiration for all he can do \u2014 and his unnerving comprehension of my face \u2014 but also, I think, our mutual affection, the unique bonds that only fellow artists seem able to establish:\u202f bonds of unstinting admiration, yes, but also of the will to help one another in a kind of work at least as lonely as the prayerful life of a desert monk.<\/p>\n

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Art Courtesy of Ann Long Fine Art<\/p>

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I haven\u2019t seen Ben now for maybe four years, but writing these few words about him makes me long to hear his fine baritone voice and join him in another main skill we share: the gift of laughter, and of finding life itself mainly comic \u2014 however tragic, too \u2014 wherever our solitary trades may lead us the moment we part.<\/p>\n

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Art Courtesy of Ann Long Fine Art<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When he is not painting in Italy, the preeminent fresco maestro makes his home in 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