Arts and Letters

I pay tribute to my old friend, Peter Taylor. It is difficult to describe this utterly engaging, witty, unusual person, son of Tennessee. This writer whose two closest friends were unconventional spirits, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell. It is not quite right to speak of Randall as unconventional—profoundly eccentric would be more accurate. And as for Robert Lowell perhaps he was both unconventional and eccentric, to put it somewhat mildly. So, in these decades and decades of friendship never wavering, we can say Peter Taylor was well-acquainted with the wilder shores. As for himself, he was a gentleman, but not genteel.

Also I do not consider his stories and novels traditional in tone and vision. We always find in his work high craftsmanship, purity of intention and perfect execution. But there is a subterranean flow of ambiguity, complication, and mystery. I suppose he is to be thought of as a "Southern" writer, but even that I would question in many ways. He is first of all a city-writer, a writer about the middle-sized cities of Nashville, Memphis, and sometimes St. Louis. I notice in his work the absence of hog-killings, drunken weekends hunting duck, even the mildly contemplative fishing tale. I am not sure that he knew how to load a rifle, on the page or off. And I remark upon the absence of grotesques, the Snopeses, and not much attraction to those relentlessly loquacious grand old ladies so richly present on the Southern fictional scene. Not that I would forego one or any of these spectacular visions in our literature. I only want to point out their absence, more or less, in Taylor's fiction.

His fictional world is not rural; it is middle-class, at least before that term was used to designate anyone not destitute. The families he writes about are often those of the best local standing—upper-class in their own landscape, even if their prosperity and local prominence would not amount to much in the East or in Los Angeles. It is true there is a good deal of the baggage of the deep South around in cooks and yardmen and assertions about what "we," that is, persons of good family, do or don't do. Naturally, these articulations are rather perfunctory, and dramatic violations of the vague code are everywhere in the stories. In the matter of location, most interesting to me are the smaller locations within the city location; that is, particular streets and what residence on them might indicate. In these middle-sized cities, placement is defining and subtle. It is not at all the "wrong side of the tracks" or even the "good part of town."

In a fine early story, "The Promise of Rain," a father is anxious about just what his son, sixteen years old, is doing with his time. He sees his son by accident on Division Street and we are given a sort of archeology of the street and then as we move along we come to Singleton Heights! with an exclamation point. The exclamation point means, This is it. To live on Singleton Heights is an accomplishment, a definition of both obvious and obscure portent. "Great stucco and stone houses and white-washed brick—the lawns are really meadows." These details have a dream-like rather than a mere sociological or class quality. In "The Long Fourth" we are told the family lives "eight miles from downtown Nashville on the Franklin Pike." The off-hand geography gives a special kind of intimacy to the mind of the reader.

Peter Taylor has made his places his own, laid them out psychologically, like a surveyor putting orange ribbons on trees to mark out spaces and contours. These corners, the left and right swerving of location, lead to inner-communities, which I think are Peter Taylor's principal interest.

The Taylor cities are big enough to have a country club, even more than one. A town needs two country clubs for one to claim distinction over the members of the other. In the superb late story "The Old Forest," the MCC (Memphis Country Club) and the Junior League, another institution sometimes called the Home of Unwayward Girls, define the scope of life for the young woman to whom the central character is engaged. The young man, however, becomes attracted to Lee Ann, who lives in a rooming house and whose family connections, as they finally emerge, are not reassuring. This is a story of great complexity in plot and setting and emotional power. I might mention that Caroline, the engaged one, must, through experience and questioning, advance morally, from the MCC to become a quite recognizable faculty wife—a bit of spiritual progress, if perhaps less fun. And for the young man, a professor with the tempting Lee Ann from the rooming house gone—his days of fun are over.

"The Old Forest" is a triumph and a glittering ornament in the span of the American short story. Its melancholy and ruminating tone, its psychological refinement and sympathy cover the scene in a benign mist. For the setting, I quote the beautiful and resonant description of the title.

The old forest, itself, a patch of woodland described as the last surviving bit of the primeval forest that once grew right up to the bluffs above the Mississippi River. Here are giant oaks and yellow poplar trees older than the memory of the earliest white settlers. Some of them must have been mature trees when Hernando de Soto passed this way, and were very old trees when General Jackson, General Winchester, and Judge Overton purchased this land and laid out the city of Memphis.

A Summons to Memphis is, among many other plot complications, about a downturn in the family's fortunes bringing about a move from Nashville to Memphis. Memphis does not come out very well in this pairing and in fact is seen by the family as a traumatic exile and displacement. Peter Taylor's serene and confident command of his art can make these complicated creations appear effortless. But, of course, that is never the case. However, he does seem to have a natural gift for style always at hand, a gift for texture and tone. In his vision of things, moral torment, individual conscience, are often the intellectual structure that supports the action. Still he is an undogmatic spirit with a lightness of touch, something of the comic stress that does not bear down too hard on the follies and pretenses of the characters. I want to mention the wonderful stories collected in the volume, In the Miro District. Here we see that the middle-sized city with its banks and clothing stores, its Woolworth's and bright lights at night has undergone a change and the treasured old streets and alleys, the churches and the public library, a statue here and there—all that is alive only in the memory of the older citizens. Life has moved on to what he calls the "flat and sun-baked and endlessly sprawling" suburbs. And for that, also, the stories show the usual Peter Taylor sympathy for whatever time and circumstance offer to his rich imagination and acute observation.