Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

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  PETER TAYLOR

  COMPLETE STORIES

  1938–1959

  Ann Beattie, editor

  THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

  Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2017 by

  Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Ann Beattie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

  the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  All texts published by arrangement with the Estate of Peter Taylor.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

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  ISBN 978–1–59853–542–6

  eISBN 978–1–59583–568–6

  Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories

  is kept in print with a gift from

  THE GEOFFREY C. HUGHES FOUNDATION

  to the Guardians of American Letters Fund,

  established by the Library of America

  to ensure that every volume in the series

  will be permanently available.

  Contents

  COMPLETE STORIES 1938–1959

  Introduction by Ann Beattie

  A Spinster’s Tale

  Cookie

  Sky Line

  The Fancy Woman

  The School Girl

  A Walled Garden

  Attendant Evils

  Rain in the Heart

  The Scoutmaster

  Allegiance

  A Long Fourth

  Porte Cochere

  A Wife of Nashville

  Their Losses

  Uncles

  Two Ladies in Retirement

  What You Hear from ’Em?

  Bad Dreams

  The Dark Walk

  1939

  The Other Times

  Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time

  Promise of Rain

  Je Suis Perdu

  A Friend and Protector

  Guests

  The Little Cousins

  Heads of Houses

  Miss Leonora When Last Seen

  UNDERGRADUATE STORIES 1936–1939

  The Party

  The Lady Is Civilized

  The Life Before

  Chronology

  Note on the Texts

  Notes

  Index of Titles

  Introduction

  BY ANN BEATTIE

  MATTHEW HILLSMAN TAYLOR JR., nicknamed Pete, decided early to become simply Peter Taylor. The name has a certain directness, as well as a hint of elegance. Both qualities were also true of his writing, though his directness was reserved for energizing inanimate objects, as well as for presenting physical details. (His sidelong psychological studies, on the other hand, take time to unfold.) It was also his tendency to situate his characters within precisely rendered historical and social settings. His stories deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering—by the verbal equivalent to what painters call atmospheric perspective. Their surfaces are no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.

  Born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917, Taylor was a self-proclaimed “mama’s boy,” though he said his mother never showed favoritism among her children: he had an older brother and two older sisters. She was old-fashioned, even for her day. Still, he adored her, and women were often the objects of his fictional fascination. The women in Taylor’s stories are capable, intelligent, if sometimes unpredictable in their eccentricities as well as in their fierce energies and abilities. Obi-Wan Kenobi wouldn’t need to wish them anything: they already have the Force.

  How wonderful that all the stories are now collected in two volumes in the Library of America series. A reader unfamiliar with Taylor’s work will here become an archaeologist; American history, especially the Upper South’s history of racial divisions and sometimes dubious harmonies, is everywhere on full display. Taylor was raised with servants. The woman who was once his father’s nurse also cared for him. Traditions were handed down, as were silver and obligation. Though he seldom writes about people determined to overturn the social order, Taylor never flinches when presenting encounters between whites and blacks—whether affectionate, indifferent, or unkind—and dramatizes them forthrightly.

  The stories, rooted in daily life, use the quotidian as their point of departure into more complex matters. Writers have little use for the usual. Whenever a writer takes the pose that the events of his story are typical and ordinary, the reader knows that the story would not exist if this day, this moment, were not about to become exceptional. (Of course things will not go smoothly at the Misses Morkan’s annual dance in James Joyce’s “The Dead.”) Taylor mobilizes his characters and the plots that they create as if merely observing, as if capably invoking convention and happy to go along with it. To add to this effect, he sometimes creates a character, often a narrator, that the reader can take for a Peter Taylor stand-in: a child, a college professor, or a young man like Nat, the protagonist of “The Old Forest,” whose thwarted desires and covertness about tempting fate are at odds with what society condones and also with his inexperience. It is a woman who, in that particular story, turns the tables, and another woman—Nat’s fiancée, Caroline—who, in the closing lines, kicks the table right out of the room, so to speak. It is one of the most amazing endings in modern fiction, with a revelation that rises out of the subtext: “Though it”—says Nat, referring to leaving home and rejecting an identity determined by others—“clearly meant that we must live on a somewhat more modest scale and live among people of a sort she [Caroline] was not used to, and even meant leaving Memphis forever behind us, the firmness with which she supported my decision, and the look in her eyes whenever I spoke of feeling I must make the change, seemed to say to me that she would dedicate her pride of power to the power of freedom I sought.”

  The present tense of “The Old Forest” is the early 1980s, when Nat is a man in his sixties. The story’s action, however, takes place in a remembered 1937, just before Nat, then a college undergraduate, is to marry Caroline. His wedding plans go astray when, while driving near Overton Park with another young woman, he has a minor car accident, after which the woman flees into the forest and disappears. The mystery of her disappearance must be solved before the marriage can take place. Nat, as narrator, has alerted us early on (no doubt so we might forget about it) that the story we’re about to read happened in the Memphis of long ago. It ends in an epiphany we never see play out. The future—the “now” of the story—is only eloquently suggested. The story of the forty intervening years is barely, glancingly told—shocking as some of the few offered details are. Virginia Woolf’s surprising use of parentheses to
inform the reader of the death of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse was stunning; Taylor’s narrator, who hurries through his account of family tragedies, is equally shocking, as the information he relays appears to be but a brief aside to the story he wishes to tell.

  Every writer thinks hard about the best moment for a story to begin and end. Taylor does, too, but his diction—his exquisite and equivocal choice of words—often suggests that beneath the surface action of the story dwells something more, something uncontainable. With “pride of power” comes the hint that Caroline is fiercely leonine (pride of lions) as well as heroically self-sacrificing. This, however, is projected onto her by Nat: it “seemed to say to me.” In other words, it’s worth noting that an idea has been planted, both in Nat’s mind and the reader’s, yet is unverifiable; we do not get to read the story of a lifetime that might otherwise inform us or offer a different interpretation of what we’re asked to understand. Elegant prose, calculated to convince, appears at story’s end—a literary high note, nearly one of elation, on which to conclude. But I wouldn’t be sure. In retrospect, the story tells us a lot about Nat (perhaps that he can be as annoying as a gnat), who intermittently interrupts the narrative to inform us with disquisitions about the historical significance of the old forest. It’s a ploy to distract our attention from all that’s forming below the surface (as in the cliché “Miss the forest for the trees”). Nat writes in the present, from the perspective of maturity. Nat knows himself, yet not entirely; he feels he must do the right thing, but does so only when prodded by Caroline, a strong woman; he is adamant that he and she must find another way, a new way, a way forward in which something is lost (Memphis, his family, and their expectations of him) but something also gained (autonomy and the ability to pursue one’s passion). All this leaves the lioness a little on the sidelines, and the present-day reader might be saddened that the Caroline of 1937 understands that her only way forward is to attach herself to Nat, a man—but at the moment the story concludes, the two characters are united by the writer in their own version of triumph.

  With apologies to the New Criticism (originated and practiced by some of Peter Taylor’s most important teachers, including Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren), here is where I conflate the life of the writer with the actions and thoughts of his stand-in character. The tension that arises from a psychological or emotional conflict within the protagonist is a common theme of Taylor’s stories. As is the idea of a trade-off, or compromise. As is ambiguity, a feeling of unease that can creep over the reader like a shadow, so slow moving that it’s accepted without question. It’s not until later that one looks for its source. There, at the source of our unease, is where Taylor always outfoxes the reader. Taylor often purposefully disrupts a story’s forward momentum to delve into the narrator’s past, making what might seem to be equilibrium, when jammed up against the story’s present moment, cause disequilibrium. What makes me so admiringly queasy is not this juxtaposition and the discordant tone it sounds but what the methodology evokes more broadly: Peter Taylor, as writer, occupying the role of both Orpheus and Eurydice. He repeatedly creates narrators who guide the reader through the story toward an expected and just resolution but who then hesitate, or momentarily lose their moral focus, and so scuttle that resolution. Taylor’s characters want to come out into the light, but the person who can best guide them, the writer himself, is impelled to make them look over their shoulder and face the omnipresent past, with all its implied demands. The possibility of faltering, the probability of it, is a recurring undertow in this writer’s stories. It’s as if, in his worst fears, Taylor, relegated to Eurydice’s powerless and inescapable position, might himself need rescuing. The way out is never easy or clear, even with a narrator’s guidance, and so daunting one can’t go it alone. Taylor’s main characters always need to bring someone with them; individuals, in Taylor’s fiction, must exist in pairs. After all, his narrators are mortal.

  The writer’s use of intrinsic doubt—of aporia as a rhetorical strategy—is also fascinating. Just when we’re almost hypnotized by the narrative abilities of some of his eloquent yet dissembling characters, there comes a shift in tone, really a sotto voce moment, in which the narrator second-guesses himself or the tale he is telling, thereby indicating that everything the reader hears must not be taken at face value. Quite a few of the stories verge on being mysteries (“The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court,” “First Heat”), though not the conventional kind that pose suspense-filled puzzles that will eventually be solved. Rather, Taylor’s puzzles are articulated so that some potential accommodation, some new way to go on with one’s life, may become apparent. Though the reader may not register it immediately, at the end of a Peter Taylor story some essential riddle remains.

  Peter Taylor embodied contradictions. He often explored them in his fiction, though rarely does he leave us with a feeling that things have been comfortably reconciled for himself or his characters. There remains an oscillation, an internal push/pull, as if the mind were a vibrating tuning fork. Currently, in the age of memoir, there’s a lot of self-important talk among writers about writing as a means to self-salvation. To the extent that this applies to Taylor, his characters are proof that the energy generated by inner turmoil is synonymous with really living. Take “Je Suis Perdu” as a beautiful example. Its real-life point of departure is that the Taylors, in the mid-1950s, went to France with their two young children. The story chronicles a day in the life of an unnamed American husband and father (he is thirty-eight) who is morbidly preoccupied with aging and mortality. Our protagonist goes to the Luxembourg Gardens, where Taylor begins to expose him to various backdrops, beginning with Poe-like monstrous façades. His thoughts turn to the French painter David and his only landscape, an oil-on-canvas view from the building in which he was imprisoned. We can’t fail to understand the import of this implied link between the two men. The character also considers the Panthéon, a mausoleum for France’s secular saints, projecting his dark mood so that it, too, is personified into monstrousness. Late in the story, our protagonist seems to be suddenly overwhelmed with a kind of emotional vertigo, along with the disoriented reader: “When the mood was not on him, he could never believe in it.” The writer is always aware of individual words, and all they might convey: significantly, it is “the” mood, not “his mood.” It becomes “his”—it is personalized—only on the last page of the story. Yet again, the writer provides us with a psychological study (this one more explicit than most) not to solve the mystery of his protagonist’s conflicting moods but rather to create anxiety with its articulation: it is a beautiful day in Paris; he loves his wife and children; he’s been away from his job in America, working on a book he has just finished. Aha. So this is also a story about writing, and about one writer’s personal demons being projected onto the external world. Consider the “cute” antics of his baby son, which impress the reader as more grotesque than humorous, the boy’s spinning reminiscent of the devil’s; also his wife, who, in her slip, does not disrobe but instead gives him the slip (as one would say colloquially) as she goes off to dress; and his daughter, who is too tightly wound, her shrieking portending the nightmarish perceptions that will soon overwhelm her father.

  The story is divided into two sections, titled after Milton’s pastoral poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Sometimes described as paired opposites, the poems actually embody their own contradictions in an embedded complexity that would appeal to Taylor, who never thought in terms of either/or. Also, Taylor would never invoke Miltonic high seriousness if not to alter it—in this case, by wittily playing against it. This is a story about a man who should be all right, but who isn’t. (How many of us have admonished ourselves privately for not appreciating our good fortune?) Its ending is qualified by the indelibility of every revelation that, earlier in the story, we’ve been so immediately immersed in; Taylor overwhelms both reader and character with the intensity of the character’s inner conflict.
Our own moods plunge as we read. Here’s what the writer depends on: once we see something, we can’t not see it; once we feel something, we can’t be told we don’t. It sounds so obvious, but few writers have the mastery to haunt the reader long after their characters have ostensibly shaken off their demons. The story’s final paragraph, with ellipses that convey what must remain unspoken, the “buts” still too painful to articulate, expresses a tentativeness that purports to end with enlightened awareness: “But this was not a mood, it was only a thought.” This sounds like an important distinction, yet it’s more likely the character is grasping at straws—word straws—desperate to regain (or at least feign) equilibrium. We, however, have felt the bleakness of his mood; we retain the afterimage of the Panthéon transformed into a glaring monster. Near story’s end, Taylor expands his horizons: we find ourselves reading an unexpected parable about America, and furthermore this consideration—which we now understand has been a significant part of the subtext—mitigates the ending’s potential upswing. We’re taken aback, just as we are at the end of The Great Gatsby, though without the enlightened exhilaration. In Taylor’s story, as in Fitzgerald’s novel, one has gone to a foreign land (in Gatsby we hear about the Dutch sailors; the characters’ predecessors have also moved, in Taylor’s story, to a new frontier); the protagonist of “Je Suis Perdu” has become something of an actor (he grows, then shaves off, his moustache; Gatsby, with his rainbow of colorful shirts, has nothing on this guy). Time and again in Taylor, the visitor is never, ever, truly accepted, however well he tries to act the required role. It’s the status quo that our protagonist desperately returns to—or tries to—at the end of “Je Suis Perdu,” words his daughter utters that, we come to understand, expand in their connotations so that, metaphorically, we see it is he, the father, who is lost. We know “the mood” will descend again.