by Peter Taylor
An admirer of Hemingway (there we see shadows before we suspect the source), Taylor, as his talent matured, increasingly turned toward another early influence, Henry James. Taylor has been compared (too often and too easily) to Chekhov. He admitted that he learned a lot from him, particularly how to consider things from many perspectives. But in reading or re-reading Peter Taylor’s work after many years, I was struck not by these but rather by certain other influences that I’d previously passed over: Freud, for example. (Taylor, on being sent students’ analyses of his story “A Walled Garden”: “As I read their papers, I began to think, ‘Well, you know, that didn’t occur to me while I was writing it, but in a way that’s why it works as well as it does.’” It’s not unusual for writers to write from an unconscious level, though Taylor’s level-headedness—at least in interviews—seems so atypically rational, one wonders whether he isn’t being a bit coy in his modesty.) I was surprised at the number of times the progression of a story and its symbols seemed so obviously Freudian, or to hint at allegory. When Taylor began writing, psychoanalysis and Freud’s surprising new ideas were in the air. Freud and Jung’s ways of thinking were part of the cosmology of some of his closest friends and fellow writers, such as Robert Lowell.
Taylor did not compose in a white heat, though, or dash off rough drafts. He was an urbane, educated man, as well as someone who clearly perceived the world intuitively, and through his senses. He was keenly attuned to tone, timing, gestures, and subtleties. Peter Taylor was also a playwright, which informed his fiction writing. Time and again he lets us see people acting, whether they’re gazing into a foggy mirror, as in “Je Suis Perdu,” or rationalizing aloud a bit too much, as Nat does in “The Old Forest.” When a text is composed over many months—as was his usual working method—I wonder how often he must have stared at the wallpaper, only to suddenly see an alternate, hidden pattern emerge. Like other highly visual writers such as John Updike and Elizabeth Bishop, his involvement in art began in a childhood desire to paint. He drew his dreams. Perhaps more than he let on, he trusted unconscious forces. A case could be made that his writing conveyed so much immediacy because, awake, the writer was trying to connect the dots, flashes of a dream that lit up here and there unexpectedly, in the moment of its being dreamt. Though the dreamer cannot be both dreamer and interpreter of the dream, there’s no prohibition against waking up, remembering, pondering, and incorporating the dream’s meaning in its re-take, its re-shaping into a story. What I’m suggesting is that Taylor often deliberately immerses the reader in the illogic of a dream (“Demons,” “A Cheerful Disposition,” “The Megalopolitans”) and gives us a visceral sense of how that feels. With guidance (his conscious mind perfects the story), its symbols, when they have their dots connected, form the character’s personal psychological map—one that at times we are better able to understand than the character can.
Taylor was also interested, at least as a subject of fiction, in the occult, in the Tarot, in ghosts—as was Henry James. Reading Taylor, one is reminded more than once of James’s “The Jolly Corner.” Of course this story would appeal to him, with its hints of what is unseen becoming manifest, and the implied question of what one’s life would be like if it could be re-lived. Taylor’s early story “The Life Before,” which appeared in the Kenyon undergraduate magazine Hika and is included here in book form for the first time, shows his interest in characters who are haunted: the protagonist and his wife conjure up their guardian angel, a seemingly ageless man named Benton Young, who appears in the doorway of the hotel in which they live to remind them of the power of his love, which comes as a kind of blessing to these two people who each love him in different ways. There is much more to the story, but placed in a context of his other “ghost” stories, and his collection of one-act plays titled Presences (1973), this early story is a little unsubtle in technique, yet also significant. (One can understand why plays appealed to Taylor: “In fiction you’ve got to prepare for the ghost for pages and make it right, whereas in a play you just say, ‘Enter ghost.’” Taylor could be quite witty.)
Socially, Taylor was a raconteur who never told stories for easy laughs any more than he let them inflate into tragedies. I met him in 1975 and remained his and his wife Eleanor’s friend for the rest of their lives. Peter Taylor and his former student John Casey were the people who got me hired at the University of Virginia when I was twenty-five. Was I awestruck? Not really, because he made anyone he befriended feel so comfortable. Was I intimidated by his wizardry in constructing a story? I just assumed anyone who could write them was a genius. Do I wish I’d asked him questions about everything from what books to read (his students were treated to this, because he read aloud in class) to how certain effects were achieved in his own fiction? At the very least, couldn’t I have interviewed him? I’d like to go back in time—which I think Taylor would sympathize with—and give my younger self a shove. But I got from him, because of his attention as well as his talent, what some other lucky people also received: the idea of how a person might have a life in writing.
In the early stories, and even more so in the later ones, his narratives zig and zag through time as he gestures to other literary texts, and sometimes to works of visual art, with which his writing is in dialogue. Many of the stories (particularly the longer ones) are intended to approximate oral storytelling, rich in episodic digressions and a mixing of the important with the seemingly unimportant. Readers perceive different connotations, different connections, depending on their level of literary awareness. “A Walled Garden,” for instance, is a prolonged apostrophe that sounds more than a little like one of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, though anything Taylor took in was made his own.
“Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” written in the indirect third person (until the anonymous narrator, having cleared his throat for twenty-five pages, at last steps forward and says “I”), asks us to believe a narrator who casually assumes that his views and the reader’s coincide, yet who also informs us of things no one else would realize or put together in the same way. At the heart of the story is an account of the last of the annual parties given by Mr. Alfred Dorset and “his old-maid sister,” Miss Louisa Dorset, for the children of provincial Chatham, Tennessee. Brother-sister incest, the story’s subtext, is never observed but instead is displaced, prismatically: we see many puzzling points of light before the picture that the narrator is painting comes into focus. We “see” it in its pictorial or visual equivalents—lovemaking stopped in time (an echo of Keats?) as depicted in Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss,” as well as in the busy Bronzino canvas that gives the story its name: there the naughty Cupid fondles his mother’s breast, while the child Folly, rushing up behind them, prepares to shower them with a fistful of rose petals. These images—together with a plaque of Leda and the Swan—hang on the walls of the Dorsets’ home. Into this highly sexualized setting comes an adolescent named Tom, whose actions disrupt the children’s party and upend the lives of its hosts. If the reader hasn’t suspected before, the “uninvited guest” of Taylor’s story is played against that of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” though the stakes are not quite so sensational, or so deadly; instead, they remain murky and hauntingly disturbing, since there is no one form of evil to unmask. “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” also, in places, mimics a fairy tale. By extension, it might be America’s fairy tale about itself, gone wrong: “The wicked in-laws had first tried to make them [brother and sister] sell the house, then had tried to separate them . . .” These references are gestures tossed out by Taylor’s sleight of hand that reappear in his literary layering by way of double exposure.
Taylor is a writer who so loves to keep our senses sharp; our eye is forced to work like a borer bee as it moves closer to the deeper meaning below the intricately contrived surface pattern. In this story, the calculated miscalculation of a teenager’s joke—a mock seduction—echoes the off-the-page “real” seduction (the incest of the Dorsets, who, as Miss Louis
a tells us, “have given up everything for each other”). All this is played against a backdrop of sexually evocative sculpture and painting—to which is added the suggestion that time (and sexual maturity) does, and does not, change everything. The old couple being teased, in the reader’s presence, have already been relegated to twisted figures depleted by time: the sister, symbolically wearing (like a wedding dress) a “modish white evening gown, a garment perfectly fitted to her spare and scrawny figure . . . never to be worn but that one night!”; her brother, like a Tennessee cousin of Gustav von Aschenbach, “powdered with the same bronze powder that his sister used.”
The use of exclamation points in this story is purposeful: they indicate faux surprise and mock the Southern Gothic horror genre, which insistently telegraphs its shocking revelations. In the claustrophobic funhouse Taylor has orchestrated, his narrator blithely tells us things as if telling a conventional story, the author withholding many metaphorical exclamation points of his own. This amazing tour de force, which was published in The Kenyon Review and awarded First Prize in the 1959 O. Henry Awards collection, has been much anthologized. It must have gone over many of its first readers’ heads like a shooting star. It’s meant to read like the transcript of a spoken story; it’s a bit meanderingly and imperfectly told. The repeated use of the conjunctions “and” and “but” to begin sentences says everything: and means there is a connection between things; but means that that connection is not absolute. Also, the story’s location, the fictional town of Chatham—described by some as “geographically Northern and culturally Southern,” by others as “geographically Southern but culturally Northern”—puts us on a fault line, in troubled and troubling territory that makes everything liminal. With a historical perspective introduced only in the last pages of the story, we’re made to understand that the mercenary, mercantile Dorset family opportunistically settled Chatham “right after the Revolution” and then, in the early twentieth century, abandoned it—“practically all of them except the one old bachelor and the one old maid—left it just as they had come, not caring much about what they were leaving or where they were going.” The rape of the town echoes the rape Taylor has earlier alluded to in “Leda and the Swan”; it also keeps the suggestion of incest ambient. Heedless people. Opportunists, Taylor intends us to see—analogous to those who grasp for what serves their purposes to embrace.
One doesn’t look for consistencies in writers’ lives because few are to be found. Peter Taylor married a poet, and both his son and daughter wanted to write. It made him worry about their futures—a recognizable worry of many fathers. As for himself, he took the position that if the conservative path was nonetheless the right one, however unglamorous (or because it was unglamorous), he was perfectly fine with it. For a limited time. A certain number of clichés, or banal assumptions in conversation, are helpful in orienting one’s audience, forging a bond in either friendship or literature. It could be said—it must be said—that how he conducted himself personally has nothing to do with his work. I don’t mean to suggest that he gave advice he disbelieved. Yet being aware of some of his contradictions offers a helpful orientation for understanding stories in which a turn of phrase, or a character’s casually uttered misgivings (heard as loudly as a shout), serve to make the reader listen not to what’s off the page, as we do when reading Hemingway, but to the levels of meaning embedded in the carefully chosen words or cagey digressions that are there.
Peter Taylor was a Southerner whose best friend was Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin. It’s possible that, for reasons of his own, he put a positive spin on some of Lowell’s pointed needling and, ultimately, neediness. (Taylor once told an interviewer that Lowell “invented facts and stories that made his dearest friends out as clichés . . . cliché Jews, cliché Southerners, cliché Englishmen. Naturally this was irksome sometimes—even mischief-making. He was fond of representing me as a Southern racist, though of course he knew better—knew it from the hours of talk we had had on the subject, as well as from my published stories. . . . His teasing was always rough [but] it was his way of drawing closer to his friends, rather than putting them off.”) It seems equally possible that sometimes he was hurt, though he always remained Lowell’s loyal friend. Peter Taylor was in some instances quite sure of his feelings: he knew, for example, that as a young man he must stand up to his father and—even if it meant forgoing his acceptance at Columbia—refuse to attend Vanderbilt, his father’s choice of university for him. (Peter Taylor did later attend Vanderbilt, but for his own reasons and on his own terms.) He knew the first time he saw Eleanor Ross that he would marry her and waited only six weeks to do this. Their long marriage lasted until his death. As for finally wearing a somewhat ironic crown, in 1987 he received the Pulitzer Prize for a novel, A Summons to Memphis, yet thought of himself as primarily a short story writer. Like all of us, at times he revealed more than he knew. He explained his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters by mentioning that there were “no dues, or anything like that.” I love the slight naïveté, as well as everything implied in the phrase “anything like that.”
In Charlottesville, one didn’t see Peter Taylor on the golf course or riding with the horsey set. Though he taught at a great many colleges and universities—in the East and the Midwest as well as in the South—he returned in the end not exactly to the foul rag and bone shop of his heart, but, with fondness, to a place he thought of as a prestigious known entity: the University of Virginia. In what might or might not be a contradiction, he taught creative writing while remaining skeptical about whether there should be a creative writing program. When he retired, he and Eleanor continued to live in town. Eleanor liked to garden. If she’d written a poem during the day, no visitor was told. Quite a few of his students and former students became his friends. Robert Wilson, who later became a distinguished writer and editor, accompanied him to Paris to receive the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. Dan O’Neill, a student who later became his real estate agent, drove a rented van to Long Island to fetch Jean Stafford’s settee (a wonderful Tayloresque word that has vanished from the current vocabulary), which she’d willed to Peter and Eleanor. (Only after her husband’s death did Eleanor say she didn’t much like it.) A former student routinely drove the couple to Florida in the winter. They bought a house in Gainesville near Eleanor’s sister, Jean, who had married the poet Donald Justice; earlier, they’d lived in Key West. Oddly—or maybe significantly—while wild tales of Tennessee Williams and, more recently, the bon mots of James Merrill are as essential to the residents of Key West as the literary air they breathe, there is no plaque on the Pine Street house where the Taylors lived, nor is there any Peter Taylor lore.
Peter and Eleanor were real estate enthusiasts. They bought and sold and repurchased a house, only to later sell it again. They came for dinner and, if you were renting, asked if you knew whether the house was for sale. Taylor showed pictures of properties they were considering when Eleanor left the room. Eleanor, in the kitchen, would earlier have laid out on the breakfast table photographs of her own recent house fascinations. (In an echo of life imitating art, might he have thought of them as analogous to having Tarot cards read?) They rented Faulkner’s house in Charlottesville but were unable to buy it. They bought the house next door. Later, they moved a bit closer to the university. But I don’t believe they ever owned only one house, even when limited to one location when Taylor’s heart trouble worsened.
Enough background. I bring it up because their preoccupation with houses was surprising and a bit eccentric, but also because houses and their home-obsessed inhabitants are everywhere in his fiction. Never props, houses (apartments and hotels, as well), along with their furnishings (think of the wardrobe in “In the Miro District”), are given the stature of characters. The characters are an outgrowth of the life lived within, as well as the houses’ being significant because of where they’re located, how they’re used, and what details have been described in such highly visual terms that they
convey indelible meaning throughout the story (Alice Munro and William Maxwell are also brilliant at this). The houses are as integral to the story as a shell is to a turtle. And, like a turtle, they suggest that no one’s going anywhere fast. In spite of life’s flux, houses give the impression of being constant.
Taylor isn’t Hawthorne or Poe (he admired them, but their pyrotechnics didn’t reflect his sensibility; if they were the fireworks, his stories would be the just-struck match). He did have the ability to create his own sort of visceral scariness—one that rarely had anything directly to do with obvious projection or personification (“Je Suis Perdu” is an exception that proves the rule). Here is Peter Taylor, talking to interviewer J. William Broadway in 1985: “I like to do landscaping. On the last place I had I built three ponds, one spilling into the other—eighteenth-century style. And that’s what I’ve done to this place. It’s got great boulders on the side of the hill, rocks as big as this room. And it’s very beautiful. I was even building an imitation graveyard, a topiary graveyard, with carvings and shrubbery. It was pure folly. And Eleanor’s planted acres of trees. Then there are a lot of blackberries, persimmons to be gathered and that sort of thing.” Of course, his saying this, and making the “folly” we’ll never see so vivid, remind me of how important his dreams were to him, how Freudian the implications of some of his stories are, as well as of his own use of allegory. It’s almost astonishing how easily we can read into his words and understand that he is speaking simultaneously about a literal and symbolic landscape (as in dreams). When he described his property, he was already suffering from heart problems. He doesn’t reflect on his statement or in any way let on that he knows what he’s said, but it’s easy to see that the topiary graveyard conveys both his concern with mortality and the careful artistry, the pruning/writing that he undertakes; landscaping is an inherent metaphor by which, in creating an ideal world, he wishes to prove he’s powerful—still alive.
