Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  To read a great number of his stories is to sense an invincibility about Taylor’s dwellings that make them a force to be reckoned with. His writerly interest in myth, palmistry, superstition, and ghosts is also obvious. A house, though, is the opposite of a ghost, entirely apparent. But within them—as within all of us—must be secrets, areas of disrepair, covert demands exerted. One of his major considerations as a writer is the clash of past and present, the old order versus the changing world, Nashville versus Memphis. This evolution asks important questions about who we are, where we belong (and whether we can ever really leave those places), and what meaning to ascribe to exteriors, compared with (I’m speaking psychologically) interiors. In the stories, we sometimes hear angry words from a character, a roar, occasionally hysteria—though no reader would typify his material by these outbursts. When things go out of control, in life or in fiction, they rarely devolve into complete chaos (war zones excepted), though it’s true that Taylor tends to play in quieter territory.

  Has he not had the reputation he’s so long deserved because it takes a while for his subtle, disturbing stories that gestate below the surface to settle in? Was his magic act of Now-You-See-It, Now-You-Don’t a bit too successful, a ruse that ultimately became counter-productive? His proclivity toward selecting narrators who have a cordial, confiding tone was trickery, but may have misled some readers into thinking that he was a nice Southern gentleman, indistinguishable from his fictional creations. (He must have read Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier—though none of Taylor’s characters ever blow their cover.)

  It’s also possible that his reputation is a rare case of a short story writer being eclipsed by the poets of his generation, Lowell foremost among a group that also included Randall Jarrell and the now iconic Elizabeth Bishop. Another factor may be that once upon a time Southern writers, with notable exceptions such as William Faulkner or, more recently, William Styron, were considered regional writers, whose voices did not rise to universal truths. This is not the case today, if it ever was, so it can be easy to forget that there was a time when the term “regional writing” carried negative associations, and things Southern were thought a bit unsophisticated. In some ways, Peter Taylor’s discursive, chatty stories played into a stereotype about pawky storytellers whose horizons were obscured by the hills of home. His contemporary, Eudora Welty—she was of his generation, eight years older than he—has more admirers for her stories than for her novels. At least in the academic world Welty’s novels are rarely taught (she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for The Optimist’s Daughter), though her stories are. Taylor very much liked her writing. I might be overstating the case, but it’s as if the audience already had their cherished Southern short story writer in Eudora Welty. In the 1990s, during Peter Taylor’s last years, it was her work that was celebrated as the example of the quintessential Southern short story. Meanwhile, he struggled to get his stories and books into print (in any case, he was never prolific) and his critical reputation became wobbly; had it not been for the admiration of such distinguished writers as Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates, his reputation might have dipped further—that and the unwavering support he received (he was often agentless, by choice) from so many former students in the world of writing and publishing. Jonathan Yardley, former book critic at the Washington Post’s Book World, did much to spread the word about Peter Taylor’s singular talent; a former student, the book editor Jonathan Coleman, persuaded Peter to assemble In the Miro District for Knopf. It’s rarely easy to find and keep an audience when a writer is writing only intermittently, especially when that writer is not easily categorizable: Taylor alternated between genres; he composed stories in verse (some of his rough drafts—in fact, every story in In the Miro District, he once said—initially took this form); he did not write essays and seldom reviewed books. He did not live in New York City. When his career was on the ascent, during the Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins era, writers and editors took each other very seriously. Writing wasn’t the business it has become, in a time when corporations own the publishing houses and issue a mandate to make money. (If today’s talented young book editors were Peter Taylor characters, they, like Nat, might do better to go off to study Latin.) Taylor advised writers to find a teaching job that would allow them time to write—conservative, no doubt practical advice, though having done that, he, himself, moved from job to job. Having one’s peers admire you (he certainly had that) was valued by Peter Taylor as the greatest compliment. He thought small literary magazines were where a beginning writer could attract an audience and be encouraged as one built a reputation. Now, with few magazines printing fiction, and The Kenyon Review and The Southern Review (among other magazines where he first published) still going strong, he turns out to be right, again.

  Peter Taylor once remarked, “Flaubert says, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ How can you write fiction if you can’t imagine it? And how can you imagine it if you don’t link your psychology to your characters? Writing starts with events and experiences that worry me, and I put them together. You write a story in which you are the protagonist, but you have to change him for the theme’s sake.”

  As always, he’s very clear about what he believes. It is the reader’s good luck that he worried. His best stories rise to the level of transcendent worry. When we finish reading one of his more complex stories, he’s capable of making us look upward from planet Earth, and from the South, in particular, to a blue sky, or a dark sky, just waiting to be projected upon.

  COMPLETE STORIES

  1938–1959

  A Spinster’s Tale

  MY BROTHER would often get drunk when I was a little girl, but that put a different sort of fear into me from what Mr. Speed did. With Brother it was a spiritual thing. And though it was frightening to know that he would have to burn for all that giggling and bouncing around on the stair at night, the truth was that he only seemed jollier to me when I would stick my head out of the hall door. It made him seem almost my age for him to act so silly, putting his white forefinger all over his flushed face and finally over his lips to say, “Sh-sh-sh-sh!” But the really frightening thing about seeing Brother drunk was what I always heard when I had slid back into bed. I could always recall my mother’s words to him when he was sixteen, the year before she died, spoken in her greatest sincerity, in her most religious tone: “Son, I’d rather see you in your grave.”

  Yet those nights put a scaredness into me that was clearly distinguishable from the terror that Mr. Speed instilled by stumbling past our house two or three afternoons a week. The most that I knew about Mr. Speed was his name. And this I considered that I had somewhat fabricated—by allowing him the “Mr.”—in my effort to humanize and soften the monster that was forever passing our house on Church Street. My father would point him out through the wide parlor window in soberness and severity to my brother with: “There goes Old Speed, again.” Or on Saturdays when Brother was with the Benton boys and my two uncles were over having toddies with Father in the parlor, Father would refer to Mr. Speed’s passing with a similar speech, but in a blustering tone of merry tolerance: “There goes Old Speed, again. The rascal!” These designations were equally awful, both spoken in tones that were foreign to my father’s manner of addressing me; and not unconsciously I prepared the euphemism, Mister Speed, against the inevitable day when I should have to speak of him to someone.

  I was named Elizabeth, for my mother. My mother had died in the spring before Mr. Speed first came to my notice on that late afternoon in October. I had bathed at four with the aid of Lucy, who had been my nurse and who was now the upstairs maid; and Lucy was upstairs turning back the covers of the beds in the rooms with their color schemes of blue and green and rose. I wandered into the shadowy parlor and sat first on one chair, then on another. I tried lying down on the settee that went with the parlor set, but my legs had got too long this summer to stretch out straight on the settee. And my feet looked long in their pumps against the wicker arm. I looked at th
e pictures around the room blankly and at the stained-glass windows on either side of the fireplace; and the winter light coming through them was hardly bright enough to show the colors. I struck a match on the mosaic hearth and lit the gas logs.

  Kneeling on the hearth I watched the flames till my face felt hot. I stood up then and turned directly to one of the full-length mirror panels that were on each side of the front window. This one was just to the right of the broad window and my reflection in it stood out strangely from the rest of the room in the dull light that did not penetrate beyond my figure. I leaned closer to the mirror trying to discover a resemblance between myself and the wondrous Alice who walked through a looking glass. But that resemblance I was seeking I could not find in my sharp features, or in my heavy, dark curls hanging like fragments of hosepipe to my shoulders.

  I propped my hands on the borders of the narrow mirror and put my face close to watch my lips say, “Away.” I would hardly open them for the “a”; and then I would contort my face by the great opening I made for the “way.” I whispered, “Away, away.” I whispered it over and over, faster and faster, watching myself in the mirror: “A-way—a-way—away-away-awayaway.” Suddenly I burst into tears and turned from the gloomy mirror to the daylight at the wide parlor window. Gazing tearfully through the expanse of plate glass there, I beheld Mr. Speed walking like a cripple with one foot on the curb and one in the street. And faintly I could hear him cursing the trees as he passed them, giving each a lick with his heavy walking cane.

  Presently I was dry-eyed in my fright. My breath came short, and I clasped the black bow at the neck of my middy blouse.

  When he had passed from view, I stumbled back from the window. I hadn’t heard the houseboy enter the parlor, and he must not have noticed me there, I made no move of recognition as he drew the draperies across the wide front window for the night. I stood cold and silent before the gas logs with a sudden inexplicable memory of my mother’s cheek and a vision of her in her bedroom on a spring day.

  That April day when spring had seemed to crowd itself through the windows into the bright upstairs rooms, the old-fashioned mahogany sick-chair had been brought down from the attic to my mother’s room. Three days before, a quiet service had been held there for the stillborn baby, and I had accompanied my father and brother to our lot in the gray cemetery to see the box (large for so tiny a parcel) lowered and covered with mud. But in the parlor now by the gas logs I remembered the day that my mother had sent for the sick-chair and for me.

  The practical nurse, sitting in a straight chair busy at her needlework, looked over her glasses to give me some little instruction in the arrangement of my mother’s pillows in the chair. A few minutes before, this practical nurse had lifted my sick mother bodily from the bed, and I had the privilege of rolling my mother to the big bay window that looked out ideally over the new foliage of small trees in our side yard.

  I stood self-consciously straight, close by my mother, a maturing little girl awkward in my curls and long-waisted dress. My pale mother, in her silk bed jacket, with a smile leaned her cheek against the cheek of her daughter. Outside it was spring. The furnishings of the great blue room seemed to partake for that one moment of nature’s life. And my mother’s cheek was warm on mine. This I remembered when I sat before the gas logs trying to put Mr. Speed out of my mind; but that a few moments later my mother beckoned to the practical nurse and sent me suddenly from the room, my memory did not dwell upon. I remembered only the warmth of the cheek and the comfort of that other moment.

  I sat near the blue burning logs and waited for my father and my brother to come in. When they came saying the same things about office and school that they said every day, turning on lights beside chairs that they liked to flop into, I realized not that I was ready or unready for them but that there had been, within me, an attempt at a preparation for such readiness.

  They sat so customarily in their chairs at first and the talk ran so easily that I thought that Mr. Speed could be forgotten as quickly and painlessly as a doubting of Jesus or a fear of death from the measles. But the conversation took insinuating and malicious twists this afternoon. My father talked about the possibilities of a general war and recalled opinions that people had had just before the Spanish-American. He talked about the hundreds of men in the Union Depot. Thinking of all those men there, that close together, was something like meeting Mr. Speed in the front hall. I asked my father not to talk about war, which seemed to him a natural enough request for a young lady to make.

  “How is your school, my dear?” he asked me. “How are Miss Hood and Miss Herron? Have they found who’s stealing the boarders’ things, my dear?”

  All of those little girls safely in Belmont School being called for by gentle ladies or warm-breasted Negro women were a pitiable sight beside the beastly vision of Mr. Speed which even they somehow conjured.

  At dinner, with Lucy serving and sometimes helping my plate (because she had done so for so many years), Brother teased me first one way and then another. My father joined in on each point until I began to take the teasing very seriously, and then he told Brother that he was forever carrying things too far.

  Once at dinner I was convinced that my preposterous fears that Brother knew what had happened to me by the window in the afternoon were not at all preposterous. He had been talking quietly. It was something about the meeting that he and the Benton boys were going to attend after dinner. But quickly, without reason, he turned his eyes on me across the table and fairly shouted in his new deep voice: “I saw three horses running away out on Harding Road today! They were just like the mules we saw at the mines in the mountains! They were running to beat hell and with little girls riding them!”

  The first week after I had the glimpse of Mr. Speed through the parlor window, I spent the afternoons dusting the bureau and mantel and bedside table in my room, arranging on the chaise longue the dolls which at this age I never played with and rarely even talked to; or I would absent-mindedly assist Lucy in turning down the beds and maybe watch the houseboy set the dinner table. I went to the parlor only when Father came or when Brother came earlier and called me in to show me a shin bruise or a box of cigarettes which a girl had given him.

  Finally, I put my hand on the parlor doorknob just at four one afternoon and entered the parlor, walking stiffly as I might have done with my hands in a muff going into church. The big room with its heavy furniture and pictures showed no change since the last afternoon that I had spent there, unless possibly there were fresh antimacassars on the chairs. I confidently pushed an odd chair over to the window and took my seat and sat erect and waited.

  My heart would beat hard when, from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of some figure moving up Church Street. And as it drew nearer, showing the form of some Negro or neighbor or drummer, I would sigh from relief and from regret. I was ready for Mr. Speed. And I knew that he would come again and again, that he had been passing our house for inconceivable numbers of years. I knew that if he did not appear today, he would pass tomorrow. Not because I had had accidental, unavoidable glimpses of him from upstairs windows during the past week, nor because there were indistinct memories of such a figure, hardly noticed, seen on afternoons that preceded that day when I had seen him stumbling like a cripple along the curb and beating and cursing the trees did I know that Mr. Speed was a permanent and formidable figure in my life which I would be called upon to deal with; my knowledge, I was certain, was purely intuitive.

  I was ready now not to face him with his drunken rage directed at me, but to look at him far off in the street and to appraise him. He didn’t come that afternoon, but he came the next. I sat prim and straight before the window. I turned my head neither to the right to anticipate the sight of him nor to the left to follow his figure when it had passed. But when he was passing before my window, I put my eyes full on him and looked though my teeth chattered in my head. And now I saw his face heavy, red, fierce like his body. He walked with an awkward,
stomping sort of stagger, carrying his gray topcoat over one arm; and with his other hand he kept poking his walnut cane into the soft sod along the sidewalk. When he was gone, I recalled my mother’s cheek again, but the recollection this time, though more deliberate, was dwelt less upon; and I could only think of watching Mr. Speed again and again.

  There was snow on the ground the third time that I watched Mr. Speed pass our house. Mr. Speed spat on the snow, and with his cane he aimed at the brown spot that his tobacco made there. And I could see that he missed his aim. The fourth time that I sat watching for him from the window, snow was actually falling outside; and I felt a sort of anxiety to know what would ever drive him into my own house. For a moment I doubted that he would really come to my door; but I prodded myself with the thought of his coming and finding me unprepared. And I continued to keep my secret watch for him two or three times a week during the rest of the winter.

  Meanwhile my life with my father and brother and the servants in the shadowy house went on from day to day. On week nights the evening meal usually ended with petulant arguing between the two men, the atlas or the encyclopedia usually drawing them from the table to read out the statistics. Often Brother was accused of having looked-them-up-previously and of maneuvering the conversation toward the particular subject, for topics were very easily introduced and dismissed by the two. Once I, sent to the library to fetch a cigar, returned to find the discourse shifted in two minutes’ time from the Kentucky Derby winners to the languages in which the Bible was first written. Once I actually heard the conversation slip, in the course of a small dessert, from the comparative advantages of urban and agrarian life for boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty to the probable origin and age of the Icelandic parliament and then to the doctrines of the Campbellite Church.