by Peter Taylor
1949
“The Death of a Kinsman,” a one-act play, appears in the winter number of The Sewanee Review. Miserable at the University of Indiana, where neither housing nor office accommodations are satisfactory, decides to return to Woman’s College in the fall. Spends summer with Jarrell on Spring Garden Street, then, in September, buys a house in Hillsborough, forty miles east of campus. Delivers the final draft of his novel, now titled “A Woman of Means,” to Robert Giroux.
1950
Eleanor, who had written prose as an undergraduate, enrolls in Jarrell’s creative writing class and begins to write poems, two of which soon appear in Poetry magazine. In May, A Woman of Means is published by Harcourt, Brace to mixed reviews. (The New York Herald Tribune finds it a “work of very solid merit” but “not, however, the fully realized novel for which a reader of Mr. Taylor’s excellent short stories could wish.”) When awarded a Guggenheim for the academic year 1950–51, Taylor arranges for Robie Macauley to teach his classes at Greensboro. Writes three stories during his paid year off: “Two Ladies in Retirement,” “What You Hear from ’Em?,” and “Bad Dreams.” “Their Losses,” first published in The New Yorker, is reprinted in Prize Stories 1950: The O. Henry Awards, the first of seven stories by Taylor that will appear in the series through 1982.
1951
In the fall, Jarrell leaves Greensboro, and he and Taylor sell the duplex. Taylor accepts an invitation to teach as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1952.
1952
The Taylor family is unhappy in their crowded quarters in Chicago’s Plaisance Hotel, at 1545 East Sixtieth Street, opposite Jackson Park. In the spring Taylor is awarded a writing grant of a thousand dollars by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Soon afterward he is approached by Kenyon’s new president, Gordon Keith Chalmers, to become an associate professor of English and dramatic literature at the college. In the summer the family moves to Gambier, Ohio, and Taylor rents the house of a faculty member on one-year leave. Renews his acquaintance with John Crowe Ransom, finds a good friend in drama professor James E. Michael, and soon involves himself in the affairs of both Ransom’s Kenyon Review and the college’s theater department.
1953
Assembles a second volume of short stories and resolves to write a new, almost novella-length story to cap the collection. (This story, “The Dark Walk,” will occupy most of his working hours from February to September.) In the summer leases a substantial brick house from Kenyon College. (The eleven-room house, on Brooklyn Street, was built in the 1830s and, he tells Katharine White, is “just to our taste.”) In the fall becomes obsessed with every detail of James Michael’s staging of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at Kenyon’s Hill Theater and resolves to write a full-length stage play.
1954
On April 29 The Widows of Thornton, comprising eight stories and the play “The Death of a Kinsman,” is published by Harcourt, Brace. The collection is dedicated to Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. (Orville Prescott of The New York Times writes that “Taylor’s precise artistry, his skill with dialogue, and his insight into what makes a traditional Southern reaction to life slightly different from a non-Southern one are all admirable. [These stories] are all in the general tradition of Chekhov’s ironic melancholy and static action [and] all of them are good.”) In June, Taylor is awarded a three-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing him to teach half time at half his salary during the 1954–55 academic year. Begins work on a four-act stage play based on childhood memories of Washington Terrace.
1955
Son, Peter Ross Taylor, known as Ross, born on February 7. In April Taylor is named a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom and France for the academic year 1955–56. Family spends July and August in Oxford, where Taylor lectures in creative writing at the Fulbright-sponsored Conference on American Studies. They then settle in Paris, where they rent a six-room flat at 20 boulevard St.-Michel, their home through the following April. Completes and copyrights a draft of his play, “Tennessee Day in St. Louis.”
1956
Kenyon classmate David McDowell, now an editor at Random House, negotiates a three-book contract with Taylor—a play, a novel, and a third collection of stories. From May to August the family lives at the Villa Gemma, in Rapallo, Italy. In the fall family returns to Kenyon where Taylor is to teach creative writing and playwriting.
1957
In February Tennessee Day in St. Louis is published by Random House. On April 27 the play is given its premiere in a Kenyon student production directed by James Michael. In the fall, during the months following the sudden death of Taylor’s good friend President Chalmers, Kenyon’s acting president, Frank Bailey, terminates the Taylors’ lease on their Brooklyn Street house, repurposes the property, and, among other reforms, moves to cut the budget of The Kenyon Review. Taylor, feeling betrayed by Bailey, accepts a better-paying position as professor of creative writing at nearby Ohio State University, where he will be required to teach during spring semesters only. In summer purchases house at 25 Bullitt Park Place, in Bexley, a southeastern suburb of Columbus. In October Katharine White retires from The New Yorker, and William Maxwell is named Taylor’s new editor at the magazine. David McDowell leaves Random House to cofound the publishing firm of McDowell, Obolensky, and invites Taylor to follow him there.
1958
In January travels to Memphis for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, which they celebrate with a party for two hundred guests, and then begins teaching at Ohio State. (“Columbus is an O.K. place,” Taylor will tell Robert Lowell. “It is exactly as though I’d gone back to Memphis to live—but without my past to haunt me.”) The Taylors summer in Bonassola, a beach town in the Italian Riviera. (Also vacationing in nearby Levanto are Randall Jarrell and the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald.) They spend the fall at 20 via Montevideo, in Rome, often in the company of Robert Penn Warren and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark.
1959
“Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” published in The Kenyon Review during the previous spring, is awarded the O. Henry First Prize and is also included in The Best American Short Stories 1959. Taylor’s third collection of stories, Happy Families Are All Alike, is published by McDowell, Obolensky on November 25. (The New York Times calls the book’s appearance “a literary event of the first importance,” and the Sunday Times Book Review says that these ten recent stories, “like all fine works of art, are beautifully wrought . . . full of imaginative subtlety . . . [and] insure the author very heavily against oblivion.”)
1960
When William Maxwell takes a sabbatical from The New Yorker to complete a novel, Taylor is reassigned to fiction editor Roger Angell. The Taylors spend the summer in Monteagle, Tennessee, renting the same cottage in which they had honeymooned seventeen years earlier. The Ford Foundation, which in February had granted Taylor the opportunity to spend a year “in a close working relationship with a theatre company” in the U.K. or the U.S.A., assigns him to London’s Royal Court Theatre. In late July the family leases a flat at 25 Kensington Gate, in southwest London, and Taylor begins his tenure with the English Stage Company, attending all of their workshops, rehearsals, and performances. (The company’s fifty-year-old artistic director, George Devine, is known as an advocate for contemporary British playwrights, including Edward Bond, Christopher Logue, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker.) In October Eleanor’s first collection of poems, Wilderness of Ladies, is published by McDowell, Obolensky. (She will publish five further collections, the last in 2009, and receive several honors for her work, including, in 2010, the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize.)
1961
George Devine reads Taylor’s plays and tells the author that there is “no place for them in the modern theatre.” Taylor, deeply hurt, cuts short his tenure with the English Stage Company, returning to Ohio in May rather than July. The family enjoys the first of many summers in their own Monteagle cottage, which
Taylor had financed at the end of the previous summer. On September 6 “Delayed Honeymoon,” a New York Theatre Guild adaptation of Taylor’s story “Reservations,” is broadcast live on CBS television’s United States Steel Hour. Taylor complains to Roger Angell that the screenwriter, Robert Van Scoyk, and the lead actors, Elinor Donahue and Larry Blyden, had reduced his story of wedding-night anxieties to mere “situation comedy.”
1962
Taylor is promoted to full professor of English at Ohio State. In the fall, Andrew Lytle, editor of The Sewanee Review, publishes a special Peter Taylor number of the quarterly featuring Taylor’s story “At the Drugstore,” two essays on his fiction, and a consideration of his plays.
1963
In February Randall Jarrell, who had lately returned to the faculty of Woman’s College, informs Taylor that in 1964 the school will reincorporate and expand as the racially integrated, coeducational University of North Carolina–Greensboro. By late spring Taylor has negotiated a teaching contract with Greensboro and made an offer on a large clapboard house at 114 Fisher Park Circle.
1964
On February 28 Taylor’s fourth collection, Miss Leonora When Last Seen, is published by Ivan Obolensky, Inc. The volume comprises six recent stories and ten others reprinted from A Long Fourth and The Widows of Thornton. (“The condition of Mr. Taylor’s art,” says The New York Times, “gives rise to real people meditating actual problems. . . . These stories multiply their meanings. They have enduring interest.”) Obolensky, who had broken with McDowell at the end of 1960, pressures Taylor for the novel that McDowell had signed up in 1956. At the end of the summer, with the family in need of ready cash, Taylor reluctantly sells the Monteagle cottage. In the fall serves as visiting professor in creative writing at Harvard University. He lives in a bachelor apartment on the eleventh floor of Leverett House, overlooking the Charles River, while Eleanor remains in Greensboro with fifteen-year-old Katie and nine-year-old Ross. Renews old friendships with Robert Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald, and makes new ones with poet Adrienne Rich and playwright William Alfred. Students include future novelists John Casey and James Thackara and filmmaker James Toback, all of whom will become friends for the rest of Taylor’s life.
1965
Returns to Greensboro to find Jarrell suffering severe depression and the manic side effects of Elavil. Taylor works on a novel, “The Pilgrim Sons,” and completes a draft of a new stage play, “The Girl from Forked Deer.” On October 14 Jarrell steps into the path of a car on a highway near Chapel Hill, an act that Taylor will come to accept as a suicide. Brother-in-law Millsaps Fitzhugh, at age sixty-two, dies on October 7, and his father, at age eighty-one, on November 13. In a year-end letter to a friend, Taylor writes: “It was Millsaps who introduced me to Tolstoy and Chekhov, Randall who taught me how to read them, and Father who made it possible to understand a good deal of the subject matter. I loved all three of them.”
1966
On February 28, at Yale University, Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and others speak at a memorial service for Jarrell. Robert Giroux, who had edited Jarrell at Harcourt, Brace, is so moved by their words that he invites the three friends to coedit a tribute volume, Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968). Renewed acquaintance with Taylor leads Giroux to buy the contract for “The Pilgrim Sons” from Obolensky. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allows Taylor to take a leave of absence from Greensboro for the 1966–67 academic year. In the fall he is promoted to Alumni Distinguished Professor of the University of North Carolina–Greensboro.
1967
Works on his novel and revises his play throughout the winter and spring. On March 19 sister Sally Taylor Fitzhugh dies, in Memphis, at the age of fifty-six, after a long bout with emphysema. (“The loss of Randall and Dad was hard,” Taylor tells Lowell that summer, “but with Sally [the sadness] won’t go away.”) Taylor accepts an invitation from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, to join the English faculty as head of the creative writing program. Signs a one-year lease on a four-bedroom clapboard house—the largest yet, and the best for entertaining—at 1101 Rugby Road, near the main campus. Over the next sixteen years he will make many close friends among the university’s students and faculty, including Ann Beattie, Fred Chappell, James Alan McPherson, Breece D’J Pancake, and Alan Williamson.
1968
Struggles with his novel “The Pilgrim Sons,” two chapters of which, “A Cheerful Disposition” and “Daphne’s Lover,” are placed in The Sewanee Review. Play, retitled “A Stand in the Mountains,” is printed, with a long preface by the author, in the spring number of The Kenyon Review. The preface is an extended historical gloss on the play’s social milieu—that of the summer community in Monteagle, especially the subset of reactionary intellectuals who, in the 1930s and ’40s, saw the mountain resort as a “last stand” for fading Southern agrarian virtues. In April returns to Kenyon for an eightieth-birthday celebration for John Crowe Ransom. In Gambier, he reunites with his old Douglass House friends and meets Ransom’s editor, Judith Jones, of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. After vainly attempting to purchase 1101 Rugby Road in Charlottesville, buys a two-story brick house about a block away, number 917, which had been previously owned, from 1959 to 1962, by William Faulkner. In September Robert Giroux agrees to contractually substitute a volume of collected stories for the novel “The Pilgrim Sons.” In December, after a long series of rejections from Roger Angell, Taylor declines to sign his first-refusal agreement with The New Yorker, ending his twenty-year relationship with the magazine.
1969
In February Taylor is informed that, in May, he will be inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He is unable to attend the ceremony, however, as his mother is in failing health. On May 18 she dies, in Memphis, at the age of eighty-two. A contest over her will precipitates a permanent break between the Taylor siblings. (Peter and his surviving sister, Mettie Taylor Dobson, will never forgive brother Bob for making grasping legal maneuvers as executor of their mother’s estate.) By the end of the summer Taylor makes a down payment on Brooks House, a century-old house on Main Street, Sewanee, near the campus of the University of the South. On August 28 The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The volume of twenty-one stories is dedicated to his late mother, “Katherine Taylor Taylor, who was the best teller of tales I know . . .” (The reviews range from the respectful to the ecstatic. “[Taylor] writes stories that are more than neatly crafted,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in The Southern Review. “They are both hallucinatory and articulate, the violence of [his] vision being bracketed by, even tamed by, the intelligent and gracious voice of his narrators. . . . This Collected Stories is one of the major books of our literature.”) In October, James Michael mounts a Kenyon production of A Stand in the Mountains, which Taylor thinks “works” more successfully than Tennessee Day in St. Louis. Turns away from fiction to write a series of one-act plays centering on ghosts, both real and imagined.
1970
In the spring four of his ghost plays are published in literary journals (three in Shenandoah, the other in The Virginia Quarterly Review). His mother’s estate finally settled, he pays off the mortgage on 917 Rugby Road and for the first time becomes a homeowner. In the fall he also makes a down payment on yet another property—a log farmhouse in Advance Mills, Virginia, that he calls Cohee and imagines using as his summer writing studio. Taylor urges Farrar, Straus to publish “The Collected Plays of Peter Taylor,” but Giroux refuses until at least one of the plays receives a major production. Giroux sponsors Taylor for membership in The Players, a private society for New York theater professionals founded in 1888. Once a month The Players’ clubhouse, at 16 Gramercy Park, becomes Taylor’s weekend home, its library a place of study and its membership a window on Manhattan’s theatrical world.
1971
Writes four further ghost plays, three of which will be published in The Sewanee Review, the other in Shena
ndoah. On May 28 “A Stand in the Mountains” is given a semiprofessional production by the Barter Theater Company of Abingdon, Virginia, courtesy of artistic director Robert Porterfield, an acquaintance from The Players. In June, Taylor receives an honorary doctorate in letters from Kenyon. After the ceremony, at the college’s Hill Theatre, Taylor is delighted by an evening of three of his ghost plays staged by his old friend James Michael.
1972
In January informs Robert Giroux that he has abandoned “The Pilgrim Sons” and offers in its place a collection of ghost plays. When Giroux demurs, Charles P. Corn, a former assistant at Shenandoah now an editor at Houghton Mifflin, acquires rights to the volume and also to a future collection of stories.
1973
On February 14 Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces, dedicated to his Kenyon colleague James Michael, is published by Houghton Mifflin Company. An eighth dramatic piece, “The Early Guest,” appears in the Winter number of Shenandoah. In early summer Taylor divests himself of all his properties—the Faulkner house, Brooks House, and Cohee—in order to purchase Clover Hill, a large eighteenth-century farmhouse in Albemarle County, about ten miles from Charlottesville. In September Peter and Eleanor, their children now grown, take a furnished apartment at 19 Ware Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Taylor begins a term as visiting professor at Harvard. Their social circle that fall includes Robert Lowell, his new wife Caroline Blackwood, Robert Fitzgerald, Octavio Paz, and Elizabeth Bishop. At Christmas they return to Clover Hill, their possessions still in boxes and moving crates there.
1974
In the winter begins to write fiction for the first time in five years. The new stories are short and concentrated, and their sentences are arranged on the page like verse. (Taylor calls them story-poems or, jokingly, stoems. “They look like poems,” he tells Robert Lowell. “I don’t kid myself that they are poems.”) In May, while helping improve the nine acres at Clover Hill, he suffers a near-fatal heart attack. During the six long months of his recuperation he decides to sell Clover Hill and purchase 1101 Rugby Road, Charlottesville, which has at last come on the market. At the advice of his heart surgeon, Dr. Richard Crampton, he stops smoking, abstains from liquor, and waters his wine. He experiences several brief but intense episodes of depression, yet continues to work on his story-poems. John Crowe Ransom dies, at age eighty-six, on July 3. In the fall Taylor accepts an invitation from Harvard to teach every spring for the next four years.
