The Stories of Taylor by Peter Taylor

First published:A Long Fourth and Other Stories, 1948; The Widows of Thornton, 1954; Happy Families Are All Alike, 1959; Miss Leonara When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories, 1963; The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, 1970; In the Miro District and Other Stories, 1977

Critical Evaluation

Peter Taylor’s first published collection of seven short stories, A LONG FOURTH AND OTHER STORIES, was described by Robert Penn Warren as the product of a “disenchanted mind.” This cool viewpoint has characterized much of his drama and short and long fiction. Taylor’s increasing literary stature, however, is based chiefly on the skill with which that view is expressed and the flawless technique of his short fiction.

The world that Taylor views, and expresses just short of social satire, is chiefly the modern upper South in its small-town or equivalent suburban setting. His middle-class characters consider themselves a cut above middle class since, on a small-town social scale, they are sometimes the next best thing to gentry and are probably charter members of the town’s first country club. They have, for example, the gentry’s adherence to blood and bone and family; but their plantations are likely to be neat houses on green lawns, and their ancestral memories may be conveniently short. The Old South fabric of family is still there, but fading and threadbare, in imminent danger of being chopped up by modern scissors and sewed into something for practical usage around the house.

In fact, one might view Taylor’s world as a recent island risen out of Faulknerian seas. The theme of land, that rural hold upon the heart, survives in Taylor; but the reader catches barely a sniff of the barnyard, now safely pushed beyond these city limit lines. The family, not merely falling into ruins now, is several generations along and better adjusted to commercialism, or at least it has more muted maladjustments. Tales of aristocracy and historical grief are still told by the old to the young but in a calmer voice. The role of the woman and the black in society remains unsettled, but in Taylor’s world the terms in which each is discussed have become less simple, less basic, more “civilized.” Taylor’s characters suspect that there are no easy solutions to find, no such thing as “woman’s role” or “black’s place.” The Faulkner themes have been updated, dragged forward a few years in time; and there is less despair when the Old Order clashes with the New in Southern society. It has already clashed and does clash, but despair slides over into what Warren called “disenchantment.” Taylor’s response to his contemporary South is less impassioned grief than melancholy, less rage than irony.

Some of these generalizations about Taylor’s fictional world were justified in his earliest stories. In “A Long Fourth,” the title story of his first book, a son brings into his Southern family household an “intellectual” New York girlfriend. The tensions of their holiday visit are set against the continuing hidden tensions between the mother and her black servant. Here is sentiment opposed to youth’s embarrassment by sentiment, familiar attachments set against uneasy independence. The author deals almost tenderly with all his characters, including that generation which has not and never will catch up with the times. He describes Harriet’s feeling that her children do not exist any longer; it is as if they died in childhood, never growing up at all.

Other stories that express this tangle of yesterday and today would include “A Spinster’s Tale,” the story of a motherless girl alienated in an all-male household; “The Scoutmaster,” a picture of domestic crisis performed against a backdrop of Southern nobility (this story includes near-comic creation Uncle Jake, who bears a certain resemblance to Harriet), and “The Fancy Woman.”

The latter story is probably Taylor’s best-known and most widely anthologized story. Written in 1940, it is the funny, bittersweet, pitiful account of Josie Carlson’s weekend stay on a plantation outside Memphis with an oaf named George. The “fancy woman’s” visit is interrupted and altered by the arrival of George’s two teenage sons and a set of shallow, good-time suburban friends. As one critic has said, this story holds intimations of a society disintegrating and of a tradition that was never wholly perfect or sustaining being replaced by something even less so.

The Taylor countryside, then, is one of Southern change. His characters are either changing or wearing under their refusal to do so. He picks up the Faulkner mood several degrees removed from violent upheaval and sets it down in a semi-industrialized, half-accepting, half-reluctant time.

It is not surprising that the style Taylor employs in his short stories should be consistent with their mood and setting. A reader’s initial reaction may be almost negative; technically the stories seem at first notable for what they do not do, leave out, or conceal; but the threat of violence and upheaval exists under his smooth surfaces. Most of the violence and much traditional plot take place offstage. His technical skill in constructing a story, in weaving the rhythm of ordinary speech into narrative, in conveying character through meager but always pertinent bits of dialogue, is such that the technique seems to disappear. He sews up his story with an invisible seam.

One might almost say that Taylor’s style is a studied avoidance of style. The statement demands amplification. For example, it is difficult to imagine Peter Taylor parodied, as Hemingway, Faulkner, Francois Sagan, or J. D. Salinger lend themselves to parody. There is little to be plucked from his prose as “pure Taylor.” This lack of stylistic effect is partly the result of the way in which he casts many of his stories in easy-flowing narrative, the distilled reminiscence of a single character. The narrator may be identified (“Spinster’s Tale,” “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” “A Strange Story”) or have no formal existence (“Rain in the Heart,” “Fancy Woman,” “Reservations,” “An Overwhelming Question”). If he chooses, however, the reader can think back and mentally “retell” the story from a specific first-person viewpoint, such as Josie in “The Fancy Woman” or Helen Ruth in “A Wife of Nashville.” The style of the story itself, on first reading, seems nearly neutral, taking its source from the story and not from a single mind or pair of eyes. Nothing blurs or refracts most of the told events—they are seldom handed out pre-digested or preinterpreted. Taylor is never spotted onstage adjusting the strings on the puppets. His narrative takes precedence over the language or the temptation to verbal flourishes. The style seems so natural, like conversation and the family tale, that it is clear window glass through which the action is purely seen.

Since there is so little intrusion of the author begging his case, an air of verisimilitude results. The “raisin-colored carpet,” for example, simply is that color. The reader is both bemused and convinced by the quiet story told in the quiet parlor.

This apparent lack of effort and muting of drama works better for Taylor than italics or exclamation points. Such quiet understatement alerts the reader, who casts his mind back looking for all those implications woven almost invisibly into the story. When the reader does perceive, perhaps by hindsight, the delicate design, he halfway claims this as some kind of evidence of his own sensitivity.

This method enables Taylor to tell volumes through understatement. “Reservations,” subtitled “A Love Story,” follows a just-married couple from their bridal reception at the country club to a hotel where they will spend their wedding night. The bride accidentally locks herself in the bathroom and must be rescued by residents of an adjoining room, an embarrassed man and the woman he has purchased for the evening. Taylor, a serious writer who can be very humorous at times, conveys deftly a case of honeymoon jitters. While Dorothy Parker in “Here We Are” did much the same thing in sharp and witty dialogue, Taylor gives the reader, in very little more space, a full-length portrait of the nervous bride, her feeling that the prostitute is too familiar, and the harsh accusations she finally screams at the exasperated groom while he struggles with the locked door. Parker wrote of honeymooners; at the end of Taylor’s story the reader knows what the whole marriage will be like. He makes what Hollis Summers once described as the effort to “realize simultaneously the tree and the forest of experience.”

There is not a Taylor story which does not fulfill the dictum of short fiction to tell little but suggest much. In “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” Leonora Logan habitually dons dungarees, cardigan, and poke bonnet and drives her 1942 Dodge convertible through an assortment of states, orbiting Tennessee. The last time she drives away, unfortunately, she looks very much like a thousand others seen in small towns and on the highways. She is lost, out of eccentricity and into normality.

Aunt Munsie, in “What You Hear from ’Em?” gives up her hogs and slop wagon, but she also gives up really caring when the two Tolliver boys are coming home to live in Thornton. In “Allegiance,” a Tennessee soldier in London goes to call upon an aunt with whom his family has quarreled and during the visit creates the whole microcosm of that family. In “An Overwhelming Question,” a bizarre accident at the Hunt and Polo Club prevents the couple from living happily ever after, like a sleeping beauty and a sleeping prince awaking at the same moment in the same place. In these and in other stories, what distinguishes Taylor’s fiction is, as Henry James suggested, “the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern.”

This is Taylor’s special literary talent: to select, unerringly, the small seen moment which is a keyhole to an entire revelation. If the themes are, as suggested earlier, as broad as the changing, contemporary South, Taylor illuminates them with a single pencil-flashlight, and then another, and then another.

The change in one’s homeland was expressed by William Faulkner in great intensity. Banners were furled and unfurled, and armor clanked, so much so that at first it may be hard to see that Taylor’s is the same battlefield a few years later, coolly viewed, more quietly described. In literary time, if not chronologically, Taylor is much later than Faulkner; and where the Sartoris family bled, there is already a monument or so, encrusted with pigeon droppings. It is useful for the reader to remember, however, that between the older writer and the younger one, the issues differ less in substance than in approach, angle, and author’s temperament in their presentations of a Southern region and its society.