The Complete Stories
Peter Taylor

Reviewed by Killian Quigley

Last October, in an op-ed for the New York Times, the historian and pundit Jon Meacham pondered the impending U.S. Senate election in Tennessee. At stake, he argued, were not only a nation’s balance of partisan power, but a state’s historic character. Tennessee, he explained, had long enjoying regarding itself “as a more sophisticated place than its Deep South neighbors.” And this was justified, he claimed, by an admirable, long-standing reluctance to choose sides—an attitude, that is, of “gentlemanly” ambivalence. Since entering the union in 1796, Tennessee had tended, rightly, not to conform to standard dualities—of North and South, Republican and Democrat, and so on. In November, Meacham admonished, Tennesseans would choose either to affirm their uniqueness or degenerate into some simpler version of themselves.

Ambivalence is the dominant spirit of the Tennessean fictions of Peter Taylor, who was born in Trenton, in the west of the state, in 1917. But unlike Meacham’s circumspect fence-sitters, Taylor’s characters are afflicted by indeterminacies they have not chosen and cannot resolve. They are defined by what they inherit, yet the past’s “old realities” are ones they never quite manage to comprehend. In their remarkable vanity, they are forever seeking the “unchanging” and “unchangeable” amidst the agitations, and irrevocable transformations, of modernity. As often as not, they struggle even to name “that vague region” that forms the ground under their feet. The Old Southwest, the Midsouth, the Upper South, or, as a particularly fine late story has it, one “long hinterland”: this is Tennessee as a fringe, an in-between, an en-route-to. Taylor’s question—and Meacham’s unacknowledged subtext—is whether such a space amounts to an intriguing uncertainty, or an emptiness.

Taylor’s oeuvre represents what must be one of the most remarkable and sustained commitments to situation—to a particular people, at a particular time, in a particular place—in the history of American art. Over two volumes, the new Library of America edition of his Complete Stories, edited by Ann Beattie, spans more than fifty years of writing, almost sixty publications, and nearly fifteen hundred pages. For all that, the collection adopts essentially a single point of focus (and of view), which is bourgeois society in Middle and West Tennessee in the years separating the two World Wars. Like the quasi-aristocrats of Edith Wharton’s New York, Taylor’s people occupy an apparently “gentler world,” a “tranquil” sphere which is supposed to keep its residents safe from the scarifying touch of the modern. But inside the walls of stately Nashville homes, and on the grounds of the Memphis Country Club, changes are happening, worlds are jostling, and mythologies are decaying, or simply falling asunder.

Taylor’s genteel Tennesseans arrive, time and again, at momentous junctures, where the conventions they carry are put to the test by unanticipated experiences, relationships, and worldviews. Time and again, they fail utterly to navigate them. At best, they come to the bleak understanding that the “impressions” and stories that form their perspectives, and so their persons, are not really their own. And as their intelligence goes progressively obsolete, so, in a sense, do they. This is like what Ralph Touchett said, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, when he observed that his friend Lord Warburton was “the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.” Likewise the young protagonist of Taylor’s brilliant “In the Miro District,” from 1977, who muses despondently whether “if, merely as a result of being born when I was and where I was, at the very tail end of something, I was like nothing else at all, only incomparably without a character of my own.” And thus the upper-crust young Memphians of “The Old Forest,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1979, who reckon “themselves the heirs to something, though most likely they could not have said what.” In Taylor’s stories, such somethings never get defined.

Perplexities of this sort must have been close to Taylor’s own heart. He was born into a prominent, well-to-do Tennessean family of national as well as local standing. His grandfather, Robert Love Taylor, served the state as congressman and as senator, and twice occupied its governor’s mansion. (He also happened to publish a book of spirited stories, Gov. Bob Taylor’s Tales, in 1896.) And as Taylor indicated in an interview following the publication of A Summons to Memphis, the novel that would win him a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, his heritage was not free from ambiguity. His father had “roots in Memphis,” which signaled cultural associations with “the Deep South, more like Mississippi.” This was not lost on Taylor’s mother, who came from the relative haut monde of Nashville and was “always horrified by how much Mississippi news was in the Memphis papers.” It is unsurprising, then, that Taylor spent so much of his career exploring how legacies are acknowledged, suppressed, massaged, and even invented. “One of the nice things about writing,” he offered, “is making use of details that seemed important in your life. You discover what they mean to you.”

By lingering at such length over what the South inherited from its ancestors, and what it might bequeath to its heirs, Taylor engaged a complicated, and substantially fraught, literary field. After first matriculating at Southwestern (now Rhodes) College in Memphis, he moved east to Nashville to study at Vanderbilt. There, he worked under the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, whom Taylor would eventually follow to Kenyon College, in Ohio. At Vanderbilt, Ransom was a key member of the Fugitive and Agrarian groups, which sought—through works like 1930’s I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition—to cultivate a discretely Southern sense of literary, and more broadly cultural, identity and worth. For Ransom, who was born in Pulaski, in south central Tennessee, this partly involved hailing and preserving the South’s unique “aesthetic forms”—its symbols, social mores, rituals, and so on. For recent generations of critics, this sort of thing has come to sound at best like misguided sentimentality, and at worst like dog-whistle racism.

Whatever Ransom’s influence on Taylor, throughout the younger writer’s stories, the South’s vaunted aesthetic forms are revealed as brittle and disintegrating. As “The Old Forest” opens, the narrator, a young, well-heeled pseudo-sophisticate, is betrothed to Caroline, a woman from a distinguished Memphis family. The match is temporarily called off, however, when Lee Ann, a young “city girl” with whom the narrator has been dallying, disappears into some remnant old-growth woods after the pair gets into a car accident. In the ensuing search, the young dandy is exposed as not only a philanderer, but a sop. Confronted by a real crisis, he proves useless, not to say vestigial, and it is Caroline who is compelled to return things to something like equilibrium. Meanwhile Lee Ann and her circle, whom the narrator had described, patronizingly, as “the Memphis demimonde,” are shown to be loyal to one another, curious about literature and film, and generally “liberated.” The narrator, and his peers along with him, are by contrast defined by their “dependence,” on their fathers as well as on the inegalitarian social and economic structures that literally arrange their existence. Most specifically, he and his ilk are never “more secure and relaxed than when one had given oneself over completely to the care and protection of the black servants who surrounded us and who created and sustained for the most part the luxury which distinguished [our] lives.”

Taylor’s central characters consistently refuse, or prove themselves unable, to measure the foundations of their gentler world. This is most galling when it pertains to racism, and to the histories and afterlives of chattel slavery. In the excellent and disturbing “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” from 1960, a narrator knows the coffee he receives has not been prepared by his hostess—that, “as in the old days, too, the Negro woman who made it didn’t appear or make a sound in the kitchen.” Somewhere else, a piece of mail is delivered “by a pair of black hands.” Still elsewhere, in the hospital where a white character’s mother is receiving care, there are reported to be “even colored patients” convalescing. His mother “has found it interesting,” the son states gormlessly, “working out relationships with them.” Taylor’s tales do not do much to give us black stories, or black voices, but they relentlessly delineate a false consciousness that relies on racial exclusion, and that masquerades as tranquility.

In his “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” from 1962, James Baldwin diagnosed a form of falsehood that feels unusually apt in connection to Taylor’s stories. Baldwin wrote that “white American men and women” lacked the capacity “to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives.” He argued that, as a consequence, those same men and women were estranged from any “touchstone for reality,” and so compelled to resort to “a labyrinth of attitudes,” so many “historical and public” postures that had no authentic relationship with “the present.” When Taylor’s characters discuss matters of actual historical substance, such as segregation in schools, the impressions they give are of people who are not only prevaricating, but floating in a parallel dimension. They are as if incapable of comprehending their lives in relation to worlds beyond their own, strictly confined one. “The Captain’s Son,” published in 1976, plays with Taylor’s autobiography: its narrator’s “own grandfather was wartime governor of Tennessee—Spanish War (broad smiles), not Civil.” As an “Old South” relation descends, embarrassingly, into alcoholism, a patriarch advises his son, “everybody ought to manage to be merely representative, and ought to be modest about who they were and what they had.”

How to be representative—how to strike an attitude—when you can’t quite grasp the parts you’re expected to play? Taylor’s satire is at its most cutting, and most mordantly hilarious, in “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court,” his final, and perhaps best-known, story. After failing to avoid service in World War II on the grounds of conscientious objection, the Tennessean narrator acquiesces, shamefacedly, to soldiering. During the Normandy landings, he sustains an injury that renders him an amnesiac, only to be informed, thereafter, that he acquitted himself at D-Day with exceptional bravery. Finding himself lionized back home, he nonetheless never quite manages to believe the abundant stories of his own heroism. “As I have read them,” he explains, “I have gone along with said accounts (it has been a ‘learning experience’ for me) because since I do not remember anything, I cannot therefore deny anything.” As the unreliable protagonist of his own life, he embodies the existential meagerness of a society relying on mythologies from which its members feel increasingly estranged.

In January of this year, Marsha Blackburn, originally of Laurel, Mississippi, was sworn in as Tennessee’s junior senator. In the Times, Meacham had called her, not unfairly, “unapologetically Trumpian,” and proposed, more tendentiously, that to elect her would be to exacerbate “a perpetual Hobbesian war of all against all” in American politics. He may have been right about that, but what he missed is the fact that sophistication is often a thin façade, and ambivalence is sometimes a convenient euphemism for cowardice. He could learn as much, and more, from Taylor, who showed, unobtrusively but unequivocally, that manners mean zilch if they adorn a vacuum. “Let them cant about decorum, / Who have characters to lose,” goes Robert Burns’s “The Jolly Beggars.” Taylor’s Upper South characters cannot see that they lack character, or understand that this renders their pretensions hollow. And this makes them, and these stories, excellent reading, in a present when attitudes are abundant, but home truths too rarely heard.