Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life (Southern Literary Studies)

Rating:
Summary: Unrevealing
Review: Peter Taylor, whom William Du Bois, writing in the New York Times, proclaimed "a master of the short story form," was also a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist, a playwright, and sometimes poet who was numbered as one of the first generation of writers to make their living teaching writing.

Knowing what we know now, that Taylor would enter academia, it's interesting that upon his completion of studies at Kenyon College he wrote that he longed that "this limbo of a life could go on forever; I dread seeing the great real world again."

He would seldom have to for when he enrolled in Allen Tate's composition course at Southwestern College in Memphis he found instead entrée into an elite literary society when Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, soon invited Taylor to dinner and into their world.

Taylor would go on to Louisiana State University for graduate studies, and when a number of his short stories were published in the Southern Review, he gained recognition in literary circles. Deciding graduate courses weren't his forte, Taylor soon resolved to return to Memphis since he was "starving for the sweet taste of gossip, absurd argumentation, intimate Sunday-night suppers, carousing evenings...and an occasional whiff of the rare, rank odor of Memphis High Society."

Unfortunately, McAlexander isn't able to provide us with much detail about such carousing and the book ends up reading like a busy social calendar.

Unable to avoid the draft as a conscientious objector, Taylor found himself involved in the Second World War much to his own chagrin, but it was in the army that he was given his first teaching position when he was assigned to teach American literature at an army school. After the war he took a job teaching at Woman's College (later the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and soon thereafter Harcourt, Brace published Taylor's first collection of short stories, A Long Fourth and Other Stories.

At one point, Taylor confided to friend Tom White, "I now have 'tenure' in the teaching profession and can be fired only for a 'treasonable act' or for 'gross immorality.' What an awful situation for a man of my temperament to be in at [thirty-one]! The impulse to throw it all overboard grows stronger everyday."

He would avoid this impulse throughout his life. Perennially restless, he would change publishers, homes and colleges the way most of us change our shirts, eventually teaching at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, Kenyon College, Ohio State University, and Harvard, among others. His stories often first appeared in Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Harper's Bazaar and the New Yorker, while collections were published by a series of book publishers.

Notorious for missing deadlines (for classes and other teaching duties as well as writing assignments), Taylor - like most writers - was disheartened by critical reviews (As John Osborne once said, "Asking a writer what he thinks about negative reviews is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs!") and ashamed of some of his own works. After the opening of one of his plays, Tennessee Day, in Nashville, he confided to a fellow Memphian, "Finally I was so embarrassed that I just sneaked away into the night."

Despite his early apprehension about the teaching profession, Taylor would come to love the social opportunities it afforded him, while he exerted a profound influence on his students. Reflecting on his studies at Harvard under Taylor, James Thackara says, "Within the first few minutes of my first conference, the roles of professor and student were dropped. He must have known that I was a homicidal writer, that for me being a writer was a matter of life and death"; and commenting on Taylor's reading of Chekhov's "Gusev," Lawrence Reynolds conveys, "His voice created the story for me in a way my own reading had never done, he made it real, he made it matter."

Taylor was the consummate friend within his vast social circles (populated by Tate, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarell, and others), which would prove to be his greatest distraction from writing as he and his wife (poet Eleanor Ross Taylor) became legendary for the parties they gave.

In the real world, Taylor noticed the little things: a painting of a beautiful woman in a coffee shop, the waiter talking to himself, an anonymous man who's just realized the main seam in his coat has come undone. But other than a brief description from Brian Griffin (a former student who served for awhile as Taylor's typist), we gain little insight into how Taylor wrote, other than his determination to do so in the face of numerous rejections from the New Yorker and other publishers. Observing Taylor scribbling with a pencil in a notebook on a sofa, Griffin described Taylor's writing as "the unintelligible scrawl of a desperate man."

Eleanor was a devoted wife, offering her unfailing support - while the lives of those around them were in disarray, often marred by suicide - even though she and Peter were vastly different people; he an extrovert (described as ebullient), she an introvert and somewhat of a recluse (described as reticent). She described differences best herself in a poem entitled "Kitchen Fable" which appeared in the New Yorker, which ends with, "He dulled; he was a dull knife/ while she was, after all, a fork."

Late in life, Taylor was diagnosed with diabetes and suffered a series of debilitating strokes. He died in 1994 at the age of 77.

Of Taylor's novel, In the Tennessee Country, Alicia Metcalf Miller wrote in the Cleveland Plains Dealer, "under an extravagantly bland exterior, it seethes with anger, failure, and pain."

There are hints that her words would also seem apt in describing Taylor's life, but here we see little more than the "bland exterior."

Former Taylor students might enjoy this reverent biography.

Rating:
Summary: In his houses there are many rooms
Review: See Robb Forman Dew, "Now Known as Peter Taylor," in The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, September 30, 2001, p. 10, and
Jonathan Yardley, "Peter Taylor," in The Washington Post Book World, Sunday September 30, 2001, p. 2.

A professor of English at UGA, Mr. McAlexander personally knew Mr. Taylor and edited "Conversations with" the writer and "Critical Essays on" his works before being given access to the papers in his widow's--poet Eleanor Ross Taylor's--possession. In the present volume, befitting his subject, the biographer gracefully weaves the history of 20th century American letters through the life and works of perhaps its most admired short story writer.