THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411080543
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Peter Taylor died earlier this month at 77 after a series of strokes. He left many admirers of his prose. Taylor's distinctly Southern voice recorded vivid visions of contemporary life in eight books of stories, two novels and three volumes of plays.
In the domestic hall of mirrors that is his fiction, family became a dark image that reflected itself infinitely away into a distant and reproachful past.
``It's hell to be in a family,'' the lanky author-teacher told me shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Summons to Memphis. ``It's more of a hell to be outside one. These concrete relationships, older and younger, male and female, enable the world to move.''
So it was with Summons, and so it remains with his recent and final novel, In the Tennessee Country (Knopf, 226 pp., $21). The earlier book recounted the opposition of a Tennessee family to the remarriage of its widowed father, as recounted by a middle-aged son. The new volume follows the obsession of a similarly ironic senior observer with an older relation who leaves the fold.
In both cases, the examined past comes to reveal the narrator to the reader much more sharply than to himself.
``In the Tennessee country of my forebears,'' begins the measured intonation of Nathan Longfort, ``it was not uncommon for a man of good character suddenly to disappear. He might be a young man or a middle-aged man or even sometimes a very old man. Whatever the case, few questions were ever asked.
``Rather, it was generally assumed that such a man had very likely felt the urging of some inner compulsion and so could not do otherwise than gather up his chattels and move on to resettle himself elsewhere.''
Whatever became of Cousin Aubrey, illegitimate son of Longfort's maternal great-uncle? Longfort's account starts on a funeral train from Washington to Knoxville in 1916 and concludes on a local from Charlottesville to Washington in the recent past. The long emotional journey between is the substance of the book; what happened to black sheep Aubrey becomes a wry commentary on what happened to favorite son Nathan.
And that journey is an enormously fascinating, eventful, cerebral ride. In the Tennessee Country is every bit as good a yarn as Summons to Memphis, arrestingly observed and crisply written. Only Taylor (and perhaps his Yankee influence, Henry James) could make the self-admiring meditations of a smug art historian so compelling.
We come away with compassion not only for him but for his wrong-headed, terminally dysfunctional, socially revered Southern family.
``Forgiving our parents is a sign of maturity,'' Taylor had said at his home in Charlottesville, where he was professor emeritus of creative writing from the University of Virginia. ``Don't you know parents, folks my age, who still hate their parents? Who are still bitter after all the years?
``I used to get furious. But as I got older, after 40 or so, my wife said I had gotten soft on my father. Well, you discover it's hard to be a parent.''
He had two grown children of his own: short-story writer Katherine Baird, 46; and poet Peter Ross, 39. Taylor married poet Eleanor Ross 51 years ago and remained married to her. Spare and understated as his prose in white shirt, white trousers and white shoes, Taylor spoke to me in a curtained library dominated by a photograph of his father.
Nearby was an oil of himself at 20; the keen faces merged as they might have in a Taylor story, where familial patterns of the past exert themselves inevitably upon the present. Taylor's father prevented him from accepting a scholarship to the university of his choice, Columbia. The elder Taylor had evidently forgotten that he hadn't wanted to go to the college his own father had chosen for him.
``I wanted my son to go to Harvard,'' Taylor added, ``because I taught there and loved it. He wouldn't even apply. I didn't try to make him, but I still wish he had.''
And Taylor accepted his Pulitzer at Columbia.
In the writer's life and in his fiction, domestic events circled back on themselves like homing birds returned inexorably to roost.
``A family, and a place, and a time,'' Taylor said. ``It's an inexhaustible subject and terribly important. If a society doesn't have the family for the basic cultural unit, then it's a dung hill.''
Peter Taylor is gone. His family survives him. So will his books. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
BUD LEE
Peter Taylor's last novel, ``In the Tennessee Country,'' examines
the divisions of family.
by CNB