undefinedPeter Taylor at Kenyon College, 1941. Photograph by Robie Macauley.

 

Peter Taylor is a storyteller of fixed abode. His ancestral ghosts inhabit an irregular triangle formed by Memphis, Nashville, and the farm at Trenton in Gibson County where Taylor spent much of his childhood.

The power and resilience of his roots have allowed him a peripatetic life. He and his wife, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, have owned nearly thirty houses since the first small duplex they bought in 1947 with the Randall Jarrells when Taylor and Jarrell were teaching at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina.

Our conversations over the tape recorder took place, as well, in many locations. The first was in the spring of 1981 in a dim corner of the Cosmos Club, a stately Victorian edifice on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., where Taylor stayed while conducting a week’s workshop at American University. He sat under a larger-than-life portrait of some long-gone member in a stiff wooden chair that could only remind him that he too was sitting for a portrait rather than enjoying social conversation. He was not, then or ever, fully reconciled to the idea of a recorded dialogue, an extended self-revelation. “There is something offensive to me about a man or woman’s confessing all to the whole world. I never believe a word he or she says, especially when it’s ever so consistent. Always there is that ugly ego exposed. In my own case, how could I possibly assume that the world would have any interest in what I have to say about myself and/or my writing? Anybody but a friend, that is.”

And so we talked “on contingency”—that if at the end it was too hateful to him, the transcript would go into a locked drawer. We met and talked a half-dozen times over a period of years in a variety of places—early on, in a high-ceilinged room with fresh paint but no furniture that my husband and I had just bought in mid-Manhattan. We dragged in the kitchen table and sat at the two small rush-seated chairs until they got too uncomfortable, then adjourned to the Russian Tea Room, nearby, where the tape recorder picked up more of the gossip from the next table than of Taylor’s off-the-record stories of being young with Jarrell and Robert Lowell and Katherine Anne Porter. We met again that winter in Key West, Florida, where he and Eleanor wintered in a white conch house with a deep tree-shaded garden. There was a party that weekend, with the Taylors’ customary mix of local people and old friends, some of whom were poets and fiction writers—James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, James Boatwright.

His house in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the serene repository of many inheritances: mellow old furniture and tall family portraits, oriental rugs on polished floors. There is a youthful portrait of Taylor over the mantelpiece in the library, across from the carved Victorian settee that he and Eleanor were bequeathed by Jean Stafford (Lowell) Liebling, a friend for decades. In his basement study, books line the walls, floor to ceiling, and a pair of sofas covered with old, Indian hand-blocked cotton offer comfort for the reader, or a place to sit and talk. Across the room his work-desk stands against the wall. It has many small drawers and its writing surface closes up like a box. On one side a dictionary lies open on its own table; on the other his seafoam Olivetti manual. At eye level atop the desk an ornate square clock of polished burl waits, its glass ajar, to be set and wound. Everywhere in these rooms one is conscious of the past as useful, beautiful, and suffused with meaning.

 

INTERVIEWER

Why did you become a writer, a storyteller?

PETER TAYLOR

I think a great part of it was the storytelling in the family. I was lucky to come along out of this family of storytellers. My grandfather was famous for his tales. There used to be cartoons about him in the Washington papers—standing in the senate cloakroom telling stories to the other senators. He was of the generation just following the Civil War; he was a little boy then. His father was of the war generation. He, that great grandfather, was a lawyer, a clergyman, a landowner. He went to Princeton and was a Unionist. In fact, he was commissioner of Indian affairs under the first President Johnson. He was enlightened and freed his slaves. But his wife was for the Confederacy, more or less. Her brother was a Confederate senator from Tennessee. That’s why the younger children of the next generation were afterwards to become Democrats and the older children Republicans. We grew up, in my generation, with political battles, sometimes bloody, at home between those great-uncles and aunts. But I think it did give me a sense of history, a sense of the past. I began to make up stories about these things, the old houses, Robert E. Lee, Southern things that I was obsessed by even then, at eight or nine. And I did have considerable imagination, of course, and so when I began to make up stories about my forebears, I began, you know, to exercise my power over them. That’s one of the satisfactions of writing fiction! One of the reasons that all of this was so interesting to me was that we lived outside the South, away from what we thought of as the South, and yet there was constant talk at our table about Tennessee, constant plans for going back there at Christmas, at Easter, at every holiday. This was when we lived in St. Louis. We considered that far up north! My mother and father thought Nashville was the center of the world. When we lived away from there it was either because my father was in business in St. Louis or my grandfather in politics in Washington. There are no more loyal Southerners than those who grew up just outside the South or in the border states. We lived in a little South of our own in St. Louis. We had a houseful of servants from my father’s farm in the cotton country of West Tennessee, and the adults—black and white—would talk about the South, about the way things used to be there. We had very intelligent people working for us. Lucille, who really ran the house, had been to college for two or three years, and had taught school. That was the tragic thing in those days: Even when the negroes went off to college, there was really nothing they could do with their education—especially during the Depression years—and they would come back home and go into service. Lucille would talk to me about my writing and my efforts to paint. I had more conversations with her than with my mother on those subjects—and of course far more than with my father. Lucille had more influence on me when I was a child than any other adult, unless it was her cousin Basil Manly Taylor, who was our butler. It has always been difficult for me to see how people who grew up in the South, brought up by people like Lucille Taylor and B. M. Taylor, could be guilty of race prejudice. The people that loved me most and that I loved most when I was growing up, I think, were these people.

INTERVIEWER

In the stories those black servants come across as very powerful.

TAYLOR

They were, indeed. My nurse, the Aunt Munsie in “What You Hear from ‘Em?” was the same nurse that my father had when he was a baby. She absolutely belonged to us, or we absolutely belonged to her. She often talked to us about having been a slave. She never knew how old she was. The only way we could estimate her age was by remembering she always said that she was “a girl up about the big house when freedom came.” That meant that she was about twelve years old, the age when she would have gone into her mistress’s house as a maid, and that was before Emancipation. Mammy adored my father, but she made my mother’s life hell. She had run my grandmother’s house as long as she lived, and when her old mistress died she had to be taken on by my mother. Mother would often send her away because she would take it upon herself to dismiss one of the other servants without so much as consulting Mother. She was jealous of the other maids and would send them packing if they were in too much favor with Mother. One of the crises between her and Mother was over the use of butter plates. Butter plates were a fashion Mother had brought with her from Washington. (She and my father had married in Washington when Grandfather was in the senate.) Mammy said, “Ain’t no need in nastyin’ up all them dishes.” When Mother would try to dismiss her, Mammy would say, “You can’t fire me. I was here afore you come here and I’ll be here when you gone.” She felt she was the real authority in the house, and of course after Grandmother was dead my father spoiled her. She was a wonderful character—even Mother recognized that—very tiny, what used to be called a “Guinea nigger.” She came to Tennessee, as an infant I think, by way of South Carolina. One time my father’s most important client—the richest man in the state—was having dinner at our house. He and my father were talking endlessly over the meal. Mammy was in the kitchen—she ran the kitchen and cooked, too. Someone else served at the table. And when the meal had gone on too long she entered through the swinging door and tapped my father on the head with her knuckles, saying, “Quit ’at talkin’ and eat them vittles.” This to my mother’s great embarrassment and to my father’s delight.

INTERVIEWER

In the dedication to your collected stories you spoke of your mother as the best teller of tales you ever knew. 

TAYLOR

She was that. She was constantly pouring out stories. You couldn’t stop her. She would tell a story over and over again, and she would tell it in precisely the same words every time. My father would do that too. She would begin by saying, “Have I told you about the time . . .” Since one had heard it about twenty times, one would say, “Yes, Mother, you have.” And she would proceed to tell it again. When she got very old she became less critical than formerly. That is, her inhibitions broke down and she didn’t censor her stories to the same degree. We would suddenly discover new things in her stories that had been suppressed before. A shocking love affair or a divorce—I mean, that is, the reason for the divorce or the real nature of the love affair had been suppressed.

INTERVIEWER

Many of the early stories are in a woman’s voice or from a woman’s point of view.

TAYLOR

When I first began writing stories I wrote about blacks a great deal, and I wrote about women. I didn’t begin with any conscious philosophy, but I had a store of stories that I knew, that I had been told, and I felt I had to write them. I discovered in writing them that certain people were always getting the short end. I found the blacks being exploited by the white women, and the white women being exploited by the white men. In my stories that always came through to me, and from the stories themselves I began to understand what I really thought.

INTERVIEWER

As Lawrence said, not to trust the teller, but trust the tale.

TAYLOR

I quote Frank O’Connor to my students: that when you are writing a story, at some point the story must take over. You are not going to be able to control it. I think this is true. O’Connor said he thought Joyce controls his stories too tightly—“Whoever heard of a Joyce story taking over?” he asked—and that there is a deadness about them. You have got to keep the story opened up, let the story take over at some point.

INTERVIEWER

Do you always know the ending when you begin?

TAYLOR

I know one ending. But before I’ve worked on a story very long I know another. That’s part of the fun of it. You begin with one thing, but the story itself may change your mind by the end. I always have some idea, but I think it’s important to keep your story free when you are writing it, rather than working mechanically towards a fixed ending. I often reverse my understanding in the course of writing a story. Perhaps my real feelings come out as I write.

INTERVIEWER

In ways you hadn’t imagined?

TAYLOR

That happens to me more often than not. I didn’t know what was going to happen in “The Old Forest.” I didn’t plan all the business of the hunt for Lee Ann or understand its significance. The significance began to emerge as I was writing it, along with my true feelings about the characters. The story came from something I remembered. I did have such an accident in the family car, and there were some incidents and characters like those I describe . . . There was a girl like Lee Ann and there was another set of young people that I sometimes ran with; the accident occurred a few blocks from where she lived, and she was involved in it. But it was only after I began writing the story that I realized the significance of that girl. Obviously it was too carefully plotted, at last, to have happened that way. Then another story of mine called “Guests,” an earlier one about a family who have cousins visiting them from the country—I hadn’t planned for anyone to die when I was writing the beginning of the story, but then it suddenly seemed the only way the story could end.

INTERVIEWER

What do you begin with, in those cases where it isn’t a remembered event or an old family tale?

TAYLOR

I often begin with a character or a situation I’ve observed or even with a joke I’ve heard. Often a very serious story has begun with a joke. If a joke or anecdote sticks in my mind for years I know there must be something in it that means something to me that I am not conscious of. This is what I mean when I say I feel one learns about oneself from writing fiction. If a story has stuck with me for years, even a dirty story, a dirty joke, I’ll think the story must contain some profound meaning for me and about me . . . I’ll give you an example. There’s a story called “Heads of Houses.” Ten years before I wrote it I knew a couple who went to stay in the summer with the wife’s parents up in the mountains of Tennessee. The two couples got on each other’s nerves terribly. Their summer together was a disaster, more or less, and so the young husband pretended he had received a telegram or letter—I think this got into the story—calling him back to the university where he taught. When they set out for home and were starting to drive down the mountainside, they looked back and saw the father and mother and bachelor brother join hands and dance in a circle on the lawn—they were so glad the young couple had gone! And, you understand, the young couple had been feeling guilty about leaving. When I began the story, the very point of it was to be that dancing on the lawn. That’s what had originally appealed to me. But when I finished it, it was all wrong. When I saw how wrong it was I tore up the story without ever looking at it again. Then I wrote it again from scratch—in quite a different form. When I wrote it the first time it was the story of the two couples; in the background was the brother, the one who danced with the parents in a circle. That was really his only role. But by the time I got the story worked out the second time, I saw how he was really the most sympathetic character in it. Everyone else is enjoying (or suffering) a rich family life, but the old bachelor brother is not having any life at all. And by the time I finished the second version there wasn’t even any dancing on the lawn. The parents and the brother are too preoccupied with the significance of the moment. The brother simply stands there juggling apples. So the important image I began with never got into the story at all. Then there is a story called “The Hand of Emmagene,” about a girl who cuts off her hand. Well, I’d heard that story fifteen years before, at least. It was told to me by the same woman, Lucy Hooke, who told me the story of “Heads of Houses.” She was a marvelous storyteller—you know how some people have a great talent for telling a story but can’t write one. Just as many writers can’t actually tell a story. Well, Lucy Hooke told me about the severed hand. It was her brother who found it, I think. It was a young woman’s hand. Why had she done it? What had happened? In real life she was a girl from East Tennessee, which is generally considered the puritanical part of the state, up-country. Nobody knew why she cut off her hand. That’s the mystery we were left with. I only knew that I must imagine why some young woman would do such a thing, what it signified. But I didn’t know how to use it, or what it meant to me. Or how I would fit something like that into the quiet world of the stories I usually write. And then at last I realized that what I had to do to dramatize it was to put it against the background of the most conventional people I could think of, just perfectly plain and unimaginative people. And in dramatizing it I found its significance, at least twenty-five years after the event. I have another story called “Her Need.” I have rewritten it since In the Miro District appeared. I was walking early one morning in Charlottesville and saw a young woman, thirty-five or so, with her teenage son beside her in her car speeding along through the residential streets, driving him somewhere. I began to speculate upon what they were doing, where they were going. I went home and wrote the story that day. Sometimes you have a story that’s been in your mind a long time. I have one story that I haven’t written yet that I want to write. I recently thought about it reading Trollope’s Barchester Towers. I want to bring out the story of the people who leave a town, leave the world they have always lived in and go off and become something else. What reminded me of it was the Stanhopes in Trollope, who had been off in Italy and then came back to Barchester. They are very continental, all their manners are different, and they are rather resented and thought odd by everybody. It’s a big part of the novel. Well, I have seen that happen. People would go off and become very rich someplace else and when they would come back to Nashville or Memphis or St. Louis, they weren’t quite accepted. I don’t know quite what it means: The people who resented them all wanted to be rich themselves. But if somebody went off and got to be president of U.S. Steel or owned it or something, the people back home rather rejected them. I’ll get some little theme like that and go over it and over it and wonder why it interests me and what there is in it, ask myself where does that lead and what does it signify? Is this just a frivolous interest or a profound one? What is marvelous is when your frivolous interests (your interests in the world, just representing it and imitating life) coincide with some serious theme that you are concerned with; when the two coincide, that’s what’s marvelous and fun. Then sometimes a story stays in your mind for a long time and refuses to yield the significance it has for you. It’s like trying to discover what your dreams mean.