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Vanderbilt SAE Peter Taylor is the author of two
novels, A Woman of Means (1950) and A Summons to Memphis, which in 1986 won
both the Pulitzer Prize and, in Paris, the $50,000 Ritz Hemingway prize for
English Literature. Best known as a short story writer, he published seven
books of short stories, beginning with A Long Fourth and Other Stories
(1948) and including The Old Forest and Other Stories, which won the P.E.N./Faulkner
Award in 1986. Nine stories of his appeared in the annual Best American
Short Stories, and six stories appeared in the O. Henry Prize collections.
He has been described as "a Southern writer in the tradition of William
Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor" and "one of the most accomplished
short-story writers of our time." His work has also been described as
"outwardly simple but psychologically complex and powerful, and under the
surface of events in the regions he knows best the author discloses the
universal longings of the human heart." As a dramatist, he is the author of
Tennessee Day in St. Louis (1957), Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (1973)
and A Stand in the Mountains (1985). In 1983 he retired from the University
of Virginia, and divided his time between Charlottesville and Key West,
Florida. In 1982, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. In 1994, he died in Charlottesville at 77 years of age.
The following is a review of Peter Taylor's last book of short stories, THE
ORACLE AT STONELEIGH COURT by William Pratt, also an SAE at Vanderbilt. It
was first published in the Fall 1993 issue of WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, a few
months before Taylor passed away. Bill Pratt's review was one of the things
Taylor specifically asked his wife to read to him while he lay on his death
bed.
Peter Taylor. The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court: Stories. New York. Alfred
A. Knopf. 1993. 325 pages. $22.00.
This book confirms the fact that Peter Taylor may well be the best living
writer: the stories are superbly written with the touch of a master.
Though they are not all excellent, they are all stylish, and the four
longest stories--"The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court," "Demons," "The Witch of
Owl Mountain Springs," and "The Decline and Fall of the Episcopal Church (in
the Year of Our Lord 1952)" are as fine as any Taylor has written over a
long career, even including his prize-winning novel of 1987, A Summons to
Memphis. What this volume shows conclusively is that Taylor has reached his
peak as a storyteller in his later years, and that the earlier comparisons
he invited, especially with Henry James, were the portents of a late
blossoming of his talent. James might well have enjoyed reading these
latter day ghost stories, which have the elegance of "The Turn of the Screw"
or "The Jolly Corner," late masterpieces of James's short fiction. That
Taylor, too, sees ghosts in old age may be evidence of his anticipation of
death, but he manages to make them seem a part of ordinary human experience,
just as James did, not at all the exotic Gothic apparitions of Poe.
In fact, Taylor domesticates his ghosts beautifully, making us believe that
there might be such a thing as an "oracle" in a fashionable Washington
apartment building, or a "witch" at the family resort of "Owl Mountain
Springs" (his fictional counterpart of Monteagle, Tennessee, also used as a
setting for A Summons to Memphis), or "demons" which speak to an imaginative
young boy much like Peter Taylor himself. All the stories seem
autobiographical, whether or not they really come directly out of his life,
because Taylor has a knack for inventing characters and situations that
appear to be altogether normal while they are unmistakably fictional--a
knack he shares with Katherine Anne Porter more than with any other modern
author. Like Porter, he prefers indirect discourse to dialogue, and so each
story seems to emerge from the mind of the narrator, an "I" much like
himself yet different:
"I may as well say here and now that no other group of girls ever had quite
the same devastating effect upon me as did the girls at the summer resort at
Owl Mountain Springs, a pretty little sylvan retreat perched high on the
bluffs of the Cumberland Plateau in Middle Tennessee."
There is something so natural about these musings of the narrator that one
is led almost unwittingly towards a highly eccentric old woman, the central
character of the story, once one of the charming little girls the narrator
knew as a boy, become a "witch" gradually in his eyes because "perhaps Lizzy
Pettigru had, consciously or unconsciously, made a compact with some dark
spirit which her imagination had conjured." One might think of the New
England "witches" in Hawthorne or Frost, coming from an earlier Puritan
fascination with evil, but there is no active Devil here and no supernatural
powers: Taylor transforms Lizzy Pettigru from a lovable young girl into a
hateful old hag by probing, through the mind of the narrator, into her
motives for bringing about the violent death of a man she once loved and the
woman with whom he eloped, aging movie stars who die in a sudden,
inexplicable automobile crash on their way back to Owl Mountain Springs.
The plot is entirely plausible, and her revenge is only hinted at, so that
even when the "witch" dies violently herself in her cottage and the cottage
burns to the ground, we are never sure she was paying the price for her
revenge. The consummate artistry of Peter Taylor, like that of James and
Porter, convinces us that divine justice might somehow operate in ordinary
human circumstances, that there is a moral order in the universe which makes
instruments of good or evil out of quite normal people, your friends or
neighbors, maybe even your close relatives.
One relishes these four major stories of Taylor as one relishes classics,
which they undoubtedly are, and if the slighter stories and the three plays
included in this collection are less successful, they tend to set off the
best, making the reader sure of their greatness, a higher level of
excellence than he is used to seeing in contemporary fiction. Taylor's
fictional world centers on Middle Tennessee, rather than the International
Scene of which James was master, but what he does with it in the best of his
stories compares favorably with James, and favorably with Porter's fictional
world of East Texas which it more nearly resembles, but all three authors
demonstrate the control of style and the penetration into character which is
the mark of the greatest writers of fiction: how lucky we are that Peter
Taylor is still alive and still writing at his highest pitch of perfection
at 75 years and counting.
William Pratt
Miami University (Ohio)
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