Copyright 1986 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
October 19, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 2739 words
HEADLINE: THE FAMILY GAME WAS REVENGE
BYLINE: BY
MARILYNNE ROBINSON; Marilynne Robinson is the author of ''Housekeeping,'' a novel.
BODY:
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS By Peter Taylor. 209 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
$15.95.
PETER TAYLOR is a novelist and short-story writer who for almost half a century
has produced fictions about a distinctive world of Southern inland cities, and
about a characteristic stratum of society whose members are both provincial and
urbane, descended from plantation-owning stock but very comfortably ensconced
in the finest neighborhoods of Nashville and Memphis. They marry their own kind
and honor the leisurely rituals of their caste, careful stewards of their own
good fortune. These are not the tormented souls we are accustomed to finding in
literature of the South. The motive force in most of these lives is
complacency, the genial expectation that the young will succeed to the quiet
privileges that their parents, in enjoying them, have preserved.
Let us call this Peter Taylor's donnee. His work is compared with the fiction
of Henry James, and the comparison has value, even though, in terms of style,
the two writers are very different indeed. Both are conscious of having as
their subject what is called manners, small fields of nuanced and estheticized
behavior that, as Flannery O'Connor observed, should never be thought of apart
from mystery. Henry James as American in England, Peter Taylor as Southerner in
America, write about societies whose bounds and particularities they are
intensely aware of, and whose manners they can see as an interplay of stylized
gestures, spontaneous or inevitable as they may seem to those who enact them.
James, like a Whitman scanning an especially elegant stream of the human throng
for glimpses of transcendency, taking esthetics as a holy mystery and a most
mannered class as a sort of priestly caste, described a world for whose meaning
he imagined no limit, however narrow a world it might be. Thoreau did not bring
loftier expectations to his bean patch.
Peter Taylor approaches the mystery of manners another way. He reminds us that
people, like spiders, impose geometries on thin air, which are fragile but will
be replicated, which are ingenious and also involuntary; that given an angle,
we will colonize void and disorder, putting a tiny Euclidean patch on exploding
reality. The sense of limit in Mr. Taylor's work alludes to the littleness and
frailty and also the resilience and inevitability of the webs we deploy to make
experience habitable. While James finds his limited world inexhaustible, Peter
Taylor finds the limitedness of his world inexhaustibly suggestive. MR.
TAYLOR'S gentry behave well at the rate and to the degree that convention is a
worthy guide to the conduct of life.
They are seldom distinguished for good or evil. Their ''manners'' are the terms
in which their lives are understood, terms that, in Mr. Taylor's world, differ
bewilderingly even as between Memphis and Nashville. In his beautifully ironic
new novel, ''A Summons to Memphis'' - his only previous novel, ''A Woman of
Means,'' appeared 36 years ago - he describes, with scarcely a smile, how a
family is destroyed by a betrayal, rarely mentioned even among themselves, that
took place more than 40 years before. Phillip Carver, the 49-year-old son of
the family, is called back to Memphis by his two older sisters to prevent their
widowed father from remarrying. In narrating the story of his return, he
recalls how the treachery of their father's business partner caused the family
to remove from Nashville and a life blessed with meaning to Memphis and
gathering despair. The change is only the more insidious for being almost
undetectable.
It is usual to say that a Southern writer is chronicling the passing of a
society doomed and overwhelmed. Such statements sidestep the vexed question of
the relationship of any fiction to any reality. They seem particularly
misleading in the case of Peter Taylor, for on the one hand his stories do not
really present themselves as the social anatomy of Tennessee, and on the other
hand one recognizes in them an authentic old regime, less regional than
provincial, whose decline is neither greatly to be regretted nor likely to
happen soon. In describing the disruptions and erosions that beset it, Mr.
Taylor is innocent of a common error. He knows it is because these social
structures are unstable that they will not change. His stories and novels are
variations on a theme. He returns again and again to one question: what is
stasis? And how is it achieved?
He does not make the odd though familiar assumption that the stability of a
society is any proof of its goodness, nor is he interested in reviling people
who, despite houseboys and fox hunts, are dead ordinary. It is rather as though
he wishes to describe the pressures that toughen structure, as gravity thickens
bone. Imagine a sort of adversary, to borrow a word from Job - a pressure,
ubiquitous and protean, that has made every creature the fossil of a harrowing
history, the porcupine a war machine, the skunk an avenger, the turtle a
walking state of siege. In ''A Summons to Memphis,'' as in all Peter Taylor's
fiction, stasis is defended, not voluntarily or even consciously, by means
honorable or pernicious as the circumstance requires, not because it is
goodness or value or virtue but because it is stasis - as it would not be if it
had not found strategies of persistence in this Heraclitean world. Subversion
and erosion take dozens of forms, every one of them more or less like fishing
moonlight from the sea in a net, or stifling it in a cloud, or drowning it in a
flood.
Among the more satisfying ironies in Mr. Taylor's work is a sort of patterning
or recurrence of the threat or betrayal that makes of disruption and continuity
one thing. In ''A Summons to Memphis'' the three middle-aged children betray
their old father in a way we are told to consider characteristic of Memphis.
The novel demonstrates the gradual naturalization of the Nashville family to
the norms of a less humane civilization, one, interestingly enough, more
dominated by landowning. These wealthy and childless heirs to an old man's
fortune, when they learn that he plans to marry, resort almost reflexively to
cruelty and coercion to prevent him. The very familiarity of the tale of the
mistreatment of an old parent is a great part of the point - none of us would
do such a thing, and yet such things get done, and so commonly that when
Shakespeare wrote ''King Lear'' he thought best to begin it in the manner of a
folk tale, the story being as plain and ancient as its historical provenance.
Speaking of their father's business partner, the narrator of ''A Summons to
Memphis'' says: ''I cannot resist this opportunity to point out how the evil
which men like Lewis Shackleford do, men who have come to power either through
the use of military force or through preaching the Word of God or through the
manipulation of municipal bonds, as was Mr. Shackleford's case, how the evil
they do . . . has its effect . . . at last upon myriads of persons in all the
millennia to come.'' This comparing of great things with small is amused, yet
the novel proposes a complex reading of the world in which almost impalpable
forces work as imperviously as fate, making whole cloth of what is done and
what is suffered.
The father, in making his dignified retreat from Nashville, the scene of his
betrayal, shocks his family profoundly. His wife takes to her bed and his
children remain unmarried, the two daughters still dressing like girls in
corpulent middle age, a sort of taunting allusion to the time when the rituals
that would have supported their passage through life were disrupted. The shock
of their father's being betrayed is transmitted as his betrayal of them. The
narrator, too, who has long since moved to Manhattan and established a life
there with a Jewish woman from Cleveland, attempting to naturalize himself to
the part of the world that is not Tennessee, blames his father for disrupting
his only chance at marriage, when he was a young man. So the family is frozen
in one moment, the offspring oxymoronically ''middle-aged children'' far too
engrossed with their father. A recoil is built into the situation. The children
do as they feel they have been done by. They betray. IN ''A Summons to
Memphis,'' as in tragedy - I take the title to invite such comparisons -what
these people do for reasons that are personal and unique to them, and wholly
sufficient to account for their actions, coincides neatly with larger patterns
that exist outside them. Oedipus went to Thebes imagining himself a stranger.
These people have considered themselves strangers in Memphis. Yet, as the
narrator makes clear from the beginning, anticipating events as precisely as
any oracle, they re-enact a situation he sees as ''some kind of symbol . . . of
Memphis'' - in the typical pattern he observes in that city, ''a rich old
widower'' is ''denounced and persecuted by his own middle-aged children'' when
he decides to remarry. While the energy of malice in the Carver children comes
from their being obliged to move to this alien place, its last expression takes
a form that makes it clear they are assimilated to Memphis altogether.
The children are not villains or connivers. They are the beneficiaries of the
fact that their pettiness has so many precedents as almost to perform itself.
Their actions, if they are thought of as freely chosen, are abetted by the
recurrence around them of like actions, which make them seem determined. So two
apparently contrary models of human motivation are not only affirmed at the
same time but shown to be mutually reinforcing. That is a neat piece of work.
While the narrator declares people of his sort now to have only an attenuated
existence, their past and milieu hold them so powerfully that if attenuation
exists at all among them its only effect is to make them, paradoxically, less
resistant to such influences - just as, having lost Nashville, the family falls
completely under the sway of Memphis. Behavior, like matter, will have one form
or another.
A mistral blows through Peter Taylor's world. Although it is manifested often
in betrayal of friend by friend, father by son, son by father, most vulnerable
of all are the blacks. In many of his stories, they are drawn into
near-familial relationships, and then at the same time subject to being scolded
or dismissed at any time, at any age, embarrassed for any imagined offense.
They have made, as a magnanimous response to intractable necessity, lives for
themselves out of interest in the lives of uningratiating people and affection
for children not their own, but have enlisted nothing of the duty or loyalty or
identification that sometimes shelters the feelings of family. These stories
are very painful to read, as they should be. The problems of race in Mr.
Taylor's writing are not historical or political so much as they are the
extreme expression of the strange energy loose in his world, an injuriousness
like Poe's gratuitously destructive ''perverse.''
Black characters are not prominent in ''A Summons to Memphis.'' All of them
servants, they move over the same terrain as the Carver family, standing by the
road during the departure from Nashville to gaze wistfully in the direction of
the small country town they and the Carvers have come from. To one who has read
Mr. Taylor's stories, the presence of the black characters in this novel is a
reminder of the potent shocks that can run along the lines of loyalty and
family.
Southern writing often seems to me cloyed with the fusty apologetics of
19th-century reaction, to be indebted a little too deeply to Walter Scott and
such inventors of the mystique of past and place, the moral opiate inevitably
in demand while Scots were being routed from their lands and driven into
wretched industrial cities and death from famine and cholera, and while blacks
were being carried from their own lands and put to the uses of an
industrialized agriculture, treated as articles of commerce, with no
acknowledgment of their ties to any place or community or family. This
subordination of human beings to sheep on one side of the Atlantic and to
cotton on the other is smuggled into our consciousness disguised as an old
order, and the noble depopulators and the aristocratic slaveholders as the few,
fading survivors of a more human world. History holds few examples of such
chutzpah. Even the best Southern writing nevertheless subscribes too willingly
to the idea that there is a past that some people have and others lack, and
that this past is dignifying and full of a sort of plenary grace upon which the
present can still draw. So intimate was the connection between the American
South and 19th-century industrialism that during the Civil War cotton workers
in Manchester, England, died in the streets. The past is an industrial
byproduct.
All this is by way of giving emphasis to my admiration for Peter Taylor's
perfect indifference to the blandishments of this tradition, an indifference
more remarkable because he sets his stories in wide temporal expanses and gives
great play to social and generational influences. The present resonates with
the past, but history is not a sort of monosodium glutamate, an instant,
all-purpose intensifier of experience. PETER TAYLOR'S fiction is full of
rewards. It is hard for a reviewer to do justice to the pleasures of
understatement.
Mr. Taylor's tact in preserving narrative surface, allowing fictional
''meaning'' to remain immersed in its element and preventing the degeneration
of question into statement, leaves him open to being seen as another
interpreter of an important tradition, when in fact he is as sui generis as
middle Tennessee.
''A Summons to Memphis'' is not so much a tale of human weakness as of the
power of larger patterns, human also, that engulf individual character, a
current subsumed in a tide. The moral earnestness of contemporary thought, the
eagerness to praise and condemn, almost forbids the utterance of an important
fact, which is that most of the time we really do not know just what we are
doing or why, or what appearances our actions would have if we could see them
from a little distance. I think the real accomplishment of Peter Taylor may be
to have conjured the great slow shapes of epic and tragedy, so they can be
glimpsed in the little segment of an ordinary life, restoring to our myths
their most unsettling implications.
SOME SOUTHERN RASCALS
It seems natural for Peter Taylor, so attuned to family mysteries, to say of
meeting Gertrude Stein, ''She was like an old aunt, chatting.'' In ''A Summons
to Memphis'' the narrator introduces himself to Stein on a Paris street while
stationed there during World War II; soon they're gossiping about Memphis
acquaintances. That happened to Mr. Taylor, but part of the story didn't suit
his book. ''I meant to say, 'Miss Stein, I'm a young American writer,' but I
got excited and said, 'Miss Stein, I'm a young American soldier.' I was wearing
my uniform and she looked at me and said, 'I see that you are.' ''
Peter Taylor himself sounds like a gentle uncle telling family stories, even
while explaining in a phone conversation how actual circumstances found their
way into his novel, where minute social distinctions between Memphis and
Nashville are crucial. He grew up moving often between the two cities. His
father had ''roots in Memphis, which is really the Deep South, more like
Mississippi.'' His mother, from Nashville, ''was always horrified by how much
Mississippi news was in the Memphis papers. The difference between the cities
always seemed significant but I didn't know why. One of the nice things about
writing is making use of details that seemed important in your life. You
discover what they mean to you.'' Despite an obvious leap from fact to novel,
he has written one of his sisters, saying she's not one of the sneaky sisters
in the book.
His next novel (''I seem to have switched to another form,'' the master story
writer said) is set in 1915 on a train bringing the body of a senator and his
family back to Tennessee. ''I'm fascinated by the deterioration of the family,
but I'm not taking a Gloomy Gus view. I play with ideas the way you do with a
tune.'' His own grandfather was a Tennessee senator. Other relatives were
''preachers, lawyers, the ordinary things. Some were very fine and some were
rascals.''
Caryn James
GRAPHIC: Photo of Peter Taylor telling an ancient story (J. William Boradway)
