Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  1924

  After his father’s death, Red decides to sell the family law practice and seek greater fortune in Nashville, about 125 miles east of Trenton. In spring, he accepts the position of chief corporate lawyer to Rogers Caldwell, a financier then known as the J. P. Morgan of the South. By September the family has settled on Hogan Lane, in a hilltop house they call the House of the Seven Gables. Pete is enrolled in the first grade at Robertson Academy, a private elementary school.

  1926

  In January Caldwell & Company acquires the Missouri State Life Insurance Company, headquartered in St. Louis, and Rogers Caldwell appoints Red vice president and chief executive. That summer the family moves into a modern manse on Lenox Place, in St. Louis’s fashionable Central West End. Pete enrolls at Miss Rossman’s School, a private elementary school.

  1929

  When Missouri State Life acquires the title to 5 Washington Terrace, a twenty-year-old Beaux Arts mansion furnished with European art and antiques, Red, now president of the firm, arranges to make it the Taylor family home. (Established in 1902, Washington Terrace is a private enclave of fifty houses and a self-governing community of several of the wealthiest families in the Central West End.) The immense, many-bedroomed house, which features a third-floor ballroom and a detached two-story stable, is staffed by five African American servants, all originally from the Trenton area. Housekeeper Lucille Rogers, who had attended college at Memphis’s historically black Le Moyne School, becomes Pete’s closest companion, the person to whom he confides his dreams and aspirations. (“I had more conversations with her than with my mother on those subjects,” Taylor told The Paris Review, “and of course far more than with my father. Lucille had more influence on me when I was a child than any other adult.”)

  1930

  Enrolls at St. Louis Country Day School, a private academy for boys in grades seven through twelve. Begins to write and direct plays starring his classmates, which he stages in the ballroom at home. When not conceiving plays he is sketching or painting; he will harbor a dream of becoming an exhibiting artist well into early adulthood. In November the banking branch of Caldwell & Company, which after the Crash of 1929 had merged with BancoKentucky, enters receivership, precipitating the closure of 120 banks in seven states.

  1931

  An audit of the books at Missouri State Life, conducted as part of a government investigation into the bank collapse, reveals that Caldwell & Company has mortgaged many of the insurance company’s assets and transferred the monies to other Caldwell holdings. Though Red denies personal knowledge of the matter, the board of directors of Missouri State Life demands his resignation. On December 1, days after Rogers Caldwell had reneged on an oral promise to defend him before the board, Red resigns. Family legend has it that from that day forward the name “Rogers Caldwell” was never again uttered by Red Taylor.

  1932

  On New Year’s Day the family moves into an apartment on Waterman Avenue, near Washington University. The contents of 5 Washington Terrace are auctioned and the mansion sold. In October Red, unemployed and living on savings, moves the family to Memphis, Tennessee, where both he and Katherine have family. The Taylors lease a house at 79 Morningside Park, in the exclusive Central Gardens neighborhood. Pete enrolls at Central High School, the largest public school in the city.

  1933

  In June the family moves a few blocks west to a rented house at 1583 Peabody Avenue. Red opens a Memphis law practice and slowly rebuilds fortune. Pete begins his junior year at Central High as an honors student, a favorite of the English and Latin faculty, and a reporter for the school’s biweekly paper, the Warrior.

  1935

  In the winter of his senior year Pete is named editor of the Warrior, for which he writes a regular humor column, “Lord Chatterfill’d’s Letters to His Son.” In April he is awarded a two-thousand-dollar scholarship to Columbia University, where he intends to study literature and art, but father forbids him to accept it. Red instead offers to send him to Vanderbilt, his alma mater, to study law. Though tempted by the prospect of a new life in Nashville, declines the offer, and, through a connection made by his brother-in-law, Sally’s new husband Millsaps Fitzhugh, finds work as an errand boy for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. (Fitzhugh, a well-read attorney, will become very close to Taylor, introducing him to books by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other Russian masters.)

  1936

  Living at home with his parents, takes Saturday painting classes at the newly established Memphis Academy of Arts. In the spring enrolls as a special student at local Southwestern College (now Rhodes College). Peter Hills­man Taylor, as he now calls himself, takes two English classes, one a freshman composition course taught by Allen Tate, a thirty-five-year-old poet, critic, and biographer already well-known to followers of Southern writing as a member of the Fugitive group and a contributor to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). (Taylor will remember Tate as an “electrifying” instructor and as the authority figure who gave him permission to become a writer. “He made literature and ideas seem more important than anything else in the world,” Taylor said in a 1986 interview. “You wanted to put everything else aside and follow him.”) In the summer he takes two more courses with Tate, one in modern fiction, with an emphasis on Henry James, and the other in creative writing. For Tate he writes his first short stories, “The Party” and “The Lady Is Civilized,” both of which are enthusiastically received. Taylor is devastated when Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, announce they have accepted teaching positions at Woman’s College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, for the coming academic year. Tate recommends that Taylor continue his studies at Vanderbilt under his mentor, the forty-eight-year-old poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, a plan that Red Taylor readily agrees to—so long as Peter also prepares himself for a career in law. After spending the fall trimester living in a Nashville rooming house, joins the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. There he meets master’s candidate Randall Jarrell, a brilliant young poet and critic who will become a lifelong friend and, in Taylor’s view, the most perceptive reader of his fiction. At Christmastime his two short stories are accepted by River, a literary monthly being planned by Dale Mullen, an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

  1937

  In March “The Party” is published in the first number of River, followed in April by “The Lady Is Civilized.” At the end of the spring trimester, Vanderbilt puts Taylor on academic probation. (Although he had received three A’s from Ransom, he had failed botany, algebra, trigonometry, and physical education.) Returns to parents’ home in Memphis, and in the fall resumes classes at Southwestern College. His evenings and weekends are spent not in the library but in the company of four bohemian classmates—two young men and their girlfriends—who together explore the West Tennessee “demimonde” of roadhouses, rent parties, and open-air “gin picnics.” They call themselves the Entity, and their favorite dive is the Jungle, a juke joint in Proctor, Arkansas, some twenty-five miles west of Memphis. At Christmastime, his interest in both school and the Entity fading, Taylor begins to look for a full-time job.

  1938

  In February accepts position as a sales representative for Van Court Realtors and immediately withdraws from Southwestern. Spends evenings writing unpaid book reviews for the Commercial Appeal. In March hears through a Vanderbilt acquaintance that Ransom, now at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, has established a full-tuition scholarship in creative writing and hopes that Taylor will apply. When, in May, Kenyon admits Taylor, his father, despite his continued misgivings about Taylor’s pursuing a writer’s life, does not object. During the summer Taylor writes “A Spinster’s Tale,” which he will later consider his first mature short story. (Over the next two years he will repeatedly try to place it in a national magazine.) At Kenyon is assigned a room in Douglass House, a decrepit Carpenter’s Gothic residence just off campus. His housemaster is Randall Jarrell, now an instructor of freshm
an composition; his housemates include the young poet Robert Lowell, who will become for Taylor a kind of “second brother,” and the future book and magazine editors David McDowell and Robie Macauley. In October “The Lady Is Civilized,” one of the River stories that helped win him his scholarship, is reprinted in Hika, Kenyon’s undergraduate monthly.

  1939

  Reviews Allen Tate’s novel, The Fathers, for Hika, and during July visits the Tates in Monteagle, a mountain resort town southeast of Nashville that will become a lifelong summer haunt. Poem “The Furnishings of a House” appears in the third number of Ransom’s newly established quarterly, The Kenyon Review (Summer 1939); it is the first piece of writing for which Taylor is paid. In the fall contributes several new stories to Hika, including “The Life Before” and “Middle Age.” Presiding over his creative life, as well as those of Jarrell and Lowell, McDowell and Macauley, is the calm, benign, and nurturing figure of John Crowe Ransom. (“I suppose it really was a sort of idealized father-sons relationship,” Taylor would write in 1985. “He was the father we had not quarreled with, the father who was not a lawyer or businessman, and was the man we wished to become. [And] I am absolutely certain he had a parental love for all of us.”)

  1940

  In his final semester at Kenyon publishes the story “Winged Chariot” in the graduation number of Hika. Travels home to Memphis, bringing with him, as houseguests, Robert Lowell and his new wife, the young writer Jean Stafford, both on their way to jobs at Louisiana State University. (Lowell is to be a teaching assistant to Ransom’s former pupils Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; Stafford is to be an editorial assistant at Brooks and Warren’s literary quarterly, The Southern Review.) Through the agency of Lowell, Stafford, Ransom, and Tate, “A Spinster’s Tale” is placed in The Southern Review for Autumn 1940. (Within a year the journal will also publish “Sky Line” [a revised version of “Winged Chariot”] and a new story, “The Fancy Woman.”) Impressed by his fiction, Brooks and Warren offer Taylor thirty dollars a month to grade freshman papers for the academic year 1940–41. In August he moves to Baton Rouge, rents a room in Warren’s apartment, and enrolls at LSU as a postgraduate student. Come Thanksgiving week he withdraws from the program to devote more time to writing. (Taylor, though he will spend most of his life on university campuses, will never consider himself an “academic.” He regularly tells his colleagues and students that he is not an intellectual but rather “someone who writes stories and lets his intelligence come out that way.”) He will remain in Baton Rouge through the end of the school year.

  1941

  In April returns to Memphis, and in May is drafted into the U.S. Army. Is stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, in Catoosa County, Georgia, just across the border from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Serves as a clerk in the transportation section, an office position that allows him time and privacy for writing. Engages Diarmuid Russell, of the New York firm of Russell & Volkening, as his literary agent “for the duration.” On December 7, Japanese aircraft attack Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and America enters World War II.

  1942

  Promoted from PFC to corporal, and then to sergeant. Becomes head clerk of the transportation department, and travels with deployed troops to embarkation points in California, Florida, and the District of Columbia. “The Fancy Woman” is selected for The Best American Short Stories 1942, the first of nine stories by Taylor that will appear in the series through 1980.

  1943

  During Easter furlough travels to Monteagle to visit the Tates. There he meets Eleanor Lilly Ross (b. 1920), the Tates’ favorite student at Woman’s College and now a master’s candidate in English at Vanderbilt. The connection between Taylor and Ross, one of a family of artists and writers in rural Norwood, North Carolina, is instant and profound. Six weeks later, on June 4, the couple is married by Father James Harold Flye, at St. Andrew’s School Chapel, near Sewanee, Tennessee. (The Tates stand in for the parents of the bride; Robert Lowell is the best man, and Jean Stafford is Ross’s bridesmaid.) The newlyweds rent a small apartment in Chattanooga, where that summer Taylor, who commutes by bus to Fort Oglethorpe, writes the story “Rain in the Heart.” Starts work on a novel, a study of the relationship between an only child and his wealthy, complicated stepmother that he calls “Edward, Edward.”

  1944

  In January is ordered to Camp Butner, near Durham, North Carolina, to train for overseas duty. In February his outfit—Headquarters Company, Twelfth Replacement Depot—transfers to Fort Dix, near Trenton, New Jersey. (“When we do go across,” Taylor writes his mother, “our function will be the handling of other men as they come over. We’ll remain from fifty to one hundred miles behind the lines and continue to send replacements up. So we’ll be comparatively free from danger.”) In March Taylor and his company sail on the Ile de France for Northern Ireland. During a prolonged stay in Somerset he makes a friend of local businessman Charles Abbot, who introduces him to the work of Anthony Trollope, which will become a lifelong pleasure. By late spring his company is established at Camp Tidworth, in Wiltshire, in southwest England, where Taylor will serve for the rest of the war. In the summer, through arrangements made by an army chaplain, he is welcomed into the Anglican Communion by William Wand, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Throughout the year he works on “The Scoutmaster,” which will win third prize in a “novelette” contest sponsored by Partisan Review and the Dial Press.

  1945

  In the weeks following V-E Day, completes the stories “Allegiance” and “A Long Fourth” and makes repeated visits to London, eighty miles northeast of Tidworth. Ten days after V-J Day, travels to Paris and—by accident, on the street—encounters Gertrude Stein, who invites him to her Left Bank apartment for a spontaneous, private, two-hour conversation. (They talk of writing, the Jameses, Trollope, and the antebellum South, and Taylor finds her “sensible,” “witty,” and “warm.”) In the fall teaches American literature in a U.S. Army school, his first experience as a classroom instructor. On December 9, sails from Southampton as one of 11,500 American troops aboard the Queen Mary. Arrives in New York on December 15, and five days later is demobilized, at Camp McPherson, in Atlanta. After a reunion in Chattanooga, he and Eleanor spend Christmas with his parents in Memphis.

  1946

  In February leases a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, where, under a two-book contract with Doubleday (negotiated by Diarmuid Russell), he assembles a collection of seven short stories. In March, Doubleday declines to publish the book until he also delivers his novel “Edward, Edward.” In April, at the urging of the Tates, Taylor accepts a teaching position at Woman’s College for the academic year 1946–47. In the meanwhile, he and Eleanor will live in New York City, where Tate has secured Taylor a summer job as reader for Henry Holt & Company and an apartment, at 224 West Tenth Street. At Woman’s College continues to work on “Edward, Edward,” completing the first draft during Christmas break.

  1947

  In the spring organizes annual arts forum at Woman’s College, enlisting Robert Penn Warren, now the author of the best-selling novel All the King’s Men, as the keynote speaker. In attendance are Robert Lowell—whose first trade collection of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle, had just been published—and Lowell’s editor, Robert Giroux, of Harcourt, Brace & Company. After the forum, Giroux proposes that Harcourt buy Taylor’s contract from Doubleday and publish his collection of stories immediately. Giroux suggests the book’s title, “A Long Fourth and Other Stories,” and commissions an introduction from Warren. Taylor renews his contract with Woman’s College, and persuades the En­glish department to hire Randall Jarrell as an instructor beginning in fall 1947. In July, Taylor and Jarrell jointly buy a duplex at 1924 Spring Garden Street, Greensboro. Taylor dismisses Diarmuid Russell as his literary agent, and rewrites “Edward, Edward” throughout the fall.

  1948

  In January accepts offer to teach creative writing at Indiana University for the 1948–49 academic year. In March A Long Fourth is published b
y Harcourt, Brace. Robert Penn Warren’s introduction, which Taylor considers “exactly perfect,” praises both the author’s choice of subject matter—“the contemporary, urban, middle-class world of the Upper South,” which is “his alone”—and his “natural style, one based on conversation and the family tale, with the echo of the spoken world.” The book is reviewed widely and well, and, in response, Katharine S. White, fiction editor of The New Yorker, asks to read Taylor’s future work. He sends her a revised version of his Hika story “Middle Age” (later retitled “Cookie”), which appears in the number for November 6. Signs a first-refusal agreement with The New Yorker, which will publish three short stories and an excerpt from his novel during the coming year. Daughter, Katherine Baird “Katie” Taylor, born in Bloomington on September 30.