by Peter Taylor
1975
Spends three winter weeks in Key West with Eleanor and finds that, in the Florida climate, he “feels fifteen years younger.” By the summer, five of Taylor’s story-poems have been completed and have begun to appear in literary magazines. The sixth and most ambitious, “A Fable of Nashville and Memphis,” evolves into “The Captain’s Son,” his first prose fiction in more than six years. In September, he sends the story to William Maxwell, who, unbeknownst to Taylor, is on hospital leave from The New Yorker. It is read in Maxwell’s absence by Roger Angell, who immediately accepts it for the magazine. The story is edited by Maxwell, who will retire from the magazine at the end of the year, and by Maxwell’s assistant, Frances Kiernan.
1976
Again engaged with fiction, Taylor resigns from Harvard and reduces his workload at Charlottesville. When “The Captain’s Son” appears in January, Jonathan Coleman, a recent graduate of Virginia now a junior editor at Knopf, asks Taylor if he might publish his next collection. Through the agency of Timothy Seldes, his first literary representative in thirty years, Taylor returns his unearned advance to Houghton Mifflin and signs a contract with Knopf. In July he completes a long story, “In the Miro District,” and mails it to Frances Kiernan, now a fiction editor at The New Yorker. It will appear in the magazine the following February.
1977
In January begins to renovate his new Key West property, 1207 Pine Street, a tree-shaded, white-clapboard island cottage purchased sight unseen during the previous summer. (It will be the Taylors’ winter residence, from January through April, for the next six years.) On April 14, Taylor’s sixth collection of stories, In the Miro District, is published by Knopf. The book is dedicated to Taylor’s heart surgeon, Dr. Crampton, “in appreciation for an extension of time.” (Stephen Goodwin, in The New Republic, finds these eight new stories, four of them in verse, “varied and innovative, even rebellious,” and written in a new “risk-taking” voice that is prepared “to withhold nothing, to disguise nothing, to speak all that it knows.”) In June the Taylors downsize to a smaller principal residence—their last—at 1841 Wayside Place, Charlottesville. In the late summer a special number of Shenandoah is published in honor of Taylor’s sixtieth year. On September 13, Robert Lowell, also sixty, dies of a heart attack in New York City. At the funeral, in Boston, Taylor reads Lowell’s poem “Where the Rainbow Ends,” from Lord Weary’s Castle. In October he is diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes, the medical condition that had shortened the life of his father. After Christmas he receives news that, in May, he will be awarded the Gold Medal for the Short Story by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1978
Allen Tate dies, at the age of seventy-nine, on February 9, and Jean Stafford, at sixty-three, on March 26. On August 1 completes a long story, “The Old Forest,” and mails it to Frances Kiernan.
1979
“The Old Forest” is published in the May 14 number of The New Yorker. Despite its length—nearly twenty-five thousand words—it is selected for inclusion in both The Best American Short Stories 1980 and Prize Stories 1980: The O. Henry Awards. In the wake of the critical success of In the Miro District, Farrar, Straus reprints The Collected Stories in hardcover and paperback.
1980
Greatly enjoys the winter social circle in Key West, which includes John Ciardi, John Hersey, Ralph Ellison, Alison Lurie, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, and James Boatwright, the editor of Shenandoah. In September Frances Kiernan accepts another short story, “The Gift of the Prodigal,” which will appear in The New Yorker the following June. In August signs a contract with Judith Jones of Alfred A. Knopf for a novel and a collection of short stories. Spends the fall sketching out three long stories, one of which, the tale of a middle-aged New York book editor’s reluctant return to his childhood home in Tennessee, seems to be the germ of his next novel.
1981
Suffers diabetic nerve damage to legs and feet, which makes sleep nearly impossible. Painkillers help but interfere with his writing. Still he makes good progress on his novel, which he calls first “The Duelists” and then “A Summons to Memphis.”
1982
Stuart Wright, a book collector and fine-press printer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, prints a chapbook edition of Taylor’s play “The Early Guest,” limited to 140 hand-sewn copies. Taylor assembles the typescript of “New and Selected Stories,” an omnibus conceived as a companion to The Collected Stories. The book, which comprises “The Old Forest,” “The Gift of the Prodigal,” and twelve stories from out-of-print collections, is submitted to Knopf by his agent, Tim Seldes. Judith Jones, remarking that Knopf had contracted for a volume of previously uncollected stories, regretfully declines publication.
1983
In May is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the fifty-member inner circle of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In June teaches his final class at the University of Virginia. Accepts an invitation to teach the fall semester at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), partly to research the Memphis sections of his novel-in-progress, partly to observe the filming of a one-hour television film based on “The Old Forest.” The film, directed by Steven John Ross, is a coproduction of the Department of Theater and Communications Arts of MSU and Humanities Tennessee. A Woman of Means, Taylor’s novel of 1950, is reprinted in hardcover by Frederick C. Beil, New York. Tim Seldes, after unsuccessfully submitting “New and Selected Stories” to Farrar, Straus, places the book with Allen Peacock of The Dial Press.
1984
In spring gives a reading at the University of Georgia–Athens, where his host is Hubert H. McAlexander, a young professor of English with an interest in Southern fiction and biography. In August is awarded a Senior Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. While working on proof of “New and Selected Stories” changes the title of the book to “The Old Forest.”
1985
On February 8 Taylor’s seventh collection of stories, The Old Forest, is published by The Dial Press. (The reviews are the best and most numerous of his career. Anne Tyler, writing in USA Today, calls Taylor “the undisputed master of the short story form. In The Old Forest, as in all of [his] writing, there is a quality that makes the reader feel satisfied, even honored. I believe the word for it is integrity.”) The collection, which is reprinted four times, will sell more than twenty thousand hardcover copies and, in the following year, receive the PEN/Faulkner Award for American fiction. In October Steve Ross’s film The Old Forest, featuring voice-over narration by Taylor, receives both its premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival and the first of many showings on the fledgling A&E television network. In the fall is visiting professor in creative writing at the University of Georgia, where his deepening friendship with Hubert H. McAlexander will eventually result in three collaborative book projects, Conversations with Peter Taylor (1986), Critical Essays on Peter Taylor (1993), and a posthumous biography, Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life (2001). In November delivers his novel “A Summons to Memphis” to Judith Jones. The book, about a grown man’s enduring struggle to find himself—and his calling—in the shadow of a strong father and damaged, bickering adult siblings, is, he tells Hubert McAlexander, his way of posing the question, “How successful are we ever in understanding what has happened to us?”
1986
On March 2 Taylor’s estranged brother, Bob, dies at the age of seventy. In May a limited, slipcased, hardcover edition of Taylor’s play A Stand in the Mountains is published by Frederick C. Beil. (The frontispiece is a photograph of Taylor, at the age of twenty-six, taken in Monteagle by Father Flye.) On July 24 suffers a stroke that leaves him temporarily paralyzed on his right side, the recovery from which will be slow and only partial. On October 6 A Summons to Memphis is published by Knopf. Taylor is gratified by the critical response, especially a front-page piece by Marilynne Robinson in The New York Times Book Review. (“A Summons to Memphis is not so much a ta
le of human weakness,” she writes, “as of the power of larger patterns, human also, that engulf individual character, a current subsumed in a tide.”)
1987
In spring A Summons to Memphis receives the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award and then the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Works on a new novel, “To the Lost State,” a companion piece to A Summons to Memphis that draws on his memories of his mother and his maternal grandfather, the colorful Tennessee politician Robert Love Taylor. In the fall, a substantial “composite” interview with Barbara Thompson Davis, conducted in annual sessions over the last six years, is published in The Paris Review. Frances Kiernan, his editor at The New Yorker, leaves the magazine at the end of the year.
1988
Stuart Wright, working closely with Taylor, completes a descriptive bibliography of Taylor’s work and brokers the sale of his literary manuscripts to the Vanderbilt University Library. The Taylors buy a summer property in Sewanee, the same house Peter had leased in 1946, and purchase a plot in the university cemetery, near the grave of Allen Tate. In September Taylor is hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer. “Something in Her Instep High,” an episode from “To the Lost State,” appears in the Fall number of The Key West Review.
1989
Hires an “amanuensis,” or combination typist and personal assistant, and begins dictating his correspondence and, later, his fiction. In this fashion he and his young helper, Brian Griffin, produce the manuscript of a long story, “The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs.” In November, when The New Yorker declines to publish his new story, he decides never to submit to the magazine again. In the late fall is incapacitated by a second and more severe attack of diabetic neuropathy.
1990
By spring he is feeling well enough to dispense with his amanuensis and resume work at the typewriter. “Cousin Aubrey,” a second episode from “To the Lost State,” is published in the Winter number of The Kenyon Review. Begins work on another long story, “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court,” which he hopes to publish as a stand-alone short novel.
1991
“The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs” is published in the Winter number of The Kenyon Review. In June, during a conversation with Christopher Metress, a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt writing his dissertation on Taylor’s work, learns that among his papers in the Vanderbilt library are three unpublished stories from the 1960s. Upon rereading “At the Art Theater,” “In the Waiting Room,” and “The Real Ghost,” decides that they, together with “The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs,” will form the core of his next book, a collection of short works, old and new, addressing themes of death, the past, and the supernatural.
1992
Hires a second amanuensis, Mark Trainer, and resumes work on “To the Lost State.” “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court” is published in the literary annual New Virginia Review. Taylor decides that it is not a stand-alone novella but instead the title story of his new collection, now comprising ten works of short fiction, “Cousin Aubrey,” and revised versions of three ghost plays from Presences.
1993
On February 16 Taylor’s eighth collection of stories, The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, is published by Knopf. The book is dedicated to his wife, Eleanor. (The reviews are mixed, but Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post, calls it “quintessential Taylor: wry, leisurely, intimate . . . He is, in his seventy-sixth year, the best writer we have.”) In April receives the PEN/Malamud Award for his lifetime contribution to the art of the short story. In November, completes final draft of “To the Lost State,” for which Judith Jones suggests the title “In the Tennessee Country.” Immediately begins adapting his play “A Stand in the Mountains” into a novel, a work he alternatingly refers to as “Call Me Telemachus” and “The Brothers Taliaferro.”
1994
On August 16 In the Tennessee Country is published by Knopf. (John Bayley, writing in The London Review of Books, calls it “a revelation . . . an immaculate piece of fiction, and a subtly unpretentious work of art. The Henry James of A Small Boy and Others would have adored this book.”) In mid-October Taylor suffers a final, paralyzing stroke, and soon slips into a coma. He dies at home, in Charlottesville, on November 2, at the age of seventy-seven. Three days later, after a funeral service at All Saints’ Chapel, in Sewanee, he is buried in the cemetery at the University of the South. He is survived by his wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011); his sister, Mettie Taylor Dobson (1912–2000); his daughter, Katherine (1949–2001); and his son, Ross (b. 1955).
Note on the Texts
This volume contains twenty-nine short stories that Peter Taylor wrote from the summer of 1938, when he was twenty-one, to the fall of 1959, when he was forty-two. All first appeared in American books or periodicals from 1940 to 1960. The volume also contains, in an appendix titled “Undergraduate Stories,” three stories written from 1936 to 1939 that Taylor published in little magazines and undergraduate monthlies but did not later revise or collect in book form. A companion volume in the Library of America series collects thirty of Taylor’s later stories, written from 1960 to 1992.
Most of the stories reprinted here also appeared in the following hardcover collections by Peter Taylor:
A Long Fourth and Other Stories, with an introduction by Robert Penn Warren (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1948). (First U.K. printing: London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.)
The Widows of Thornton (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1954).
Happy Families Are All Alike (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959). (First U.K. printing: London: Macmillan, 1960.)
Miss Leonora When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963).
The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969).
The Old Forest and Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: The Dial Press, 1985). (First U.K. printing: London: Chatto & Windus, 1985.)
Because it was the author’s usual practice to revise the texts of his short stories slightly every time he collected them, the latest book version of each is used here.
The stories are arranged here in the order of composition as determined by correspondence between Peter Taylor and his editors at The New Yorker magazine preserved in The New Yorker Records at the New York Public Library, supplemented by information contained in Hubert H. McAlexander’s biography Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
Taylor wrote “A Spinster’s Tale” at the home of his parents, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1938. The story was begun in February, shortly after he withdrew from the program at local Southwestern College (now Rhodes College), and was completed in July or August, just before he began the fall term at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. Although Taylor had been writing short fiction since the summer of 1936, he would always think of “A Spinster’s Tale” as his first mature story—the first “worth sending out” to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other national magazines. After nearly two years of unsuccessful submissions, it was accepted by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks for The Southern Review, a literary quarterly published by the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge, and appeared in the number for Autumn 1940. It was reprinted in A Long Fourth (1948), Miss Leonora When Last Seen (1963), and Collected Stories (1969). The text from Collected Stories is used here.
“Cookie” was written at Kenyon during the fall of 1939. It first appeared, as “Middle Age,” in the December 1939 number of Hika, the college’s undergraduate monthly. In April 1948, following the publication of the collection A Long Fourth, Katharine S. White, chief fiction editor of The New Yorker, invited Taylor to submit future work to the magazine. Taylor immediately responded with a revised version of “Middle Age,” which White published in The New Yorker for November 6, 1948. It was reprinted, as “Cookie,” in The Widows of Thornton (1954), Miss Leonora When Last Seen (1963), and Collected Stories (1969). The text from Collected Stories is used here.
“Sky Line” was written at Kenyon during the w
inter and spring of 1940. It first appeared, as “Winged Chariot,” in the June 1940 number of Hika. A revised version appeared, under the present title, in the Winter 1941 number of The Southern Review. It was reprinted in A Long Fourth (1948) and Miss Leonora When Last Seen (1963). The text from Miss Leonora When Last Seen is used here.
“The Fancy Woman” was written in a rented cottage in Monteagle, Tennessee, during the summer of 1940. It appeared in the Summer 1941 number of The Southern Review. It was reprinted in A Long Fourth (1948), Miss Leonora When Last Seen (1963), and Collected Stories (1969). The text from Collected Stories is used here.
“The School Girl” was written at the home of Taylor’s parents, in Memphis, Tennessee, during the spring of 1941. It was accepted by The Southern Review, which in the winter of 1941–42 suspended publication due to the war. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren then placed the story, as well as others in The Southern Review’s unpublished inventory, with Paul Engle, editor of American Prefaces, the literary quarterly of the University of Iowa. It appeared in the special “Southern Number” of American Prefaces dated Spring 1942, the source of the text used here.
“A Walled Garden” was written at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, just across the state line from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the fall of 1941. It appeared, as “Like the Sad Heart of Ruth,” in The New Republic for December 8, 1941. (Taylor, who was then a private first class in the U.S. Army, engaged Diarmuid Russell, of the New York literary agency Russell & Volkening, to represent his work “for the duration.” This was Russell’s first sale on Taylor’s behalf.) It was reprinted, under the present title, in Happy Families Are All Alike (1959) and The Old Forest (1985). The text from The Old Forest is used here.