THREE REVIEWS OF PETER TAYLOR'S A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS (1986)
FROM NEXIS, USING THE "ALLNWS" DATABASE AND
THE SEARCH PHRASES 'TAYLOR' AND 'SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS.'

['ALLNWS' GIVES THE FULL TEXT OF MANY U.S. NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES, INCLUDING BOOK REVIEWS, FROM THE PRESENT TO THE EARLY 1980s. 'ARCNWS' COULD HAVE BEEN USED AS WELL, SINCE THAT COVERS ALL PIECES MORE THAN 2 YEARS OLD.] LATER IN THE SEMINAR YOU WILL BE DOING SIMILAR SEARCHES FOR REVIEWS OF WORKS BY BRADLEY, JOHNSON, WILLIAMS, & OTHERS.


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=========================

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

The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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.

The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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.''

The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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
The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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

The New York Times, October 19, 1986

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



***************************************************
Copyright The New Republic Inc. 1986
The New Republic

November 24, 1986

SECTION: Vol. 195 ; Pg. 37; ISSN: 0028-6583

LENGTH: 1973 words

HEADLINE: A summons to Memphis. _book reviews

BYLINE: Hulbert, Ann

BODY:
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor Peter taylor is routinely and
rightly praised for the glasslike lucidity of his prose, yet he is interested
above all in distortions of perspective. For more than 40 years, he has written
about well-born families in the upper South who have lost much of their
assurance about what to look up to and whom to look down on. His Tennessee, as
Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1948 in his introduction to Taylor's first
collection of stories, A Long Fourth, "is a world vastly uncertain of itself

The New Republic, November 24, 1986

and the ground of its values, caught in a tangle of modern commercialism and
traditions and conventions gone to seed, confused among pieties and
pretensions." That world was still a contemporary one then. It no longer is--the
old rules of order between the generations, the sexes, and the races are
history. Yet they are important history, and Taylor has continued to
scrutinize the place and epoch of their passing in fiction that seems
old-fashioned--at least on the surface.

Taylor's new novel (his second, if you count the short A Woman of Means)
looks like another contribution to that absorbing enterprise. In a sense it is.
A Summons to Memphis is largely a gathering of Phillip Carver's memories of
growing up happily in Nashville and then unhappily in Memphis in the 1930s and
'40s. But Phillip's "very irregular notebooks," which he writes in New York
miles and years away from his family past, are also an occasion for Taylor to
explore an even more uncertain world than that densely textured South.
Scribbling in a gloomy Manhattan apartment in the 1970s, Phillip is suffering
from a very contemporary anomie. With his deracinated narrator, Taylor has
brought to the surface the psychological theme that has always been at the heart
of his social portraiture: how resilient, or else resistant, human character can
be in the face of disorder and change.


The New Republic, November 24, 1986

It is a familiar Southern preoccupation, but Taylor's "under-style," as
Warren termed it, and his quiet emphasis on the mysteries of character (he's
often compared to Chekhov) set him apart from the gothic regionalism of much
Southern writing. He is neither pious about the past nor much impressed by the
present, and his ruminations about human motives and actions have always had a
deliberately inconclusive quality. Above all, they have never been simple.
Certainly they aren't in A Summons to Memphis, which might best be described
as a dramatic monologue--a virtuosic example of the often disconcerting genre.
Taylor lets Phillip do all the talking, but that doesn't mean he trusts
Phillip's account of self-discovery or intends us to. Phillip may well rate as
Taylor's least reliable narrator, and this book demands--and
rewards--vigilance. Phillip's reckoning with his own history, Taylor
ironically implies throughout his character's monologue, is hollower than it
appears. This dispassionate narrator is strangely bloodless, and in the end he
has lost his bearings.

A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS has the outline of a familiar Taylor story: a man
is unexpectedly jolted into a confrontation with an oppressive, puzzling past
and then has a brief revelation-- Taylor's characteristically inconclusive kind
of epiphany. A reclusive New York editor and rare-book collector of middle age,
Phillip Carver receives calls one evening from his older spinster sisters in
Memphis, who announce that their aging father, recently widowed, plans to
The New Republic, November 24, 1986

remarry, and that they want Phillip to help them stop him. Phillip is prompted
to dip back into his past to explain the family resentments that motivate Betsy
and Josephine and to examine his own feelings. He unearths memories of a father
who was shamefully domineering but also admirably adaptable in a way Phillip
himself will never be, and he manages to forgive him. While his sisters sabotage
the remarriage (and also their father's reconciliation with the best friend who
once betrayed him), Phillip stands aside.

Yet the way Phillip tells the story lends support to an implicit, and
considerably darker, version. The prose is as limpid as ever ("like a
glass-bottom boat," said Randall Jarrell), but Phillip's method is digressive in
the extreme: he veers unpredictably between past and present, circles around
obviously important memories, repeats himself again and again. His long-winded,
hairsplitting manner results in some quite comical passages--to Taylor's
obvious delight. But Phillip's own detachment is strangely awkward, not witty.
Despite all the minute observations he offers, he is emotionally impassive as he
pauses to describe the woman with whom he has lived for years or his best friend
from Memphis days, or surveys his family--or assesses himself: "I think I felt
totally indifferent," says this man from whom sentiments flee. Each page seems
to hold out the promise that Phillip is about to frame a memory in a way that
might free him from his aloofness. Yet the happy ending that Taylor stages in
the last, frigidly lyrical paragraph of these notebooks is heavily ironic--as
The New Republic, November 24, 1986

his apparently comic conclusions so often are. This narrator is numbly suspended
between the past and the future, between the power to will and the power to
feel.

THROUGHOUT PHILLIP'S monologue, Taylor nudges us toward this deeper
reading: here is a man whose ostensible resilience is finally only a sign of
abiding passivity. For such an evasive soul, Taylor suggests, a confrontation
with his family past can do little to instill, or strengthen, a sense of
generous self-possession. Instead it becomes an occasion to avoid responsibility
for having become the remote person he is. The convoluted tour Phillip makes of
his youthful ordeals reveals a vulnerable man bent on blaming others for his own
self-centered vulnerability. He starts out by claiming that the source of his
sisters' (and his own) resentment against their father lies in the move George
Carver forced on the family some 40 years earlier, in 1931. Betrayed in
Nashville by his best friend and principal legal client, Lewis Shackleford,
George Carver picked up and established a new and successful career in the more
commercial, less custom-bound city of Memphis. But for his wife and children,
according to Phillip, the uprooting was a disaster George selfishly ignored.
Phillip's mother lapsed into "thirty years of real or imagined invalidism," his
sisters started down the road of brittle spinsterhood, and 13-year-old Phillip
suffered "a trauma he would in some way never recover from."

The New Republic, November 24, 1986

Phillip himself half-admits that it sounds preposterous to assign such
importance to the shift between the two cities, "with their almost imperceptible
difference--laughably alike they would seem to an outsider." What he doesn't
seem fully to appreciate is that he has undermined his own credibility, which
casts his succeeding accusations in a more questionable light. Is this narrator
either the former helpless victim or the current clear-eyed judge he makes
himself out to be? The actual disaster, he eventually claims, was that the
imperious George Carver meddled in his children's romantic lives, denying them
independence when they needed it most. He openly rejected Betsy's suitor and
Josephine's beaux, and the once beautiful girls turned into eccentric
characters. With Phillip he was sneakier but no less assertive: behind his son's
back George Carver saw to it that Phillip's sweetheart was dispatched to South
America. Phillip in turn secretly absconded to New York, where he claims he's
been enjoying placid independence ever since with a woman whose greatest virtue
is apparently her detachment.

PHILLIP HAS sketched a grim caricature of the provincial past that often
looms in taylor's stories. The changing local Tennessee customs that unbalance
so many of his characters seem to have disoriented Phillip in a radical--almost
surreal--way. For him, the familiar overbearing power of family traditions and
expectations has turned tyrannical. Not that he's presented it so strakly.
Shifting constantly among scenes and times, Phillip makes a show of groping
The New Republic, November 24, 1986

for a clearer perspective on a past he's brooded over but never before brought
to the surface--yet he's more successful in raising further questions about his
own failures to act and react.

Toward the end of his notebooks, Phillip is given what appears to be the
reprieve Taylor sometimes offers his protagonists: the chance to put his past,
if only provisionally, in more realistic proportion. Yet Taylor implies that
Phillip may be as misled about his mature liberation as he was about his
youthful enslavement. His supposed act of imaginative sympathy with forceful
George Carver serves in the end as another way for Phillip to assuage his
uneasiness about his own wan existence--to convince himself that from now on he
is choosing it freely. Taylor grants him a few moments of empathy: there is a
vivid scene in which Phillip is swept up and out of himself by the old man as
the two ride in a car to the wedding his sisters have secretly canceled.

But by the close of the book, Phillip has drifted into dry speculations
instead. Sitting in his Manhattan apartment with Holly Kaplan, the woman with
whom he's lived peacefully and passionlessly for years, he sips a watery drink
and talks endlessly about principles of family reconciliation--about forgiving
versus forgetting--rather than about real people. He says he can now see and
admire his father as an energetically adaptable man, completely different from
himself: "It was his very oppositeness from me that I could admire without
The New Republic, November 24, 1986

reservation, like a character in a book." Contemplating an unchanged, utterly
quiet life ahead, he announces in his last line that he and Holly have emerged
"serenely free spirits."

Yet "serenity" and "orderliness" and "reasonableness," the supreme values in
Phillip's limited existence, are hardly Taylor's high standards. Conceiving of
the past as the realm of determinism, Phillip seizes upon the future as the
province of choice--and is left with no true human choices to make. The static,
unencumbered fate that Phillip and his companion look forward to with
self-satisfaction is sterile--a vision of the weightless contemporary world
eerier than any Taylor has presented before. Shut up in his dim apartment with
Holly, surrounded by manuscripts rather than children, Phillip may see his
notebooks as evidence of the birth of understanding, but in fact they are the
testimony of a disoriented soul.

"PETER TAYLOR has a disenchanted mind," Robert Penn Warren wrote 40 years
ago, "but a mind that nevertheless understands and values enchantment"--"the
enchantment of veracity," he hastened to say, not of fantasy. The trauma of
maturity, Taylor's fiction has always proposed, involves more than seeing
through the oppressive pieties and pretensions of the past. But he has rarely so
starkly dramatized the real, and more daunting, challenge: to find some humane
way of living with precisely the terrifying truth that those family and social
The New Republic, November 24, 1986

customs are meant to camouflage--the chasms between selves. Some of his
characters are lucky enough to "see the world through another man's eyes," as
the narrator of the story "The Promise of Rain" puts it, and thus have a chance
of truly seeing into their own heads, and above all their own hearts: "It is
only then all the world, as you have seen it through your own eyes, will begin
to tell you things about yourself." For the less fortunate in Taylor's
fiction, the price of myopia is high. Some turn into tyrants at home. Some
become victims out in the world. In A Summons to Memphis Taylor has suggested
an even more alienating possibility in Phillip, who has no real home and rarely
ventures into the world: the danger of turning into a "free spirit" trapped
within the bounds of the self.




********************************

Copyright 1986 Newsweek
Newsweek

September 29, 1986, UNITED STATES EDITION

SECTION: THE ARTS; Books; Pg. 64

LENGTH: 864 words

HEADLINE: You Can't Go Home Again;
A Summons to Memphis. By Peter Taylor. 196 pages.
Knopf. $ 16.95.

BYLINE: WALTER CLEMONS

BODY:
"I thought only: Oh, the foolishness of Memphis ways! And I felt a surge of
happiness that I had got away so long ago," says Phillip Carver at the start of
Peter Taylor's new novel -- his first since "A Woman of Means" (1950).
Phillip is a middle-aged bachelor, sitting alone in his dark Manhattan apartment
after receiving two calls from his unmarried older sisters urging him to fly
home at once to help prevent their 81-year-old father's intended re-marriage.

Newsweek, September 29, 1986

Phillip thinks it funny that such a fuss, of which he recollects other examples
in Memphis society, should be breaking out in his own family: "We are not after
all a Memphis family. We had lived in Memphis only thirty years."

So -- charmingly, comically, lightly -- begins a tale that unfolds as easily
as relaxed family gossip. But before it ends, deep recesses of smothering
family ties, suppressed resentment and delayed revenge are uncovered. Phillip
Carver has not "got away" from his Memphis family at all, it turns out. His
father interfered with his engagement to the only girl he ever loved. But why,
he comes to ask, did he grow up into "a man who would find it so difficult to
fall in love with a woman that it could happen only once in my life?" Why did
his older brother run off to get himself killed in World War II? Why, after
their father prevented their marriages, have his vivacious sisters remained,
"while actually in their mid-fifties, two little teen-aged girls dressed up and
playing roles. It was their way of not facing or accepting the facts of their
adult life. They could not forget the old injuries. They wished to keep them
alive. They were frozen forever in their roles as injured adolescents."

Some of Taylor's best long stories -- seemingly casual, but actually
cunningly plotted -- have revolved around a mystery. Why did Miss Leonora
Logan, in "Miss Leonora When Last Seen," disappear from her hometown? Why did
Lee Ann Deehart, in "The Old Forest and Other Stories" (which recently won the
Newsweek, September 29, 1986

PEN/Faulkner Award for the best work of American fiction published in 1985),
jump out of a car after a minor Memphis accident in 1937 and go into hiding?
Why, in "A Summons to Memphis, " does Phillip Carver keep protesting that his
family's move from Nashville to Memphis, when he was 13, was a trauma from which
he and his 19- and 20-year old sisters were never able to recover? Can two
Tennessee cities a few miles apart, "with their almost imperceptible differences
-- laughably alike they would seem to an outsider," Phillip admits -- really
represent ledges of a psychic chasm? The reader does sometimes wonder if
Phillip is the "unreliable narrator" of much modern fiction since Henry James's
"The Turn of the Screw" and Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." Are we meant
to distrust him?

That's not quite what Taylor is up to. Phillip Carver knows only part of
the truth about his life when he begins tellins us about it. Nashville and
Memphis are indeed masks for a bifurcated experience of family life. After the
move from Nashville to Memphis, Phillip's handsome, loving father changed into a
tyrant. Having been betrayed by his crooked business partner in Nashville, Mr.
Carver began life over again in a new town. One of the best passages in the
novel describes the family's stately progress in two cars to their new home,
with Father glancing uneasily in the rearview mirrow when his elder daughter and
her fiance fall behind. Phillip speculates "that Father was thinking that he
must arrive in Memphis with the entire family intact if he was to make a new
Newsweek, September 29, 1986

go of things. I think possibly he felt that was the only way he could endure
this transition. He could only have the strength to start over if he felt he
had lost nothing himself, if he was certain that all his dependents were still
his dependents."

Limited forgiveness: In the revenge they take many years later, Phillip's
sisters delicately, politely re-enact the roles of Goneril and Regan, with
perfect respect for the social rules of Memphis, which has no heath for Lear to
rage upon. Phillip, as deprived as his sisters, moves from forgetting to a
limited form of forgiveness.

"A Summons to Memphis" is a delicious novel about minute social
discriminations. Phillip's sisters, "since they had already been brought out as
young ladies in Nashville society should not be presented in Memphis. The rule
was . . . that a girl could be presented simultaneously in two cities but could
not come out in different cities in successive years. . . . Otherwise some girl
who had not found love and marriage after a year of being 'out' in Nashville
might move on to Memphis the next year and New Orleans the next . . . so long as
her matronly aunts and cousins based in those other cities lasted and were
willing to present them there. . . . Clearly, as in any other game, this would
be unfair, and it would make the process of debutantism even more ridiculous
than otherwise. The reasoning was, I suppose, you have your one chance and
Newsweek, September 29, 1986

you take it." Peter Taylor is one of the best, most unfairly neglected
American writers. This funny, touching novel may change his luck.


The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X3; JONATHAN YARDLEY

LENGTH: 1356 words

HEADLINE: Peter Taylor's Novel of Fathers and Sons

BYLINE: Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS By Peter Taylor Knopf. 209 pp. $ 15.95

SEATED IN HIS cramped apartment on West 82nd Street in Manhattan, writing in
"these very irregular notebooks," Phillip Carver at the age of 49 confronts his
aged father and, in so doing, himself. Not long ago he had been summoned to
Memphis by his two spinster sisters because his father, two years a widower, had
proposed to marry a younger woman; he records in his notebooks that "I thought I
had detected an old-fashioned fury in my sisters' voices which made me fearful
for my father's well-being," and so he had hastened to Memphis to defend the old
man. But the journey turned into much more than an errand of filial mercy; it
became a summons into the depths of Carver's own past, a re-encounter with
people and events that shaped him, in most cases much against his will, into the
man he is now.

The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

Fathers and sons: the theme has recurred over and again in Taylor's mature
fiction, most notably in such short stories as "The Gift of the Prodigal," "The
Captain's Son" and "Dean of Men." In that sense, as in many others, A Summons
to Memphis is quintessential Taylor. But A Summons to Memphis is not a short
story, a novella or a play, the forms in which he has previously written; it is
Taylor's first true novel, published in his 70th year. That our most
distinguished and accomplished writer of short fiction has at last written a
novel is cause enough for comment and celebration, but there is much more for
which to be grateful. A Summons to Memphis is something of a miracle: not
merely a novel of immense intelligence, psychological acuity and emotional
power, but a work that manages to summarize and embody its author's entire
career.

It is also, for Taylor's admirers, a gift. Those of us who love his work have
wanted him to write long fiction not in order to conform to bloated American
notions about literary success, but for the sheer pleasures and rewards of
reading him at greater length. For years these readers have wondered what would
happen if the author of such masterpieces of short fiction as "A Wife of
Nashville" and "The Old Forest" simply fell into an expansive mood, and allowed
a story to spin itself out to the full dimensions of a book. Now we have the
answer, and it seems almost too good to be true: Taylor is as much a master of
the novel as of the story.

The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

In tone and method, A Summons to Memphis is directly related to Taylor's
later short stories. Its narrator is a man of sufficient years to be able to
cast a long backward glance, and of sufficient self-awareness to comprehend his
own shortcomings as well as those of others -- though his self-understanding
does have its clear, and revealing, limits. Within the opening pages a number of
mysteries and secrets are gradually identified, but we discover their true
nature only after a leisurely process in which layer after layer is slowly
peeled away. The mood is genial and civilized, but dark matters lie not far
beneath the surface; for if A Summons to Memphis is a novel about
understanding and forgiveness, it is also one about betrayal and retribution.

The first betrayal, and the one to which everything else can be traced, took
place in 1931, when George Carver, Phillip's father, was "deceived and nearly
ruined financially by his closest friend and principal legal client back in
Nashville, one Mr. Lewis Shackleford." Refusing to stay in the same town with
this knave, Carver moved with his wife and four children to Memphis, where he
established a law practice and soon became a prominent citizen -- but where his
wife and children, accustomed to Nashville ways, found their lives thrown
peculiarly off course. His wife fell into a decline, perhaps more psychosomatic
than real, that lasted three decades; his daughters were maneuvered out of
prospective marriages and into prosperous, bitter spinsterhood; his elder son
was killed in the Second World War; and Phillip renounced both Memphis and the

The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

law, moving to New York to become an editor and book-collector.

Now, back in Memphis to see what he can do about his octogenarian father's
marital aspirations, Phillip finds all these strains from his family's past
intermingling with others from his own in a painful web of memory. He writes at
one point that "my head was full of . . . adult understanding," by which he
means that the combination of a family crisis and his own arrival at middle age
has allowed him to see though veneers of half-truth and self-deception to the
truths of his life: to understand how he has misunderstood his father and his
sisters, and thus himself. In particular he comes to see that his sisters are
"frozen forever in their roles as injured adolescents" and that what he had for
years thought to be his father's selfishness is something far more complex.
Reflecting upon the counsel of the woman with whom he lives, he writes:

"By this time of course I accepted Holly's doctrine that our old people must
be not merely forgiven all their injustices and unconscious cruelties in their
roles as parents but that any selfishness on their parts had actually been
required of them if they were to remain whole human beings and not become merely
guardian robots of the young. This was something to be remembered, not
forgotten. This was something to be accepted and even welcomed, not forgotten or
forgiven."

The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

ACCEPTING and remembering are, if anything, the principal business that
Phillip Carver conducts in these "notebooks." The "adult understanding" he
slowly reaches is that one has to live with what one has been given, and that
trying to push it out of mind is merely irresponsible and self-deluding. A
central reality in Phillip's life is that his father -- with, he finally comes
to see, the unwitting complicity of his sisters -- destroyed his hopes of
marriage to the only woman he ever really loved, but he now is mature enough to
try to understand why his father did this to him. He is forced to confront the
ways in which submission is maintained within families, and the schemes that
children and spouses devise in order to cope with it. However ruefully, he
learns what his father knows but his sisters never will: there is no such thing
as "a simple truth."

But to describe A Summons to Memphis purely in terms of the themes it
examines is to overlook the other pleasures it offers: the sly depiction of
contrasting folkways in Memphis and Nashville, the nostalgic yet unsentimental
excursions into a lost way of life, the rich yet precise and unadorned prose.
Above all, perhaps, the prose. Here is Phillip, remembering a day when he gave
his one true love a small present:

"She tore off the paper with real anticipation, I felt. She peeped inside the
book to the selection of very old and little-known Christmas verse. Then

The Washington Post, September 14, 1986

almost before I knew it she had thrown her arms around my neck and kissed me so
lovingly that I made an effort to draw her further into a possibly less visible
corner of the room. But she laughed at my effort. 'What do we care who sees us?'
she asked. But I managed to lead her to the nearby couch and there returned her
kiss many times over. Finally she held me a little away from her and looking
directly into my eyes she said softly, 'Some night I want you to go with me to
my room, Phillip.' Of course I went with her that very night, and from that time
we were truly lovers and imagined ourselves bound to each other for life."

Prose of such subtlety, taste and clarity -- prose that so poignantly and
exactly evokes a moment, and makes it real -- is rare at any time, rarer still
today, yet Peter Taylor has been writing it for four decades. Only of late has
he begun to receive the attention and admiration he has earned, but with the
publication last year of The Old Forest and Other Stories he suddenly found a
readership. Now, with A Summons to Memphis, that readership surely will grow
still larger, his reputation still greater. American readers demand novels, and
now Peter Taylor has given them one; to say that it is every bit as good as
the best of his short stories is the highest compliment it can be paid.

==================


Copyright 1987 The Washington Post
The Washington Post

April 20, 1987, Monday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; PAGE B2; JONATHAN YARDLEY

LENGTH: 1135 words

HEADLINE: Peter Taylor's Long-Overdue Pulitzer

BYLINE: JONATHAN YARDLEY

BODY:
From time to time there is justice in this rough world, and so it is that
Peter Taylor at last has his Pulitzer Prize. The honor should have been his
years ago, but better late than never. After more than four decades of neglect,
Taylor suddenly is bathed in the glow of recognition and publicity: extravagant
reviews for his last two books, and now both a Pulitzer and a Hemingway Prize
for "A Summons to Memphis," his first novel since "A Woman of Means" in 1950.



The Washington Post, April 20, 1987

All of this good news would be better, it must be said, had Taylor not
behaved so foolishly when "A Summons to Memphis" failed to win the American
Book Award for fiction last November. The novel was on the short list of three
nominees, but after Taylor learned in advance that the award had gone elsewhere,
he refused to attend the awards ceremony, defending his action on the highly
debatable -- and most certainly ex post facto -- grounds that the short list
pitted writers against each other in unseemly competition.

Precisely how the short list for the American Book Award differs from the
short list for the Hemingway Prize is anything but clear, yet Taylor accepted
the latter award -- and its $ 50,000 check -- with no evident chagrin at beating
out Peter Handke and Margaret Atwood for the honor, which went to what the
judges deemed the best work of fiction published in English in 1986. Perhaps
consistency really is the hobgoblin of small minds; perhaps $ 50,000 is enough
to make consistency irrelevant. Whatever the case, the flexibility of Taylor's
literary principles takes some of the glow off his new e'clat.

But not enough to provoke much more than a flicker of irritation among those
of us who admired his work for years and despaired at the indifference with
which that work was greeted. Over and again, honors and commercial success went
to writers of lesser gifts and accomplishments, while Taylor, choosing to work
in the obscurity that is usually the short story writer's fate, received

The Washington Post, April 20, 1987

little except the applause of a small circle of friends and admirers that grew
ever more protective as the years passed.

Since 1948 Taylor has published a dozen books: seven collections of stories,
three volumes of plays and two novels -- though both of the latter really are
novellas. Until this year he had not won a major national award for any of them,
and none had sold more than a few thousand copies. It is instructive and
interesting to list Taylor's books, and side by side to list the books that were
awarded Pulitzers in the years Taylor was eligible. To do so is not to single
out the Pulitzers for criticism -- all award programs are fallible by nature --
but to note how difficult it is for a distinguished but unknown and commercially
unsuccessful writer to gain recognition. This is what the comparison shows:

Taylor's first collection of stories, "A Long Fourth," was published in 1948.
The 1949 Pulitzer for fiction went to James Gould Cozzens, for "Guard of Honor."
Taylor's first novel, "A Woman of Means," appeared in 1950. The 1951 Pulitzer
for fiction went to Conrad Richter, for "The Town."

"The Widows of Thornton," a volume of stories, was published in 1954. The
1955 Pulitzer for fiction went to William Faulkner, for "A Fable."


The Washington Post, April 20, 1987

Taylor's first published play, "Tennessee Day in St. Louis," came out in
1956. The 1957 Pulitzer for drama went (posthumously) to Eugene O'Neill, for
"Long Day's Journey Into Night."

"Happy Families Are All Alike," a story collection, appeared in 1959. The
1960 Pulitzer for fiction went to Allen Drury, for "Advise and Consent."

"Miss Leonora When Last Seen," more stories, was published in 1963. The 1964
Pulitzer for fiction went to no one.

"A Stand in the Mountains," a play, was published in 1968. The 1969 Pulitzer
for drama went to Howard Sackler, for "The Great White Hope."

"The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor" appeared in 1969. The 1970 Pulitzer
for fiction went to "The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford."

"Presences," a collection of short plays, was published in 1973. The 1974
Pulitzer for drama went to no one.

"In the Miro District," a volume of stories in both prose and verse, came out
in 1977. The 1978 Pulitzer for fiction went to James Alan McPherson, for "Elbow
Room."

The Washington Post, April 20, 1987

"The Old Forest and Other Stories" was published in 1985. The 1986 Pulitzer
for fiction went to Larry McMurtry, for "Lonesome Dove."

Among these 11 Pulitzers, there are some good ones (Cozzens, O'Neill,
McMurtry) and some bad ones (Drury, Faulkner, the two times when none was
given), but the point of today's sermon is that in all these years not merely
was Taylor never awarded a Pulitzer, he was never seriously considered for one.
Literary recognition in America -- recognition, that is, beyond the lamentably
small minority of Americans who read and write seriously -- is a chancy
business, and until the appearance of "A Summons to Memphis" Taylor, through
no fault of his own, missed every chance he got.

But now that he finally has his prizes and his success, Taylor has pulled a
neat twist on the ordinary run of literary experience. As a general rule, if
recognition comes late to American writers, it is long after their best work has
been done. Faulkner's Pulitzer for "A Fable," Hemingway's for "The Old Man and
the Sea," Ellen Glasgow's for "In This Our Life," Bernard Malamud's for "The
Fixer," John Updike's for "Rabbit Is Rich" -- over and again, we have honored
writers for their weaker work, if not indeed for their worst. Major awards in
America do not often go to writers when they are relatively young, when their
work is experimental or otherwise out of the mainstream; we usually wait to
applaud them when they are old, and when their work is safe.

The Washington Post, April 20, 1987

But Taylor, though he is 70 years old, is at the top of his very considerable
form in "A Summons to Memphis." Though one can argue about which of his
stories will survive the longest -- will be the bedrock upon which his
reputation ultimately will rest -- there can be no question that this novel,
which Taylor himself calls "just a book-length short story," will be among them.
It is a paradigmatic example of his work in every sense: themes, setting,
characters, technique. You can get Taylor in a nutshell in "A Summons to
Memphis," and it can only be hoped that this is just what the Pulitzer will
persuade many readers to do.

If the prize had come years ago, as it should have, those readers would
already know Taylor and his work. To be specific it should have come in 1970 for
what is still the most comprehensive of Taylor's books, the "Collected Stories";
but the prize that year went to his cherished friend, Jean Stafford, and
whatever disappointment he may have felt surely was assuaged by his pleasure at
her triumph. Now it is his turn, and thank heaven for that.


===============


Copyright 1995 National Public Radio
NPR

SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET)

March 10, 1995

Transcript # 1782-6

TYPE: Package

SECTION: News; Domestic

LENGTH: 1325 words

HEADLINE: Peter Taylor Bought his Tennessee Roots to his Work

GUESTS: JONATHAN YARDLEY, "Washington Post" Book Critic;TOM WHITE;SARAH
WHITE;TOM MITCHELL;HUBERT McALEXANDER, Taylor Biographer; PETER TAYLOR, Writer;
BYLINE: LINDA WERTHEIMER





All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

HIGHLIGHT:
The writer, who was from Memphis, told and retold old stories in his novels and
short stories. He is well-known for his subtle, quiet style and ability to
describe middle-class Southern life.

BODY:
LINDA WERTHEIMER, Host: Peter Taylor, who died last year at the age of 77,
is believed by many people to be one of the best American writers of his
generation. He taught all of his writing life, most of the time at Southern
universities, finally at the University of Virginia. But Tennessee was his home
and it permeates his work.

His novel, A Summons to Memphis won the Pulitzer Prize. His short story
collections, which many people believe are his best work, caused Washington Post
book critic, Jonathan Yardley to say that Taylor was the best writer we
had. Even though the Pulitzer Prize brought him more readers, Yardley says
Peter Taylor is still not widely read, even in his own home state.

JONATHAN YARDLEY, 'Washington Post' Book Critic: The problem for Peter, was
that he was writing about the white middle-class, upper middle-class Southern
gentry at a time when this was very unfashionable. The problem with so much of
Peter's early reviews is that they assumed that because he was white Southern
All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

gentry himself, writing about people like himself, that he was therefore, a
spokesman for the old, discredited South.

He liked to tell what he called 'stories'. [pronounced 'stowries'] I've never
heard - I'm sure all over Memphis there are thousands of people who say the word
'stories', but I'd never heard it pronounced quite that way until the first time
Peter said, 'I'm going to tell you a story.' He uses these stories, that were
told to him sitting around the porch in Memphis or Nashville and he embellishes
them and he uses them as the foundations upon which to build a house.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: On our trip to Tennessee, we visited Memphis. Although
Peter Taylor wrote about the whole state, Memphis was his home. The leisurely
life of the Southern middle-class in Memphis was Taylor's own. The rambling
houses along the park-like streets of the town's best neighborhoods were places
where he lived and where his old friends still live.

We went to Overton Park to meet Tom and Sarah White and Tom Mitchell. They were
friends with Peter Taylor since high school. Many people in Memphis think the
character in his best known short story, The Old Forest, is based on Tom White.
I asked Sarah White how it is to find family and friends incorporated into
Taylor's stories.

All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

SARAH WHITE: They are. You know, they really are. And some of them are very,
would you say, flamboyant stories, that you can't miss. You know? You know
they happened, but they are changed. Some of the stories were fairly exciting,
I think, and they might - we never asked some of them what they thought about
the story. Maybe they didn't see themselves in it. Maybe you'd be thrilled to
be in there, but on the other hand, you might rather have forgotten the
incident.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Peter Taylor's last book, In The Tennessee Country, begins
with the narrator recounting a tale told and retold throughout the state, taking
different forms, the tale of men who one day simply disappear. I asked Tom
White to read from the first page and he did, in the same soft Memphis speech
that was Peter Taylor's.

TOM WHITE: [reading from Peter Taylor novel] These disappearances from our
midst would continue to be common all through the 19th century and into the
20th. Even in my own lifetime, there have been several such vanished men.
Their names were well-known to all my generation. We were indeed brought up on
the stories of these mysterious men. And in some measure, the life of one such
man has cast a shadow over my own life's story.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: What do you think about this business of people who, men who

All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

disappeared?

TOM WHITE: I think it's true.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: You know he said there were stories that he heard all through
his boyhood, the character, the narrator of the book, says that there were
stories he heard all through his boyhood.

TOM MITCHELL: You didn't get divorced. You just disappeared.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: So, you've heard those stories too?

TOM MITCHELL: Oh sure. Certainly. They didn't do that where you lived? Having
known Peter as long as I have and I'm sure Tom and Sarah have too, you've heard
his stories many, many times. But each time, they get a little better spin on
'em, you know? And you never got tired of listening to 'em.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: That was Tom Mitchell. Hubert McAlexander [sp] is Peter
Taylor's biographer, also a good friend. He teaches at the University of
Georgia in Athens. I asked him if he thought Peter Taylor himself was a
disappearing man, disappearing into the role of the observer, the chronicler?


All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

HUBERT McALEXANDER, Peter Taylor Biographer: I do think that In The Tennessee
Country is about freedom, that often you have to break from society to find your
own identity or - but from what you ask, Taylor was both very much a member of
the social order and really apart from it, I think, clearly. And, as an artist
has to be. And he certainly shows himself to be in his work.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Peter Taylor's work is very quiet. It's a common theme of
his stories that the narrator comes close to making some sort of discovery about
himself and retreats at the last moment from self-knowledge. The stories are
like that as well. They advance and retreat, move from passionate moments, and
then fall back to behaving well. Critic Jonathan Yardley talks about the
stories.

JONATHAN YARDLEY: They're very smooth. His prose was wonderfully elegant and
graceful. And they're very quiet. But the more closely you read them, the more
you find in them, the greater the depth of feeling and the complexity of
emotion.

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Tom Mitchell spent part of his young manhood chasing around
road houses with his friend Peter Taylor. I asked him about the quiet
subtlety of Taylor's work and he offered the kind of drinking buddy review that
should only come from old, old friends.

All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995


TOM MITCHELL: Very subtle writer. And sometimes, people claim he's just dull
because he's so subtle.

He was so subtle. I can remember him, one time, he was working on a story and
he got to a point that he thought was just pure heaven. And I said, 'Well, what
is it?' And he said, 'He touched her wrist.' Peter, what?

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Tom Mitchell laughed and told us that Peter Taylor could
spend days on a phrase like that.

His old friends from Memphis remember him as a fairly funny looking, gangly boy.
'You could never call Peter good looking,' Sara White said. Although, she
acknowledged he was a very good looking older man. But mostly, they remember
his charm, how he loved to gossip about friends, to tell stories and to hear
their stories.

Taylor's family, like his writing, is firmly rooted in the history of Tennessee.
It was his genius to take that family lore, to preserve it, to interpret it, to
create a lasting legacy in collections of short stories. Here is Peter Taylor
in an interview broadcast on NPR 10 years ago.


All Things Considered (NPR), March 10, 1995

[clip from earlier interview with Peter Taylor]

PETER TAYLOR, Author: My notion is that you hear a story and you hear it over
and over maybe in the family. And it doesn't mean anything. It's just
something exciting or funny that happened, or sad, that happened. And if you're
a thoughtful person, you begin to think, 'That must mean something. Why did my
father tell that story over and over all those years? It must, to him, have had
some significance.'

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Novelist and short story writer Peter Taylor. His last
book, In The Tennessee Country, was published just before his death last fall.


The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, although
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LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: March 11, 1995