A Summons to Memphis

...Taylor is not prolific, nor is he a long ball hitter...

...The story is told by the lapsed middle-age son of the widower...

...Fortunately, however, there are still a few around who write fiction that might be recognized as such by the great nineteenth century practitioners...

...The move is traumatic to his wife and children, for while the two cities are only two hundred miles apart, the psychic distance is much greater...

...It is a world which is closer in atmosphere to an early Tolstoy story like "Family Happiness" than to Sanctuary or Light in August...

...In the second and third sentences, he pins down the setting: "This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-years ago...

...Phillip reminds us that this was before the South was homogenized by four-lane highways and Holiday Inns...

...Since graduating in 1940 from Kenyon College—the place to be for a young writer back then—he has published about one short story a year...

...the style could use a little more color...

...For given a lack of interest, either in the moral life of individuals or in any social realities which have not already been subject to endless refractions in more accessible media like film and rock music, what can a writer do except show that he has technique, that he can ride a bicycle with no hands...

...Taylor's moral preoccupations, which are profound, are woven into the narrative with such subtlety that one can get very near to the end of a first reading without realizing the endless ramifications of what is going on...

...His books are being reincarnated in designer paperbacks, prices of his first editions are in a vertical asGeorge Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...And the technical prowess of many of our more acclaimed writers is dazzling...

...People like Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth often seem as though they can do anything—except write about people...

...Phillip considers his father's decision to move as brave—but also selfish...

...like Tolstoy, he is concerned almost exclusively with the moral life of his characters, and nothing, not a single description of a magnolia blossom, is allowed to get in the way of its revelation...

...Phillip answers the summons and the family crisis comes to a slightly unexpected resolution...

...But the substance of the book is really the recollections about his family which the summons to Memphis provokes in Phillip...

...In the end, Phillip learns—or maybe does not learn: in Taylor's fiction, as in life, the moral evolution of an individual is never certain—one of the harder lessons, which is that one is never in the position to pass judgment on others...

...But there is nothing lurid or violent about Peter Taylor's Southerners...

...Lapsed middle-age men are a specialty of modern Southern writing, of course, and the other members of the family—two spinster sisters, a mother who one day complains of an imaginary ailment and retires to her bed for thirty years, and a father who preserves in his stiff manner the gentility of the Old South—would also seem at first glance to have been found in a gothic curio cabinet belonging to Faulkner or the early Capote...

...If you don't count A Woman of Means, which was published in 1953 and is really a novella, A Summons to Memphis is the 69-year-old author's first novel...

...But as he calmly tells his story to the reader, Phillip unwittingly illustrates the Kierkegaard quotation with which another Southern writer began his first novel: "The specific character of despair is precisely this, it is unaware of being despair...

...Phillip Carver, a Southern expatriate who has settled for a quiet, disembodied existence among his books in New York—he is the sort who postpones turning on lamps at twilight—is summoned back to Memphis by his two middle-age sisters when it appears that their 81-year-old father is about to marry a much younger woman, a prospect which does not delight them, not the least because it threatens their inheritance...

...This savage reductionism would make it easy to dismiss his stories if it weren't for the fact that many of them are so well done...

...But, as usual, Taylor manages to pack a great deal into a small narrative container...

...There, in his "tenth floor 82nd Street serenity," he is content to forget the past, make polite replies to any communications from his family, and lead a life of bookish reverie...

...For Taylor is the only American fiction writer I can think of since John Cheever whose prose and dialogue might be construed as having been written before the advent of mass communications...

...it reminds me of Fitzgerald's remark to Hemingway about certain writers who seem "moved by everything to exactly the same degree of mild remarking...

...And so it goes with the others...

...For Taylor gets all the social details exactly right—the rich are different in his fiction, and the old rich, with their battered Chevies and elaborate fussiness of dress, are most different of all...

...There have also been a few plays, although I am not aware of any having been produced, at least in New York...

...Barthelme even wrote a clever little pastiche a while back, entitled "At the Tolstoy Museum," which admitted in an oblique way to the problem...

...A ctually, I can't think of another living American author who can be more profitably assigned in a writers' workshop, although Taylor's craft goes against the grain of everything that seems to be taught in those places...

...the resulting financial and moral devastation makes the father decide to pull up stakes in Nashville and start his career over in Memphis...

...The plot is quite simple...

...and another is Peter Taylor...

...Until a year or so ago, there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence surrounding Peter Taylor's work...

...Isaac Bashevis Singer is one...

...Tolstoy told us that happy families are all alike, while unhappy families are not...

...Now a revival is under way which is all the more ferocious for being several decades late...

...Carver, for example, views the human race as divided into two categories, the insane and the merely pathetic...

...Their lives are mellow and slightly sad and marked by a fleeting dignity...

...cent, and reviewers who have previously ignored him are invoking his name as a standard with which to measure every hot new number out of the workshops...

...In any event, the family never recovers from the migration, and the increasingly difficult behavior of his father and sisters drives Phillip to New York...

...T he epochal event in the family history turns out to be the betrayal many years ago of the father by a business associate...

...Beginning in the forties, he had written some of the best short stories around but you never heard or read about his work, and most of his books were hard to find...

...Certainly, it would seem to apply to much "serious" fiction being written today in America...

...Onecan, in fact, simply surrender to the pleasures of a well-done novel of manners...

...There is a residue of silence when you finish one of Taylor's stories which must approach—I don't know—what silence was generally like before television...

...His style calls no attention to itself...

...And at two hundred-odd pages, it barely weighs in as a full-length novel...

...My only complaint about A Summons to Memphis, and about Taylor's writing in general, is that it is perhaps a bit too low-key...

...Just why our most talented writers get so angular and evasive when it comes to addressing the mainstream of human experience is a puzzle that we won't try to solve here...

...but in the first sentence, Taylor introduces an unhappy family in a typically unhappy situation: "The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved—especially whenthere are unmarried daughters...

...The novel is about a small crisis in a well-to-do Southern family...

...But as he is drawn back into family affairs in Memphis, he makes the discovery that one cannot really escape the past—that, as Faulkner put it, "the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 45 past is never past"—and that forgetting is not the same as forgiving...

...But I feel embarrassed making any complaint about a writer who has waited so, long for his due and to whom we should all be grateful...

...His stories are the opposite of pyrotechnical...

...it is a pane of glass on which you have to tap now and then to remind yourself that it is there...

...At least it is a certainty that remarriage was more difficult for old widowers in Memphis than it was over in Nashville, say, or in Knoxville . . ." And in the fourth sentence—but then go to a bookstore and see for yourself how adroit Taylor is with the preliminaries...