An Old Faithful

...The loss is a loss of family...

...More than the language, it is the fixing of the line upon the page that produces the formality...

...His almost epic form lets him drift into the regions of high melodrama without screeching like a television adventure...

...We are reminded of the note in Taylor's Collected Stories crediting his mother with having introduced him to many of the tales gathered in that volume...

...Here we have grandfather pitted against grandson, a clash of generations manufactured by the middle generation's notion of tradition...

...The Hand of Emmagene" begins: "After high school she had come down from Hortonsburg/To find work in Nashville./She stayed at our house./ And she began at once to take classes/In a secretarial school...

...Young writers are everywhere, yet one of our better magazines has decided they can't be found...

...In "The Captain's Son," a seemingly genteel young husband moves into the home of his bride's parents...

...The old approach paces the narratives with all the leisure of an oral story-teller...

...Whatever else can be said of him, Taylor is unconcerned with the latest literary fashions...

...much of the dramatic logic is governed by a couple trying to take in an outsider: Emmagene is cousin to the couple into whose house she moves, and from the beginning the two try to interest her in boys...

...if you read the New York Times, you were told he is an insignificant Southern regionalist...

...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer Curious things are happening in the short-story marketplace...

...The second narrative strategy Taylor employs is the rendering of his tales into a kind of prose poetry...

...What the above has to do with Peter Taylor is this: The topsy-turvy maneuverings in the marketplace and the critical response to In the Miro District both suggest what should have been clear long ago, that good fiction is as much a matter of taste as anything...

...Sustaining our interest in this situation are an old Southern family feud and the parents' attempt to bring the son-in-law into their own step...

...I know of several instances where stories rejected as "Atlantic Firsts" have subsequently been published in well-regarded quarterlies and later collected or listed in the annual Foley anthology that the Atlantic itself praises in its current ad campaign...

...The title story proceeds with a similar colloquial slowness...

...A series of confrontations between the protagonists culminates in the major confrontation that the grandson-narrator has been expecting all along...

...We don't end there, however, but with the awful terms?I won't reveal them—of the consummation itself...

...If you read the Washington Post, then you were asked to believe that Taylor is the most underrated writer in America...

...Where Atlantic sees a wasteland, Penthouse finds good pickings...

...One wonders where they have been looking for them...

...Nevertheless, it is the grandson whose loss is greatest: "And sometimes when I would ask him a question, just the way the others did, he would answer me with the same politeness he showed them, and at those times I would have the uneasy feeling that he wasn't quite certain whether it was I or one of the others who was his grandson, whether I was not perhaps merely one of the boys visiting, with the others, from Sewanee...

...On the other hand Penthouse, of all organs, has taken it upon itself to become the champion of new writers...

...In a full-page advertisement in the Writer magazine, the Atlantic Monthly asks the rhetorical question, "Where have all the young writers gone...

...Unlike Atlantic, Penthouse has pledged to publish a previously unknown talent every month for the next year...

...But he does because the formalism works against the inherent melodrama...

...None of these stories is disappointing, although a few move too quickly to a single effect...

...The result is so unexpected and shocking, one marvels that Taylor gets away with it...

...He well knows that the more formal the literary structure, the more shocking the material can be...

...As in "The Captain's Son...

...Yet the drama is high, building toward the surprising reversals that usually mark the climaxes...

...The grandfather, a Civil War veteran, cannot understand or accept the new moral climate of the young, with their more open drinking and sex...

...As a result of it, the grandfather changes: Having been long aware of the limits of living in the past, he now embraces it completely, the only era that he is finally at home in...

...A skilled craftsman first and foremost, he can put a variety of narrative strategies to his use, and this new collection of eight stories (six originally appeared in quarterlies) is divided between two quite different techniques...

...The husband remains aloof, and we learn that the marriage hasn't even been consummated...

...Taylor's collection appears in the year of his sixtieth birthday, and it is comforting to note that, whatever the fashions of the marketplace, or the false cries of the doomsayers, there is still a Peter Taylor who writes in his own voice, without regard for the strange idiosyncracies of the industry of literature...

...A strange situation, indeed...

...we are watching a master craftsman at work...

...one is as tested and old-fashioned as the other is unusual and refreshing...