Tales from the Verandah

...It is plain to the reader—and, I think, to Taylor—that the cotton broker's self-serving posture implies a denial of his servant's moral responsibility—one of the meanings of racism...

...Many of his whites are descendants of slave owners, and not very far removed, either: Enraged by what she takes to be disrespectful talk from her black maid, a white matron thinks wistfully of her uncle, "who shot all his niggers before he would free them...

...Actually, Jesse's wildness is encouraged by Nelson, who takes pleasure in it partly as an expression of his own repressed instincts, partly as a means of flaunting his power and influence over the authorities every time Jesse gets into a scrape and needs rescuing...

...Taylor, who like his long-time friend Robert Penn Warren loves all that is good and true in the old ways of the world he depicts, nowhere idealizes the pre-civil rights South...

...Indeed, because Taylor is a conservative writer he is concerned about increasing our respect for the old: the "primeval" forest of the title, the old houses, the old codes of decorum in Southern speech and manners...

...he describes emphatically all the terrible things he would do to "anybody who harmed a hair on' that white gentleman's head.'" Moreover, in the narrative "Uncle Nelson," seen from the vantage point of a young nephew, seems a likable enough fellow...

...In all the stories social relations have a palpable presence, a power to bind and mold...

...Only two of his characters (in "A Long Fourth") clearly condemn this aspect of Southern society: the son of a Memphis physician and his female companion, the Left-wing editor of a "birth-control magazine...

...And we soon come to feel we are his guests, installed on some rustic porch or verandah, listening in the course of a long hot afternoon to his ever-flowing stream of anecdotes and recollections...

...Taylor clearly expects the reader to admire Lee Ann and her friends for the bravery and freedom their office jobs represented in what was very much a man's world, and for their "advanced" artistic tastes...

...This world now depends for its economic viability on the exertions of merchants and professional men, rather than landowners...

...He is superb at evoking a sense of place (the grand columned ante-bellum mansions, the neat rows of cotton brokers' offices with their steep wooden stairs, high ceilings and windows over the Mississippi), at accurately recording varieties of black and white speech, and at building situations full of tension and conflict...

...Among the themes arising directly out of his regional subject matter perhaps the most salient involve the complex set of deferences, allegiances and obligations that both linked and distinguished old money, country club types from less exalted whites, and the similarly complicated, more intimate, but sometimes horribly destructive relationships between blacks and the white families they served...

...For all of its spontaneity, though, Taylor's artistry is highly conscious, schooled in the prose masters of the past century...

...Like a number of narrators in the book, he is an older male remembering his youth bemusedly, displaying a controlled nostalgia...

...But despite such sporadic false notes Taylor manages to recreate the manners, morals and servants of the Southern upper-middle class in cities like Memphis and Atlanta during the decade separating the Great Depression and World War II...

...We are not encouraged to condemn Nelson in an easy or absolute manner, however...

...The author does seem to resist the idea that the kinds of relationships he delineates were expressions of systematic oppression...

...Nat, a cotton broker's son engaged to marry the tall, splendid debutante Caroline Braxley, also enjoys the friendship of the more winsome Lee Ann Deehart...

...Nonetheless, it defines itself largely through memories of "the golden days when a race of noble gentlemen and gracious ladies inhabited the land of the South," as one of Taylor's unreconstructed characters puts it...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Dissent," New York "Times Book Review" A distinctive literary voice is a rare achievement, rarer still when it possesses the affability of the one that speaks to us in the latest collection of stories by Peter Taylor...

...It presents a perverse symbiosis: The more prosperous and socially connected cotton broker Andrew Nelson becomes, the more his black servant Jesse Munroe gets into trouble with the law...

...At times it is exhibited in cadences and complications reminiscent of Henry James, at other times in a certain urgent, surprising lyricism that is clearly his own...

...But his book gives no hint of the profound transformation that would soon be effected precisely by abstract ideas of equality and justice...

...On the contrary, society is too much with Taylor's people...

...Yet the narrator's—and the author's—fullest sympathy is lavished on the debutante's predicament...

...The woman talks in abstractions, declaring herself in favor of "Equality: economic and social...

...The title story is a rich blend of class tensions and conflicted passions...

...It is therefore not really apparent exactly how Taylor would have us respond to Nelson's racism, or to the racism that pervaded his milieu...

...In the book this respect coexists uneasily with Taylor's clear-eyed assessment of the rigidities of the past...

...True, too many of the stories end inconclusively, a weakness that can get to be no less irritatingly predictable than a series of pat resolutions...

...Of the entries that dramatize racial divisions, "Friend and Protector" is the most moving...

...Callow and facetious society boys dallying with those they call the "demimondames" move him to fine irony...

...I have the impression that this confession of rootlessness renders the son's opposition to "the system" either irrelevant or suspect for Taylor, since his art depends on social connectedness...

...His achievement gives the lie to John Crowe Ransom's youthful observation that "The historian of a single week of Chicago or New York or London would find more and better material for art and drama than the historian of a decade of Tennessee...

...the son's rejection of Southern racism is accompanied by a blurted announcement that he feels "no real tie" to his old Tennessee home...

...Nat presents these social discriminations in the role of narrator...

...The outcome is tragic: Jesse's violence finally lands him in a lunatic asylum, safe at last from his "friend and protector...

...its manifest, manifold oppressions and outbursts of astonishing cruelty help us avoid the silly mistake of assuming that the minute gradations of individual pain delineated in the typical New Yorker story, or even the grandiose despair of such writers as Norman Mailer, exhaust the evils of American existence...

...It is a measure of Taylor's power of sympathy that even if we reject the antique social and sexual mores that shape events in "The Old Forest," we are made to understand why Caroline Braxley could feel Nat's entanglement might expose her to scandal...

...Thanks to this extreme specificity, The Old Forest seems virtually free of the communal anomie so common in contemporary fiction, and of the concomitant alienation and weightlessness...

...Occasionally the prose is awkward, as in the following example of one character's thought about another: "The degree of her long anxiety for the special accidental qualities which would make up the naturalness of our meeting is patent in the pleasure she takes from its realization...

...SomeofTaylor'sconcerns, of course, are universal: first love, the trials of fatherhood, loneliness, old age...

...In fact, a better historian of that state (or Georgia, for that matter) in the late '30s and early '40s could not be found, and Taylor makes the life down there, back then, equal in interest to life anywhere...

...Jesse, ironically, considers himself his employer's " friend and protector...

...Both are intellectuals who have made the momentous move to New York, and neither is drawn very sympathetically...

...As impressive in their way as the title piece are several other stories that almost therapeutically explore Taylor's emotioned ambivalencies by centering on the tensions of fathers and sons, parents and children...

...On the other hand, diffused in these stories is a dark message strikingly at odds with their lively and charming narration: that human relationships can be fixed, inescapable and destructive...

...If you lived here you knew your place exactly, and everybody else's as well, whether you happened to be a debutante, a field hand, a landowner, or a businessman...

...She is a short, hazel-eyed beauty from what a Proust-reading member of Nat's circle refers to as "the Memphis demimonde" —which turns out, unglamorously, to consist of the relatively independent daughters of respectable but generally unprosperous tradesmen...

...Informal, almost chatty, yet always cultivated, it invites us into these tales written between 1941 and the present with a graciousness that reflects the author's Southern roots...

...Especially memorable are "The Gift of the Prodigal," about an embittered father suddenly flooded with love for his scapegrace boy, and "Porte Cochere," one of the earlier works, where a patriarch's Learlike rage is traced to his father's brutal treatment of him in childhood...