(Non)fiction II: Taylor-Made

To break my six-week sequestration from fiction, I chose to read Peter Taylor’s “What You Hear from ‘Em?” It was a great favorite of his friend, Randall Jarrell, and I remembered its depiction of a black servant, Aunt Munsie, sharing some of the same qualities of Faulkner’s rendering of Dilsey.

Taylor is never a tour de force writer. He shuns grand technical effects and his prose never hollers to draw attention to itself, but neither is it catatonic like Raymond Carver’s. Instead, Taylor softly modulates the conversational style: “Aunt Munsie’s skin was the color of a faded tow sack. She was hardly four feet tall. She was generally believed to be totally bald, and on her head she always wore a white dust cap with an elastic band. She wore an apron, too, while making her rounds with her slop wagon.”

In this seemingly transparent passage, the key phrase is “generally believed.” The story is set in a small Tennessee town before the Civil Rights Era, when a public consensus, an agreed-upon body of information, still existed. It’s hard to imagine a story like this being written today. Aunt Munsie is not a helpless victim of racism, a sentimental figure of faux nobility, or a mocking caricature. She is thoroughly human, at once sympathetic and repellent.

My choice of a Taylor story was impulsive but informed. I wished to enter an alternative world I had once found sympathetic, conjured by a craftsman who respected his characters (and readers) enough to make them as confoundingly complex as our family and neighbors. I plan to remain awhile among The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor.

I met Taylor once, around 1971, and the memory shames me. Writers often visited the campus. I remember meeting and occasionally drinking with such one-time worthies as John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess. A professor suggested we attend Taylor’s reading and reception. I had never heard of him. I cannot remember what he read, and recall only my ostentatious show of boredom at the words of a white Southerner in a jacket and tie. Taylor seemed impossibly square, formal, polite and courtly. I was ignorant and boorish and proud of it. I didn’t discover Taylor’s work for another decade or so. One of my favorite story collections is The Old Forest, which he published in 1985 at the age of 68. Taylor died nine years later.