Peter Taylor: a Writer's Life

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 25, 2002 | by George Garrett

Peter Taylor Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life (Louisiana State Univ. Press, $34.95, 338 pp) by Hubert H. McAlexander; The Collected Stories (Picador USA, $16 pb, 535 pp).

Peter Taylor (1917-94), an original and influential writer, has a well-earned place in America's literary pantheon. His Collected Stories, now available in paperback, demonstrates his mastery of short fiction, while Hubert H. McAlexander's biography, A Writer's Life, provides a rich portrait of his family background, populated with Tennessee governors and senators, men of substance and character as well as wealth and privilege.

McAlexander, who has edited two earlier books on his subject, Conversations with Peter Taylor (1987) and Critical Essays on Peter Taylor (1993), gives a fascinating account of Taylor's life and a sense of his artistic accomplishment, aided by primary access to the writer's letters and papers. He uses them well, quoting extensively and thus allowing the reader to enjoy the prose of a writer who couldn't turn out a bad sentence.

Taylor was a charming and courteous man. His deep, long-lasting literary friendships with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, Eudora Welty, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford and many others offer rare snapshots of these people. If McAlexander offers but rudimentary literary criticism, he provides plenty of literary history and lively gossip.

Taylor was a hardworking writer, courageously so in his last years when he suffered terribly from ill health. Off duty he liked to party down, and some of McAlexander's best attention and most engaged writing is devoted to his subject's social life. He was a witty and sometimes outrageously funny man, a world-class Southern gentleman with an irrepressible streak of rowdy hillbilly.

The book seems a little hurried. Other works, biographical and critical, are said to be in progress. For now, however, we have a readable first biography of one of our finest writers, for which we can be grateful.

REVIEWED BY GEORGE GARRETT, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.