World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor.

DONALDSON, SUSAN V.

World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor, by David M. Robinson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xii, 209 pp. $29.95.

FOR A WRITER WHO HAS ATTRACTED CRITICAL PRAISE for beautifully crafted fiction and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, Peter Taylor has been the subject of relatively few book-length critical studies. Hence David M. Robinson's World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor makes a welcome appearance in the field of Southern literary study by providing the most extensive critical study to date of Taylor's work, including readings of his last several works, A Summons to Memphis, The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, and In the Tennessee Country. Building on Robert Penn Warren's introduction to Taylor's 1948 short story collection, A Long Fourth and Other Stories, Robinson argues that Taylor's "great subject was the family and its interrelations" and their impact upon the emergence of the individual self in the highly structured world of the white middle-class upper South teetering on the edge of profound social change in the middle of the twentieth century. Taylor himself once observed in an interview, "The reason the South interests me primarily is that I think of it in terms of the family," and it is the white, middle-class family portrayed in Taylor's novels, short fiction, and plays, Robinson argues, that provides a lens into a society on the verge of dissolution.

The close readings of family relationships and their nuances provided by Robinson's study are both its central strength and its primary weakness. Robinson has strong and perceptive readings to offer of both A Summons to Memphis and In the Tennessee Country, as well as of some of Taylor's best-known short stories, like "Dean of Men," "In the Miro District," "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time," and "The Old Forest." Citing Taylor's adolescent struggles with his own father over his university education and choice of career, Robinson makes an effective argument for the centrality of father-son relationships in Taylor's fiction and in particular for Taylor's fascination with the problematics of masculine authority. To a great extent, many of Taylor's most memorable male characters remain sons all their lives, men, Robinson argues, who "act out of their past identities as sons in forming their relations as fathers" and who struggle against the wills of powerful and domineering fathers all their lives.

Nearly as compelling, though, are Taylor's representations of white middle-class women trapped in roles not of their making as daughters, wives, and mothers but nonetheless clinging to those roles as the world around them spins into uncharted territory. For all of his concern with representations of father-son relationships and of the construction of masculinity, Taylor is adept at portraying the nuances of powerlessness in the lives of both white women and black women. In sensitive and nuanced readings of "A Long Fourth," "The Old Forest," and "What You Hear from 'Em?," the latter of which offers an especially helpful approach to the story for classroom teachers, Robinson makes a strong case for Taylor's dexterity in portraying his women characters.

Robinson notes as well--and it is to his credit that he does so--that Taylor's fiction is largely free of the nostalgia for the mythic regional past that marks his Southern Agrarian mentors, like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, whom Taylor followed from Vanderbilt University to Kenyon College. As an impressionable young man, Taylor had briefly embraced the Southern Agrarian movement, but that enthusiasm dissipated fairly early on in his career. Taylor himself, Robinson suggests, "came to see Southern identity as more a problem than a solution to the challenge of modern life, especially when Southern regional pieties thickened." Like his early mentors, Taylor may have chosen as his central concern a sense of loss and "cultural displacement," but over the years he would, Robinson argues persuasively, develop "a profound skepticism of Southern regional puffery and cultural self-delusion." Many of Taylor's stories, Robinson suggests--and this is an insight that deserves considerably more discussion than it receives in Robinson's study--hint prominently that "the South" is "a shared fiction," in Robinson's words, "that can be destructively delusive." Certainly some of Taylor's best-known stories, like "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time," seem to focus on both the labored self-consciousness of efforts to pass on regional traditions--and the growing futility and irrelevance of those efforts.

But if Robinson's readings of individual works by Taylor are nuanced and highly perceptive, they are also strangely lacking in context for an argument that insists upon the wider social critique underlying Taylor's narratives of complicated relationships, heartbreak, and disillusionment. Time and again Robinson insists upon the importance of looking at specific roles in white Southern families in particular, but how those roles are to be defined within the context of mid-twentieth-century Southern life remains largely a matter of unspoken assumption. A writer as highly conscious as Taylor of specific white masculine roles--and of the approaching demise of those roles--requires at least some discussion of the culture producing those roles in certain configurations. So too does the shape of the white middle-class family that Robinson sees as central to Taylor's fiction. At the outset of this study Robinson mentions that Taylor was writing largely during the Cold War at a time when certain images of the nuclear family played a highly significant ideological role at home and abroad, but beyond that initial remark Robinson does not go. He makes no use of the wealth of scholarship emerging on Cold War families and gender roles, like the work of Elaine Tyler May, Steven Cohan, or Barbara Ehrenreich. Nor does Robinson take advantage of the burgeoning scholarship now available on the construction of masculinity. For anyone writing on an author as acutely sensitive to the way masculine authority is constructed and to different social weights given specific masculine roles as Taylor is, not to mention his concern with the complexity of father-son relationships, failing to make use of current work on masculinity seems curious indeed.

Perhaps even more to the point, Robinson never explains just what changes seem to underlie the family dramas that serve as vivid microcosms of a world on the brink of disappearing. Robinson makes repeated references to "the social transition of the modern South," to "a time of enormous upheaval," to "the changing situation of women," "the change of values in the South," and to "fading social identity," but those changes and identities are largely taken for granted and never explicitly defined or discussed. He never tells us if he is referring to the Civil Rights Revolution looming on the horizon of Taylor's mid-century Tennessee world, to the forces of urbanization, demographic shifts, and industrialization sweeping over the region after World War II, or to changing gender roles in the second half of the twentieth century. Nor does he take the time to discuss in any sort of detail what sort of impact is wrought by those changes always lurking ominously in the background of Taylor's fiction. To be sure, Taylor's own perspective in his fiction and plays seems firmly fixed on the small dramas of families who deliberately and sometimes fearfully live in circumscribed spheres, but Robinson is right to assert that the larger world of racial tensions, dissipating class categories, shifting gender roles, and changing loyalties is an insistent, if often unseen, presence in the backdrop of Taylor's households, and this study would have been better served by the inclusion of some discussion of what that larger world entailed.

Ultimately, then, we never quite learn in any detail what the content of Taylor's social critique is--beyond the writer's shrewd appraisal of traditions, mores, and assumptions in a particular social stratum as being increasingly labored and irrelevant--and it is in this particular respect, the shape and scope of Taylor's social critique, that Robinson's study falls short. What this study does offer, though, are extensive and lucid readings of individual works by Taylor that should prove especially helpful in the classroom. Those readings themselves represent a notable contribution to the study of Taylor's work.

SUSAN V. DONALDSON
The College of William and Mary