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By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
In April 1984, Peter Taylor came to Athens. The noted Southern writer had been invited to spend a week on the University of
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| Hubert McAlexander |
Georgia campus, meeting with students and faculty members. His host was English professor Hubert McAlexander.
Driving Taylor to his house for dinner that first evening, McAlexander was stuck by Taylor’s famous charm, as Taylor directed the conversation toward McAlexander, who is from Holly Springs, Miss., near Taylor’s own beloved Memphis. The evening was a notable success.
“The next morning, I told him I wished to be his biographer,” McAlexander remembered some years later. “ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I haven’t had a very interesting life’—and then he proceeded to start telling me stories.”
Those stories, and dozens of interviews with Taylor, his family and friends, led McAlexander to write Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life, just published by Louisiana State University Press.
Taylor, it turned out, had a fascinating life indeed. Born in 1917, he lived until 1994, and during that long life he knew and befriended many of the most important writers in American literature. Knowing and studying with such writers as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, Taylor developed into a famous stylist and short story writer, though when the Pulitzer Prize finally came to him late in life, it was for his novel, A Summons to Memphis. Taylor also had lifelong friendships with Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford and Randall Jarrell, and knew other writers--such as Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter--well.
“It really hadn’t occurred me to study Peter Taylor or his work until I directed a master’s thesis on Taylor in 1983,” says McAlexander. “I had to read a lot of Taylor’s work, and I found myself drawn to his stories. They were about people trapped in their own minds—people fighting deep psychic battles. I felt, after that, that Peter had been misread by some critics. They thought he was a writer of manners, but that, really, was just the surface.”
Praise is already coming in for McAlexander’s book, whose official publication date is early September.
“[The book] is as elegant, restrained, and nuanced as the writing of Taylor himself,” wrote Robert Brinkmeyer, author of Remapping Southern Literature. David Lynn, editor of The Kenyon Review, called the book “an insightful and sympathetic study of one of America’s foremost short story writers.”
Taylor’s ties with UGA didn’t end with his week as a writer-in-residence in 1984, however. Awarded a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he decided to teach spring quarter 1985 in the English department at UGA—a time that McAlexander and others still remember with fondness.
“One of the things that made people like Peter so much was his great social appetite,” says McAlexander. “He was really interested in people, and he was a great observer of the life around him.”
One memorable night, after a visit to an elegant event in Washington, Ga., when McAlexander brought Taylor back to the complex where he’d rented a condominium for the quarter, they found police cars lined up outside, lights flashing.
“Oh, someone must have cracked up,” Taylor said. McAlexander, who knew that Taylor had dealt with the mental illness and instability of many of his writer friends, most notably Robert Lowell, found the remark fascinating.
While at UGA, Taylor taught two seminars, one graduate and one undergraduate, and in general found the students articulate, interested and bright.
Writing was easier for McAlexander than it might have been, though it still took six years of hard work. Being friends with the writer and fascinated by his work had led McAlexander to edit two previous volumes, Conversations with Peter Taylor and Critical Essays on Peter Taylor. So he already had a good start.
Taylor, in addition to publishing many volumes of short stories, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was also a playwright and had published three novels by the time of his death. Through it all, Taylor managed to maintain a stable life, in marked contrast to those of his friends.
“His generation was perhaps the most self-destructive literary generation in American history,” McAlexander says in his preface to the book. “While his friends were having breakdowns, drinking themselves to death, divorcing again and again, walking into the path of oncoming cars, Peter Taylor remained married to the same person [poet Eleanor Ross Taylor] for 51 years and lived an ostensibly conventional life. It was an amazing balancing act.”
Asked why he chose to write a biography, McAlexander laughs.
“I think I like to organize material,” he says. “And I’m interested in history. I was very lucky to be able to write the biography of someone like Peter Taylor. He was an original—a very compelling sort of writer. He always said he wasn’t an intellectual in any sort of way except as a writer. But he really did not like to talk about how he did what he did. And he certainly believed in form and voice. I don’t think I’ve ever hit it off so fast with anyone personally. He was just a fascinating man.” |
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