Reviewed by Ann Hulbert, The New Republic, November 24, 1986
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor Peter taylor is routinely and rightly praised for the glasslike lucidity of his prose, yet he is interested above all in distortions of perspective. For more than 40 years, he has written about well-born families in the upper South who have lost much of their assurance about what to look up to and whom to look down on. His Tennessee, as Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1948 in his introduction to Taylor's first collection of stories, A Long Fourth, "is a world vastly uncertain of itself and the ground of its values, caught in a tangle of modern commercialism and traditions and conventions gone to seed, confused among pieties and pretensions." That world was still a contemporary one then. It no longer is--the old rules of order between the generations, the sexes, and the races are history. Yet they are important history, and Taylor has continued to scrutinize the place and epoch of their passing in fiction that seems old-fashioned--at least on the surface.
Taylor's new novel (his second, if you count the short A Woman of Means) looks like another contribution to that absorbing enterprise. In a sense it is. A Summons to Memphis is largely a gathering of Phillip Carver's memories of growing up happily in Nashville and then unhappily in Memphis in the 1930s and '40s. But Phillip's "very irregular notebooks," which he writes in New York miles and years away from his family past, are also an occasion for Taylor to explore an even more uncertain world than that densely textured South. Scribbling in a gloomy Manhattan apartment in the 1970s, Phillip is suffering from a very contemporary anomie. With his deracinated narrator, Taylor has brought to the surface the psychological theme that has always been at the heart of his social portraiture: how resilient, or else resistant, human character can be in the face of disorder and change.
It is a familiar Southern preoccupation, but Taylor's "under-style," as Warren termed it, and his quiet emphasis on the mysteries of character (he's often compared to Chekhov) set him apart from the gothic regionalism of much Southern writing. He is neither pious about the past nor much impressed by the present, and his ruminations about human motives and actions have always had a deliberately inconclusive quality. Above all, they have never been simple. Certainly they aren't in A Summons to Memphis, which might best be described as a dramatic monologue--a virtuosic example of the often disconcerting genre. Taylor lets Phillip do all the talking, but that doesn't mean he trusts Phillip's account of self-discovery or intends us to. Phillip may well rate as Taylor's least reliable narrator, and this book demands—and rewards--vigilance.
Phillip's reckoning with his own history, Taylor ironically implies throughout his character's monologue, is hollower than it appears. This dispassionate narrator is strangely bloodless, and in the end he has lost his bearings.
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS has the outline of a familiar Taylor story: a man is unexpectedly jolted into a confrontation with an oppressive, puzzling past and then has a brief revelation-- Taylor's characteristically inconclusive kind of epiphany. A reclusive New York editor and rare-book collector of middle age, Phillip Carver receives calls one evening from his older spinster sisters in Memphis, who announce that their aging father, recently widowed, plans to remarry, and that they want Phillip to help them stop him. Phillip is prompted to dip back into his past to explain the family resentments that motivate Betsy and Josephine and to examine his own feelings. He unearths memories of a father who was shamefully domineering but also admirably adaptable in a way Phillip himself will never be, and he manages to forgive him. While his sisters sabotage the remarriage (and also their father's reconciliation with the best friend who once betrayed him), Phillip stands aside.
Yet the way Phillip tells the story lends support to an implicit, and considerably darker, version. The prose is as limpid as ever ("like a glass-bottom boat," said Randall Jarrell), but Phillip's method is digressive in the extreme: he veers unpredictably between past and present, circles around obviously important memories, repeats himself again and again. His long-winded, hairsplitting manner results in some quite comical passages--to Taylor's obvious delight. But Phillip's own detachment is strangely awkward, not witty. Despite all the minute observations he offers, he is emotionally impassive as he pauses to describe the woman with whom he has lived for years or his best friend from Memphis days, or surveys his family--or assesses himself: "I think I felt totally indifferent," says this man from whom sentiments flee. Each page seems to hold out the promise that Phillip is about to frame a memory in a way that might free him from his aloofness. Yet the happy ending that Taylor stages in the last, frigidly lyrical paragraph of these notebooks is heavily ironic--as his apparently comic conclusions so often are. This narrator is numbly suspended between the past and the future, between the power to will and the power to feel.
THROUGHOUT PHILLIP'S monologue, Taylor nudges us toward this deeper reading: here is a man whose ostensible resilience is finally only a sign of abiding passivity. For such an evasive soul, Taylor suggests, a confrontation with his family past can do little to instill, or strengthen, a sense of generous self-possession. Instead it becomes an occasion to avoid responsibility for having become the remote person he is. The convoluted tour Phillip makes of his youthful ordeals reveals a vulnerable man bent on blaming others for his own self-centered vulnerability. He starts out by claiming that the source of his sisters' (and his own) resentment against their father lies in the move George Carver forced on the family some 40 years earlier, in 1931. Betrayed in Nashville by his best friend and principal legal client, Lewis Shackleford, George Carver picked up and established a new and successful career in the more commercial, less custom-bound city of Memphis. But for his wife and children, according to Phillip, the uprooting was a disaster George selfishly ignored. Phillip's mother lapsed into "thirty years of real or imagined invalidism," his sisters started down the road of brittle spinsterhood, and 13-year-old Phillip suffered "a trauma he would in some way never recover from."
Phillip himself half-admits that it sounds preposterous to assign such importance to the shift between the two cities, "with their almost imperceptible difference--laughably alike they would seem to an outsider." What he doesn't seem fully to appreciate is that he has undermined his own credibility, which casts his succeeding accusations in a more questionable light. Is this narrator either the former helpless victim or the current clear-eyed judge he makes himself out to be? The actual disaster, he eventually claims, was that the imperious George Carver meddled in his children's romantic lives, denying them independence when they needed it most. He openly rejected Betsy's suitor and Josephine's beaux, and the once beautiful girls turned into eccentric characters. With Phillip he was sneakier but no less assertive: behind his son's back George Carver saw to it that Phillip's sweetheart was dispatched to South America. Phillip in turn secretly absconded to New York, where he claims he's been enjoying placid independence ever since with a woman whose greatest virtue is apparently her detachment.
PHILLIP HAS sketched a grim caricature of the provincial past that often looms in Taylor's stories. The changing local Tennessee customs that unbalance so many of his characters seem to have disoriented Phillip in a radical--almost surreal--way. For him, the familiar overbearing power of family traditions and expectations has turned tyrannical. Not that he's presented it so starkly. Shifting constantly among scenes and times, Phillip makes a show of groping for a clearer perspective on a past he's brooded over but never before brought to the surface--yet he's more successful in raising further questions about his own failures to act and react.
Toward the end of his notebooks, Phillip is given what appears to be the reprieve Taylor sometimes offers his protagonists: the chance to put his past, if only provisionally, in more realistic proportion. Yet Taylor implies that Phillip may be as misled about his mature liberation as he was about his youthful enslavement. His supposed act of imaginative sympathy with forceful George Carver serves in the end as another way for Phillip to assuage his uneasiness about his own wan existence--to convince himself that from now on he is choosing it freely. Taylor grants him a few moments of empathy: there is a vivid scene in which Phillip is swept up and out of himself by the old man as the two ride in a car to the wedding his sisters have secretly canceled.
But by the close of the book, Phillip has drifted into dry speculations instead. Sitting in his Manhattan apartment with Holly Kaplan, the woman with whom he's lived peacefully and passionlessly for years, he sips a watery drink and talks endlessly about principles of family reconciliation--about forgiving versus forgetting--rather than about real people. He says he can now see and admire his father as an energetically adaptable man, completely different from himself: "It was his very oppositeness from me that I could admire without reservation, like a character in a book." Contemplating an unchanged, utterly quiet life ahead, he announces in his last line that he and Holly have emerged "serenely free spirits."
Yet "serenity" and "orderliness" and "reasonableness," the supreme values in Phillip's limited existence, are hardly Taylor's high standards. Conceiving of the past as the realm of determinism, Phillip seizes upon the future as the province of choice--and is left with no true human choices to make. The static, unencumbered fate that Phillip and his companion look forward to with self-satisfaction is sterile--a vision of the weightless contemporary world eerier than any Taylor has presented before. Shut up in his dim apartment with Holly, surrounded by manuscripts rather than children, Phillip may see his notebooks as evidence of the birth of understanding, but in fact they are the testimony of a disoriented soul.
"PETER TAYLOR has a disenchanted mind," Robert Penn Warren wrote 40 years ago, "but a mind that nevertheless understands and values enchantment"--"the enchantment of veracity," he hastened to say, not of fantasy. The trauma of maturity, Taylor's fiction has always proposed, involves more than seeing through the oppressive pieties and pretensions of the past. But he has rarely so starkly dramatized the real, and more daunting, challenge: to find some humane way of living with precisely the terrifying truth that those family and social customs are meant to camouflage--the chasms between selves. Some of his characters are lucky enough to "see the world through another man's eyes," as the narrator of the story "The Promise of Rain" puts it, and thus have a chance of truly seeing into their own heads, and above all their own hearts: "It is only then all the world, as you have seen it through your own eyes, will begin to tell you things about yourself." For the less fortunate in Taylor's fiction, the price of myopia is high. Some turn into tyrants at home. Some become victims out in the world. In A Summons to Memphis Taylor has suggested an even more alienating possibility in Phillip, who has no real home and rarely ventures into the world: the danger of turning into a "free spirit" trapped within the bounds of the self.