Codes of Honor the Old Forest, and Other Stories

By Paul Gray

Only two of these 14 pieces have not already appeared somewhere in Peter Taylor's six previous collections of short stories. But this is, essentially, a new book. Much of Taylor's earlier work is now difficult or impossible to buy; small printings were snapped up by his band of devoted readers and were not, as a rule, reissued. So The Old Forest supplies something that is unavailable in the literary marketplace. And the selection of these stories reveals a continuity and cohesion in Taylor's art that were less visible before. The settings are similar: the U.S. South during the 1930s and '40s, not the bogs or backwaters but growing cities like Memphis and Nashville. There, in the author's composite portrait, a well-ordered world is losing both energy and its faith in itself.

The title story, which makes its first appearance in book form, takes place during some cold December days in Memphis, 1937. Nat Ramsey, the scion of a good family, has a minor automobile accident a week before he is to marry Caroline Braxley, a debutante of equally impeccable social standing. Unfortunately, he is not alone in that car; Lee Ann Deehart, a young working woman with whom he has enjoyed an innocent but romantic friendship, runs away from the scene and disappears. Complicated codes of honor come instantly into play. It never occurs to Nat not to tell his fiancee about Lee Ann's presence; Caroline and her parents in turn have no interest in censuring him or his presumptive faithlessness. The problem is that the wedding will remain in jeopardy until the woman can be found; having her turn up pregnant or dead after the ceremony would create insufferable scandal. By the time the search for Lee Ann ends, Nat has learned much about areas of life from which his class has conspired to shield him. And with no visible effort, Taylor has spun out a marvelously intricate and fragile web of isolated society.

Taylor's people realize that their behavior is circumscribed by customs, often the very ones they cherish most and work hardest to preserve. They also sense that they should not be too content with their restrictions; they want to understand more than their experience allows. In Promise of Rain, a father recognizes the moment when his youngest son, almost grown and increasingly remote, finds the path his life will follow: "I was 50, but I had just discovered what it means to see the world through another man's eyes. It is a discovery you are lucky to make at any age, and one that is no less marvelous whether you make it at 50 or 15. Because it is only then that the world, as you have seen it through your own eyes, will begin to tell you things about yourself." In several stories, the black cooks, gardeners and domestics take on a voyeuristic burden: they are the servants who literally do the messy chore of living for their masters.

With each infrequent appearance of a Peter Taylor book (the last one came out in 1977), reviewers and fellow writers wonder again in print why the author remains a secret to the vast reading public. The question is fair but probably unanswerable. Perhaps a successful novel somewhere in his career would have attracted attention to Taylor's short fiction; among his contemporaries, Eudora Welty and the late John Cheever enjoyed just such journeys to renown. Taylor's only novel, A Woman of Means (1950), occasioned no commercial breakthrough. Audiences should have found him, nonetheless; his work is not difficult, only miraculously engaging and evocative. Taylor, 68, can obviously get along just fine without popular acclaim. Whether readers should continue to miss his work is another matter.