By Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post, September 14, 1986
A review of A "Summons to Memphis" by Peter Taylor
SEATED IN HIS cramped apartment on West 82nd Street in Manhattan, writing in "these very irregular notebooks," Phillip Carver at the age of 49 confronts his aged father and, in so doing, himself. Not long ago he had been summoned to Memphis by his two spinster sisters because his father, two years a widower, had proposed to marry a younger woman; he records in his notebooks that "I thought I had detected an old-fashioned fury in my sisters' voices which made me fearful for my father's well-being," and so he had hastened to Memphis to defend the old man. But the journey turned into much more than an errand of filial mercy; it became a summons into the depths of Carver's own past, a re-encounter with people and events that shaped him, in most cases much against his will, into the man he is now.
Fathers and sons: the theme has recurred over and again in Taylor's mature fiction, most notably in such short stories as "The Gift of the Prodigal," "The Captain's Son" and "Dean of Men." In that sense, as in many others, A Summons to Memphis is quintessential Taylor. But A Summons to Memphis is not a short story, a novella or a play, the forms in which he has previously written; it is Taylor's first true novel, published in his 70th year. That our most distinguished and accomplished writer of short fiction has at last written a novel is cause enough for comment and celebration, but there is much more for which to be grateful. A Summons to Memphis is something of a miracle: not merely a novel of immense intelligence, psychological acuity and emotional power, but a work that manages to summarize and embody its author's entire career.
It is also, for Taylor's admirers, a gift. Those of us who love his work have wanted him to write long fiction not in order to conform to bloated American notions about literary success, but for the sheer pleasures and rewards of reading him at greater length. For years these readers have wondered what would happen if the author of such masterpieces of short fiction as "A Wife of Nashville" and "The Old Forest" simply fell into an expansive mood, and allowed a story to spin itself out to the full dimensions of a book. Now we have the answer, and it seems almost too good to be true: Taylor is as much a master of the novel as of the story.
In tone and method, A Summons to Memphis is directly related to Taylor's later short stories. Its narrator is a man of sufficient years to be able to cast a long backward glance, and of sufficient self-awareness to comprehend his own shortcomings as well as those of others -- though his self-understanding does have its clear, and revealing, limits. Within the opening pages a number of mysteries and secrets are gradually identified, but we discover their true nature only after a leisurely process in which layer after layer is slowly peeled away. The mood is genial and civilized, but dark matters lie not far beneath the surface; for if A Summons to Memphis is a novel about understanding and forgiveness, it is also one about betrayal and retribution.
The first betrayal, and the one to which everything else can be traced, took place in 1931, when George Carver, Phillip's father, was "deceived and nearly ruined financially by his closest friend and principal legal client back in Nashville, one Mr. Lewis Shackleford." Refusing to stay in the same town with this knave, Carver moved with his wife and four children to Memphis, where he established a law practice and soon became a prominent citizen -- but where his wife and children, accustomed to Nashville ways, found their lives thrown peculiarly off course. His wife fell into a decline, perhaps more psychosomatic than real, that lasted three decades; his daughters were maneuvered out of prospective marriages and into prosperous, bitter spinsterhood; his elder son was killed in the Second World War; and Phillip renounced both Memphis and the law, moving to New York to become an editor and book-collector.
Now, back in Memphis to see what he can do about his octogenarian father's marital aspirations, Phillip finds all these strains from his family's past intermingling with others from his own in a painful web of memory. He writes at one point that "my head was full of . . . adult understanding," by which he means that the combination of a family crisis and his own arrival at middle age has allowed him to see though veneers of half-truth and self-deception to the truths of his life: to understand how he has misunderstood his father and his sisters, and thus himself. In particular he comes to see that his sisters are "frozen forever in their roles as injured adolescents" and that what he had for years thought to be his father's selfishness is something far more complex. Reflecting upon the counsel of the woman with whom he lives, he writes:
"By this time of course I accepted Holly's doctrine that our old people must be not merely forgiven all their injustices and unconscious cruelties in their roles as parents but that any selfishness on their parts had actually been required of them if they were to remain whole human beings and not become merely guardian robots of the young. This was something to be remembered, not forgotten. This was something to be accepted and even welcomed, not forgotten or forgiven."
ACCEPTING and remembering are, if anything, the principal business that Phillip Carver conducts in these "notebooks." The "adult understanding" he slowly reaches is that one has to live with what one has been given, and that trying to push it out of mind is merely irresponsible and self-deluding. A central reality in Phillip's life is that his father -- with, he finally comes to see, the unwitting complicity of his sisters -- destroyed his hopes of marriage to the only woman he ever really loved, but he now is mature enough to try to understand why his father did this to him. He is forced to confront the ways in which submission is maintained within families, and the schemes that children and spouses devise in order to cope with it. However ruefully, he learns what his father knows but his sisters never will: there is no such thing as "a simple truth."
But to describe A Summons to Memphis purely in terms of the themes it examines is to overlook the other pleasures it offers: the sly depiction of contrasting folkways in Memphis and Nashville, the nostalgic yet unsentimental excursions into a lost way of life, the rich yet precise and unadorned prose. Above all, perhaps, the prose. Here is Phillip, remembering a day when he gave his one true love a small present:
"She tore off the paper with real anticipation, I felt. She peeped inside the book to the selection of very old and little-known Christmas verse. Then almost before I knew it she had thrown her arms around my neck and kissed me so lovingly that I made an effort to draw her further into a possibly less visible corner of the room. But she laughed at my effort. 'What do we care who sees us?' she asked. But I managed to lead her to the nearby couch and there returned her kiss many times over. Finally she held me a little away from her and looking directly into my eyes she said softly, 'Some night I want you to go with me to my room, Phillip.' Of course I went with her that very night, and from that time we were truly lovers and imagined ourselves bound to each other for life."
Prose of such subtlety, taste and clarity -- prose that so poignantly and exactly evokes a moment, and makes it real -- is rare at any time, rarer still today, yet Peter Taylor has been writing it for four decades. Only of late has he begun to receive the attention and admiration he has earned, but with the publication last year of The Old Forest and Other Stories he suddenly found a readership. Now, with A Summons to Memphis, that readership surely will grow still larger, his reputation still greater. American readers demand novels, and now Peter Taylor has given them one; to say that it is every bit as good as the best of his short stories is the highest compliment it can be paid.