Odd Jobs (60 page)

In the course of this meandering account it is possible to feel like Holly when she blew out the impatient billow of smoke. After a lifetime of tracing teacup-tempests among genteel Tennesseeans, Mr. Taylor retains an unslaked appetite for the local nuance. The rather subtle (to Yankees, at least) differences between the styles of Memphis and Nashville are thoroughly and repeatedly gone into, with instructive side-glances
at Knoxville and Chattanooga. “Nashville,” an old social arbiter of that town explains, “is a city of schools and churches, whereas Memphis is—well, Memphis is something else again. Memphis is a place of steamboats and cotton gins, of card playing and hotel society.” The narrator puts it, “Memphis was today. Nashville was yesterday.” His own temperamental preference, as we could guess from his leisurely, laggard prose, is for yesterday: “As one walks or rides down any street in Nashville one can feel now and again that he has just glimpsed some pedestrian on the sidewalk who was not quite real somehow, who with a glance over his shoulder or with a look in his disenchanted eye has warned one not to believe too much in the plastic present and has given warning that the past is still real and present somehow and is demanding something of all men like me who happen to pass that way.” When Phillip moves to Memphis, just turned thirteen, he reports to school “in knee britches and wearing a sort of Buster Brown, highly starched collar” and discovers that (this is 1931), not only is his costume retrograde but his hair is cut too long, and he even fails to carry his books the Memphis way—“alongside my hip or thigh, with my arm hanging straight down from shoulder to wrist” rather than (evidently Nashville-style) “like a girl, in the crook of my arm.” The accents are different, and men play golf instead of ride to hounds and don’t wear cutaways downtown to the office: “Unlike other Memphis businessmen [George Carver, Phillip’s father] frequently went to his office wearing striped trousers and a cutaway jacket—a morning suit, no less—along with a starched wing collar and a gray four-in-hand silk tie.” He comes to adopt the Memphis way of dressing: “in Manhattan or even in Nashville or Knoxville or Chattanooga people on the street might have turned and stared at Father and remarked on the peculiar cut of his jacket and the width of his hat brim.” A hat alone will send Mr. Taylor into a rhapsody of Southern social history:

Now, this is admirably circumstantial and, within the generous space demanded by the unhurried tone, elegantly turned; but it is talk, not action. Direct dialogue in
A Summons to Memphis
is sparse, and the plot feels skimped, even snubbed. Although Mr. Taylor tells us a great deal about costumes, furniture, and civic differences, there is much he avoids showing. Indeed, he almost cruelly teases, with his melodious divagations and his practiced skill at foreshadowing and delaying climaxes, the reader of this novel. Its kernel of action—Phillip Carver’s trip to Memphis at the summons of his sisters, in 1967—does not occur until well after midpoint. He at last boards the plane on page 132, arrives at the Memphis airport on page 135, and by page 153 is back on a plane, winging his way into more cloudy retrospect after having refused (implausibly, I think) to spend a single night with his father and sisters. And the events while he is briefly there seem oddly betranced; though his vital if elderly father has been frustrated in an attempt at marriage, the old man submits without a peep, and though his son has been summoned a thousand miles for a family conference, he says hardly a word. Concerning an earlier frustration, it is not made clear why or how the father covertly wrecks the romance between Phillip, who is a soldier and all of twenty-three, and Clara Price, who sounds lovely and, even if she does hail from far-off Chattanooga, would appear to be socially acceptable; she and her family live “in a splendid Tudor-style house atop Lookout Mountain”—presumably above bribery and bullying persuasion. Some nuance, no doubt, escaped me, just as, in trying to grasp the scarcely-to-be-forgiven trauma of being moved from Nashville to Memphis, I fastened on the
tragic fact that the two girls thereby “came out” in the wrong city and wasted their debutante parties: “Young ladies in present-day Memphis and Nashville cannot possibly conceive the profound significance that the debutante season once held for their like or imagine the strict rules that it was death to disobey.” In any case, one might argue that the action of the novel is not so much the doings, past and present, of the Tennessee Carvers but the struggle by the self-exiled Phillip, staged in “these very irregular notebooks” of his which we are mysteriously reading, to come to terms with his past—the magnificent, crushing father, the “cluttered-up, bourgeois life,” the tenacious, static idyll of the South. As the boy rode behind his father, outside of Nashville, “the foliage of the black gums and maples and oaks often met overhead on those lanes, and it seems to me that every morning somewhere on our ride there would be an old Negro man bent down beside one of the walls, making repairs. It was a timeless scene. I could not imagine a past time when it had not been just so or a future time when it would not be the same.” From this South, with its omnipresent past, Mr. Taylor, like Faulkner, draws endless inspiration; he stirs and stirs the same waters, watching them darken and deepen, while abstaining from Faulkner’s violent modernist gestures. He stirs instead with a Jamesian sort of spoon.

In praise of
A Woman of Means
thirty-six years ago, Robert Penn Warren claimed for it “the excitement of being constantly on the verge of deep perceptions and deep interpretations.” Peter Taylor keeps us on the verge much of the time.
A Woman of Means
did plunge, with the empathy of a James Agee or a William Maxwell, into the frightening dark of boyhood, when one is able to observe so much and do so little. Its evocation of a child’s helpless, sensitive world seemed to close hastily, but not until our essential loneliness and the precariousness of even the best-appointed home were made painfully clear. In
A Summons to Memphis
, though the canvas is broader and adorned with fine comic splashes, some of the narrative churning brings up only what is already floating on the surface: “And I grasped at once that my not having other luggage meant to him that we would not be delayed by waiting at the baggage-claim window.” Or, a perception still more hard-won:

James’s heavily mirrored halls of mutual regard seem but feebly imitated by reflections like “I knew always that the affair referred to was pure fantasy but I do not know even now whether or not they knew I knew.” The diction at times is so fastidious that a smile at the narrator’s expense must be intended: “If slit skirts were the fashion, then my sisters’ would be vented well above the knees, exposing fleshy thighs which by this time in my sisters’ lives were indeed of no inconsiderable size.” Some sentences can only be called portly: “But about Alex Mercer himself there was something that made him forever fascinated by and sympathetic to that which he perhaps yearned after in spirit but which practically speaking he did not wish himself to become.” Such measured verbal groping among the shadows of morality and good intention has suffered a diminishment since James; he had no commerce with God but had retained the religious sense. In Phillip Carver’s world, no religion remains, just an old-fashioned code of behavior, and its defense is hard to distinguish from snobbery or, to use a word he uses of himself, lethargy. He is so imbued with lethargy that he speaks of “debating the question of how many angels could sit on the head of a pin” when in the conventional image, of course, the angels dance. He registers for the draft as a conscientious objector (in peacetime, early in 1941), but when the draft-board clerk fails to understand and sends in his form with the others, “this was
so
like a certain type of Memphis mentality … I could not even bring myself to protest”; he indifferently puts on his uniform and goes off to Fort Oglethorpe. When, six years later, he flees Memphis for New York, “it was as though someone else were dressing me and packing for me or at least as though I had no will of my own.” And when, in 1967, he discovers himself in the same restaurant with his long-lost love, Clara Price, he doesn’t trouble to get up from his chair and present himself; like those angels on the pin, he just sits. During his visits home, the dynamism of his ambitious father and animated, vengeful sisters oppresses him; it seems that they don’t share his knowledge of “how consummately and irreversibly life had already passed us by.” His narrative can scarcely bring itself to describe present events, and comes to life only when recapturing some moment or fact from the buried past. The prissy, circuitous
language (confided to “notebooks” yet elaborately explanatory and in one spot openly concerned about “the reader”) is flavored with anachronisms like “for the nonce” and “lad.”

And yet this language, with its echo of old usages and once-honored forms, delivers things a less quaint diction could hardly express. Explaining the ugly second-hand furniture he and Holly have in New York, Phillip writes, “It was not the kind of furniture either of us had grown up with, but we felt that the presence of such plain objects in our rooms was proof of our not having succumbed to the sentimental aesthetics of domesticity.” A beautiful fittingness develops whenever the father is the subject. “And what I must confirm is that this man, my father, this Mr. George Carver, did care more about clothes than any other man of his very masculine character and temperament that I have ever been acquainted with there in Memphis or here in Manhattan or in any other place at all.” Balked by his dim sight from finding an empty table in a nightclub, the old man “simply stood still and waited for events to develop in his favor.” His manner of posing and dressing, Phillip comes to see, was “his most direct means of communicating his aspirations and his actual vision of how things were with him.” A page of reminiscence about his father’s two cumbersome and cherished wardrobes culminates when, arriving at the Memphis airport and unexpectedly greeted by his elegantly clad progenitor, Phillip feels “as though someone had thrown open the double doors to one of those wardrobes of his and, figuratively speaking, I was inhaling the familiar aroma of his whole life and being. Only it wasn’t like an aroma exactly. For one moment it seemed I was about to be suffocated. For one moment it was as if I had never left Memphis.” Phillip’s virtually morbid interest in costume delivers, too, a telling and vivid portrait of his two sisters, who into their fifties dress with an embarrassing rakishness, partly as parody of the Memphis (as opposed to the sedater Nashville) style and partly in protest at having been denied marriage and “frozen forever in their roles as injured adolescents.” The father and sisters are old-fashioned characters, with costumes and settings and histories and psychologies; Phillip, by leaving the hinterland where clothes make a statement and the family “things” are worth inheriting, has become a non-character, a sensate shade dwelling in the low-affect regions of Don DeLillo and Donald Barthelme, a human being who assigns only a limited value, hedged about with irony, to himself. Some day, Phillip Carver fantasizes, he and Holly will simply fade away in their apartment—“when the sun shines in next morning
there will be simply no trace of us.” The lovers will not have been “alive enough to have the strength to die.”

Peter Taylor’s ingrown, overdressed Tennessee world is bleaker than Henry James’s transatlantic empyrean, for it is a century more drained of the blood of the sacred. The sacred, Mircea Eliade has written, “implies the notions of
being
, of
meaning
, and of
truth.…
It is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly
real
in the world.” For James, the real constituted the human appetites, mostly for love and money, that flickered beneath and secretly shaped the heavily draped society of late-Victorian times. By Mr. Taylor’s time, appetite has shrivelled to dread—dread of another’s aroma, of being suffocated by one’s father’s appetites. For all the fussy good manners of his prose, the ugly war between parents and children has been his recurrent topic; one thinks of the short story “Porte Cochere” (the house in
A Summons to Memphis
has a porte cochere), which ends with that old father, in the darkness of his room, while his adult children noisily besiege his door, taking out the walking stick “with his father’s face carved on the head” and stumbling about “beating the upholstered chairs with the stick and calling the names of children under his breath.” In
A Summons to Memphis
, Phillip Carver wins through to a real, non-trivial insight when he accepts “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.” The wrongs of the father are inevitably visited upon the son and daughter, as part of the jostle of “whole human beings” sharing the earth. Beneath his talky, creaking courtesies, Peter Taylor deals bravely with the primal clauses of the social contract.