Reviewed by: The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor Jean McGarry (bio) Peter Taylor, The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 560 pp. My single visit with Peter Taylor converged nicely with a typical Taylor story. At home in the latest of a string of hand-restored, "older" houses, whose cozy rooms were lined with forbidding ancestral portraits, Mr. Taylor—witty, genial, and hard of hearing—was accompanied by his wife and two children, who never left us for a second. I tried my best to convey admiration to a writer whose work I love and had taught in classes on fictional landscape and setting. It should have been easy, but we had to deal not just with the family, listening, but with the language gap. I referenced "Heads of Houses," a story with the curious feature of an eight-seat outhouse (delicately dubbed the "garden house" in the story). Taylor smiled at the reference, but looked puzzled. It took us a while to realize that he'd heard eight-seat garden hose. Things didn't get much clearer, although Taylor tried to put his guest at ease, chuckling over the dust-up that same story had caused when members of the Taylor clan saw themselves in it and didn't like what they saw. He could laugh about it—that battle was over—but, for me, it wasn't until rereading this new edition of his collected stories that I realized how dangerous and cagey a game he'd been playing with his fictional "material." Like Jane Austen, Peter Taylor lived under the same roof with his "material." Where Hemingway moved to Paris to capture his folks in their native habitat, Taylor wrote about Tennessee gentility in the thick of it, leading a respectable and genteel life as husband, father, and professor of English, his last posting at the University of Virginia. Like Austen, Taylor is essentially a comic writer, but his narrators never stand so far above the "material" as to get a good laugh at it. Taylor, like Hemingway, wrote in a plain style, but without the jaw-clenched tension and rhetorical tics of the ex-pat. Taylor's stories read like tales told aloud, and the gist of many of them came (or so he has said) from his mother, as told, one imagines, to a most receptive and retentive child. While Hemingway's childhood stories are, strictly speaking, moral tales, written by an escapee from family hell, Taylor's narratives are more ambiguous in point and tone, told by and about individuals who can't, won't, and wouldn't want to escape. Like James Joyce, Taylor wrote about what he knew, Middle Tennessee and points nearby, but unlike the great modernist (another ex-pat), he didn't aim, in his stories, to betray "the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city." Even compared to that of a coeval, Jean Stafford, Taylor's handling of characters seems oddly gentle; his attitude, faintly fond of the "fancy" women and womanizers, racists, harridans, [End Page 578] plutocrats, and aristocratic nuts who populate his stories. The difference might stem from an impulse more sympathetic than scornful. Where most writers, including the masters, seem driven by the question: how could I have come from this!, Taylor's question is exploratory: who were these people I grew up with? What were they after, and did they ever get it? The resulting stories spring free of both scorn and judgment. Whoever these people were, it wasn't for him—or for us—to judge. And, indeed, to read Taylor's stories is to feel enlightened, not instructed. The reader learns a lot about these Tennesseans, without quite getting their "number." In "Heads of Houses," three men identified as "Kitty's" father, husband, and old bachelor brother are brought together for breakfast on the day of the brother's arrival and the husband's departure (with Kitty and kids), after what has proven a long summer of togetherness, with three generations grating on each other's nerves. The insistent focus on Kitty, who plays a small role in the story, might seem coy until the...