Summary
The Old Forest and Other Stories brings together fourteen pieces from across Peter Taylor's long career, thirteen stories and a short play, The Death of a Kinsman. Like most of Taylor's fiction, they mostly concern middle and upper class white Southerners living through the changes of the twentieth century, people whose manners do a great deal of the work they will not do out loud. The Dial Press published it in 1985.
The title story, first printed in The New Yorker, is the one to start with. An older Nat Ramsey, long since a college professor, looks back on one week in Memphis in December 1937. A few days before his wedding to Caroline Braxley, a debutante, Nat has a car accident in Overton Park while out with Lee Ann Deehart, an independent young woman he has been seeing. Lee Ann climbs out and runs into the ancient woods of the park, and she does not come back. Neither family will let the wedding go ahead under the threat of scandal. It is Caroline, not Nat, who takes charge, tracking Lee Ann down through her friends and settling the matter, and the story's real subject turns out to be how much the quiet, conventional girl understood all along. Other titles include "The Gift of the Prodigal," "A Long Fourth," "The Little Cousins" and "Two Ladies in Retirement."
Taylor does not write quick stories. His narrators circle, digress, correct themselves and consider what might have happened instead, so the longer pieces read like short novels. The pleasure is in the voice, courteous and exact, and in the gap between what a narrator says and what he lets slip. It is a book to read one story at a time. It suits readers of William Trevor, Alice Munro or John Cheever, and anyone curious about the urban South.
Historical Context & Significance
The Old Forest and Other Stories won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1986, over a field that included Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, the 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner, and William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic, as well as Hugh Nissenson's The Tree of Life, Helen Norris's The Christmas Wife and Grace Paley's Later the Same Day. The title story, printed in The New Yorker in May 1979, had already been chosen for The Best American Short Stories 1980, edited by Stanley Elkin. The director Steven John Ross filmed it in Memphis as a short motion picture, released in 1984.
The prize came near the end of a long career that had begun with A Long Fourth and Other Stories in 1948. Taylor, born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917, taught at Kenyon and later at the University of Virginia. A year after this award his novel A Summons to Memphis won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1993 he received the PEN/Malamud Award for the short story. He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994.
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