PARTISAN REVIEW
interesting. It is obvious that Taylor has learned much from the best
living Southern writers. One feels it most happily in his grace and
directness. Beyond that I don't know how profitable it is to think of
these stories about middle-class Nashville and Memphis as a comment
upon the South-indeed, the only disturbing note in them is just this
business of
The South.
Taylor seems to be in a dilemma; he wants to
say yes and no at the same time and in answer to a question not quite
clear to me. Implicitly he suggests that his tales of contemporary Ten–
nessee have something to do with a larger social theme, city and coun–
try, fathers and sons, industrialism and agrarianism. On the other hand,
being young and of the present, he knows the past and its choices only
in a literary way and they come into his work in a diluted, timid form.
The result is that his older characters and their bewilderments are
rather conventional and forced, whereas the young people are always
alive and charming. (Speaking of "Southern" literature, I suspect no
one is now in a position to write it except the English and they seem,
for good historical reasons, to be doing just that. Crude city children
trample upon ancestral flowerbeds, old family houses are revisited,
classes are suffering a recent doom, colorful people are out of place in
a drab, impoverished world.) In Taylor's stories the old order changeth,
yes; a terrible, citified girl in "A Long Fourth" makes progressive con–
versation while the Southern mother goes through a moral and emo–
tional crisis with an old Negro servant; an uncle regrets that people
have neither honor nor manners nowadays; a little boy in "Skyline," one
of the best pieces, sees his father change from respectability and confi–
dence into an anonymous man. Still one cannot make much of this and
even in South Dakota some people must remember better days.
What is fine about Taylor's stories is not his speculation about
the disintegration of family life, but his delicately individual creation
of particular families and his amazing skill in getting a great many
distinct characters into a short scene; not the past and the present of
the South, but the love-making on the front porch, the sexless, sinister
khaki and woolen socks of the dedicated scoutmaster, the wonderfully
repetitive conversation about the weather in "Rain in the Heart." The
dialogue is superb, regularly reproducing the accents of life with such
precision that the most ordinary exchange seems witty and fresh .
Anais Nin, on the other hand, shuns the real world as if it had a
bad reputation. Tills elegant snobbishness seems not designed to get her
on in good society, but to allow her to sneak away to the psychological
underworld revealed in the following, frightening images. "I walked
pinned to a spider web of fantasies spun during the night, obstinately
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