Civil War in the Upper South a Summons to Memphis

By Paul Gray

It is easy to be hooked by this book. For one thing, the opening sentence rates high on any scale of irresistibility: "The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved -- especially when there are unmarried daughters." Perhaps a few readers could stop right there, unmoved by the promise of a comedy of manners with undercurrents of family squabbling and greed, set forth with whimsical decorum. But not those familiar with the works of the author who wrote these 25 introductory words. Peter Taylor, 69, has acquired over four decades a formidable reputation and a small but fanatical following among those who care about American short fiction. For many, such Taylor stories as In the Miro District and The Old Forest have come to exemplify the current state of the art. The phenomenon of an established master attempting only his second novel, $ and his first in 36 years, is one that devotees will not want to miss.

A Summons to Memphis lives up to its introduction and its author's renown. The story of grown children locked in polite, civil warfare with a tyrannical father is genuinely funny. And the setting offers a leisurely look at the geography that has emerged patchwork from Taylor's stories: the Upper South, which can be described as a swath of territory and customs running west from Richmond to St. Louis, with the emphasis on Tennessee. But Taylor has done more than obey all the rules he has imposed on himself, now and in the past. He satisfies surface expectations on his way to deeper questions.

The plot is easy to summarize, although not for the person who tells it. He is Phillip Carver, 49, a bachelor who learns from his two older sisters in Memphis that their father, 81 and a widower, is planning to remarry. Phillip believes he has long since escaped Memphis and old associations; he works for a publishing house in Manhattan and collects rare books. But his live-in girlfriend Holly has just moved out on him, and he is lonely and therefore vulnerable to appeals from the past. There is also the matter of his father's "not inconsiderable fortune" and the possibility of an interloper's inheriting it. Phillip confesses, "I did think of the money."

That is not all he considers. Before he boards the airplane that will take him to Memphis, either to defend his father from his sisters or vice versa, Phillip picks through a tangled skein of memories. The crucial incident in the Carver history, as he sees it, occurred in 1931, when his father moved his family, his wife and four children, including the youngest, Phillip, 13, from Nashville to Memphis. George Carver, an eminently respectable lawyer, had been "deceived and nearly financially ruined" by his business association with a Nashville entrepreneur. Old-fashioned honor demanded a move to a place where the innocent man could start all over again. The son, grown middle-aged, remains fixed in his opinion of this event: "I thought Father had ruined all our lives, except his own."

Other grievances swarm up from the past. Phillip recalls how his father prevented both daughters from marrying, scaring off suitors or using courtroom wiles to turn the impressionable girls into witnesses against their gentlemen friends. The third child, Georgie, was ostensibly so traumatized by family life that he volunteered for service in World War II with the sole intent of being killed, at which he succeeded. The old man also managed to put an end to Phillip's courtship of a "girl I was in love with in Chattanooga (and there has never been another)." As these remembrances and confessions tumble out, a question emerges: Who is more awful, the domineering, selfish father or his aggrieved and equally solipsistic son?

The guilty finger in A Summons to Memphis seems to point nearly everywhere. Phillip's dry, punctilious narrative style hardly jibes with his claims to be a doomed romantic hero. Thinking back on the girl in Chattanooga, he remarks, "Surely no life was ever so quickly and completely transformed by love as mine was." Yet his only visible passion is self-absorption. He cannot even muster much interest in Alex Mercer, "my closest friend there in Memphis." He admits several times his inability to remember just how many children Alex and his wife possess.

A book filled with such inveterate egotists as the Carver clan ought not to be much fun. Yet A Summons to Memphis radiates tolerant good humor. For all of Phillip's flaws, he is a keen observer, witty monologist and an adept at anecdotes. He recalls, for example, the fate of another old Memphis widower who attempted to take a second wife: "When Mr. Joel's intention to remarry was made manifest he was actually hauled into court by his own children. (His sons were all lawyers, unhappily for him.) And there in court . . . Mr. Joel's sons had their father declared non compos mentis. Those middle-aged lawyer sons were able to achieve this even though a host of Mr. Joel's lifelong friends testified, under oath, either that Mr. Joel Manning was perfectly sane or at least, as one of his oldest and most trusted friends phrased it, 'as sane as he had ever been.' " Taylor has always been able to portray the dignity in his characters, particularly when they are in the act of making fools of themselves. It may be ludicrous for a grown man still to mourn a childhood move from one Tennessee city to another, but the author's art evokes sympathy along with laughter.