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An Absence of Grace
| Article
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10089 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
2,361 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
THE ORACLE AT STONELEIGH COURT
Peter Taylor
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
324 pp., $22.00
"My writing," Peter Taylor has said, "is a by-product of my efforts to understand my life." That is why, one may reasonably suppose, he has made such regular use of his own and his family's experiences. By creatively recording them, placing them in a new contexts, and viewing them from different angles, he has succeeded in bringing out the essential character not merely of his own, but of modern man's prevailing dilemmas. Moreover, he is done so in prose that, because it does not call attention to itself, affords a singular sense of involvement, a feeling of unmediated engagement with reality. So even though he has gained national recognition only in recent years, he long ago secured a place for him self among the very few major American writers of the post-World War II era.
To speak of that era is to ratify the terms of Taylor's discourse, for he insists that the war drove a wedge between two profoundly different worlds--one governed by respected traditions and recognized codes of behavior, the other by the impulse to break free of old expectations and restrictions. Such a radical discontinuity was felt with particular intensity by the people of the South, among whom Taylor came of age. In one of the most chilling of his new stories, "The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs," he points out that after 1945 upper-middle-class Tennesseans "ceased to identify themselves as a separate sort of people, as a separate sort of Southerner, as those whose forebears had not lost important battles or minor skirmishes in that old [Civil] war that was coming to be mentioned less and less."
That loss of identity, Taylor believes, was emblematic of even more fundamental changes in the American character. In the masterful title story, for example, he describes the transformation of Lila Montgomery, an ingénue whom the narrator, a soldier on temporary assignment in Washington, D.C., introduces to his aunt, the "oracle" who resides in the Stoneleigh Court Apartments on Connecticut Avenue. The year is 1943, and the soldier, identified only as "Roger," is about to be shipped overseas, to the European theater of operations. He is fascinated by his aunt, a fiercely independent widow who consults tarot cards and claims to possess divinatory and other, unspecified, powers.
Lila quickly falls under the old woman's spell and when,
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