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- A
- Biographer’s
- Biographer
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- Hubert H. McAlexander
By Robert L. Hall
If
there can be such a thing as a man’s man or a writer’s writer, then there
can be a biographer’s biographer—and Hubert H. McAlexander is one. Yes, I
know that it sounds like a delicious double entendre: is this a person who
(A) writes biographies about other biographers, or (B) is it a phrase meant
to point to a person who is a model biographer for other biographers to
follow?
In
this case, the answer is (B). I mean, what would you call a person
who has written not one, not two, but three different types of books about
the same southern author, Peter Taylor? I, for one, would say that he
probably knows quite a lot about the subject of his investigations.
Wouldn’t you?
A
professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches (among
other courses) the twentieth century American novel, a Faulkner course, and
southern literature, Dr. McAlexander was born in Holly Springs,
Mississippi. He attended the University of Mississippi, where he earned his
Master’s Degree and eventually received his PhD from the University of
Wisconsin, with a concentration in British and American Literature from the
first half of the twentieth century.
However, what made him take the leap to biographer of Peter Taylor is not
just his education, nor his background (although there is no doubt that it
prepared him well for what was to come.)
It
was his meeting with the southern author himself, who had been invited by
the University of Georgia to come speak to the student body for a week in
1984, and his own impressions of the writer.
McAlexander recalls that he had written his first biography a few years
before.
"I was his host
for that weekend.
He was at our house a couple of times in the spring of ’84. The
writing of
the book itself….well let me talk about my first book—the
biography of
Sherwood Bonner.
At the time that I
was completing it, I was also reading the five-volume biography of Henry
James by Leon Edel.
“I
was doing that
because it was a great biography, and James and Sherwood Bonner were of the
same generation. I learned a lot from Edel’s work: how important it is to sketch
in the scene and give a sense of the place. I have read some biographies
and never got a real sense of the people who were being presented, sometimes
not even a clear sense of the main subject as a presence…as a personality.
In some biographies all you get are names and dates and sequences of
movement, but no vivid sense of people and places.
"You certainly get that in
the Edel biography of James. So, that taught me a lot. Hell, it’s five
volumes! (He laughs) But, oh what a life he had and the people who knew
James! And I, uh…I realized while doing that first biography that I
really liked organizing material, and how congenial it was. In a general way
you have the organization already there in the life, but you have to find
different ways to make that organization interesting. I’m not a creative
writer. I could never do that, but the biography is much more novelistic
than I ever realized. You try lots of different techniques to bring people
to life.
"Now as to Peter’s
biography…I felt that I had an advantage and I think he did to, in that I
grew up just 45 miles from Memphis, so I could really understand the milieu
that produced him. He grew up in Trenton, Tennessee, and in a slight way I
knew about Memphis of my generation, so that I could understand a lot of
things without having to make a study of them. I hope I got that right?
(He pauses)
" I
have no theories about biographies in particular. You have to have a sense
of time and movement and with an author you should weave the two
together—the work and the life.”
I was at Burke’s Bookstore when you spoke
about first meeting Peter in ’84. Can you recount that for me?
Oh,
surely. He was so warm and cordial. He felt, that a writer
should live a certain type of life. And he lived it, with his learned
friends and colleagues. He wasn’t rowdy or uncontrolled as some of his
friends were. In fact, he might be considered quite tame in comparison with
some of them.
Anyway, after a while, I told him, “Peter, I want to write your biography.”
He just smiled and held up his hands. “No, no. You shouldn’t do that,” he
said. But, within a few minutes, he began to tell me such interesting and
long stories about himself and those he had met in his life. It was
as if he were giving me tacit agreement to begin the project. And, indeed,
he was providing me with material even then.
That’s really funny. I heard a someone in the audience at the bookstore say
to you, “We thought we’d all be dead before it was completed. You didn’t
even pause when you responded, “Some of us are,” and followed with a few
names of those who passed on since you interviewed them. How long did the
book take you to write?
In
1993 I began interviewing for the book. It took a total of six years. I had
already done a book containing interviews with Peter. It
is called Conversations with Peter Taylor. I completed it in 1987.
Then Critical Essays on Peter Taylor followed in 1993. Only then did
I start the biography.
Tell us about Peter Taylor.
 He
had a very
distinctive voice. To non-southerners it seemed very southern.
It was a cultivated voice, an educated voice, about mid-range. But,
when he would get excited, the words would
just spill out. He would trip over words in his enthusiasm.
But,
he told wonderful
stories. All the people who knew him thought of him as really a
storyteller. Peter would say to me a number of times, “I am not
intellectual anyway, except as a writer.” And he was not an academic
or a critic. He was an instinctive
writer, and although he gave a lot of
interviews, basically he didn’t like to talk about how he did what he did,
and maybe he didn’t understand it anyway. He just knew how to do it. He
was a very self-conscious writer--v-e-r-y careful! Revised a great
deal. Sometimes he would tell a story in the third person and go back
and rewrite the entire story in the
first person.
Peter
Taylor’s real significance is as one of the notable American short story
writers of this century, although he won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel,
Summons to Memphis, in 1987. A little biography of him: born in
1917 in Trenton, Tennessee in Gibson County. When he was six years old, the
family moved to Nashville, where his father practiced law. He went into
business with a big entrepreneur of the twenties, Rogers Caldwell. After
two years, the Taylors moved to St. Louis, where Peter’s father was
President of Missouri Life Insurance Company and they lived very high, going
up with the Caldwell Empire. However, in 1932, it all came crashing down.
The Taylors after living so high, were wiped out, then came to Memphis.
Peter graduated from Central High in Memphis, graduated in 1935. Then went
for one semester to Rhodes College (then called Southwestern at Memphis.)
His freshman English teacher was Allen Tate.
Tate
left Memphis after talking Peter into going to Vanderbilt to study under
John Crowe Ransom. Peter did, but it was Ransom’s last year at Vanderbilt.
He had been lured away by Kenyon College in Ohio. Peter returned to
Memphis, sold real estate for a year, then went to Kenyon after Ransom
arranged that Peter be given a scholarship. There he was thrown in with
an unusually talented group of people—very literary, who remained close
friends all their lives. The most famous being Peter’s roommate, Robert
Lowell, who became the most famous American poet of his generation; picture
on the cover of time Magazine, etc., etc. He was really Peter’s best
friend. Peter by that time was already publishing short fiction.
Right
after graduation from Kenyon, he published three notable short stories in
the Southern Review, one of the editors being Robert Penn Warren. Peter
went with Lowell and Lowell’s new wife to Baton Rouge. He decided that more
college was not for him, however. He quit at Thanksgiving, went back to
Memphis, then into the army. One weekend up in Monteagle, he met Eleanor
Ross, a poet from North Carolina. They got married, and were an anomaly
among the others of that generation, in that they stayed together for
fifty-one years. Amazingly, he wrote a lot during the war. Afterwards, he
made his living as an academic, moving from college to college. In 1948,
The New Yorker accepted his first story at the time that his first
volume was coming out, with an introduction by Robert Penn Warren. Peter was part
of the stable of New York writers, from 1948 up into the 60’s.
Peter
considered himself fundamentally a short story writer. Influences upon him
were Henry James--Checkov is another one. Only towards the end of his life
did he start writing novels. He said of novels, “Novels are for windy old
men.” What he meant was that they were so much looser. He was used to
working with short, tight forms. His most popular period came toward the
end of his life, with Summons to Memphis, winning the Pulitzer Prize
and all that. And then, as a result the later works had a much bigger
sale. But, Peter made his living as a creative writing teacher, as many
writers of that day did. He was quite self-consciously a writer, an artist,
and he really felt that writers had to live in a different way. One
striking thing he said, which his students talked about, was that you always
judged yourself against the great writers. He was pretty relentless in
that!
Although he never had a large reading public, he always was a writer’s
writer. And, he won fellowships, awards, and was elected to American
Academy of Arts and Letters…he taught at what is now University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, then went to Indiana University, back to Greensboro,
to Kenyon college, Ohio State, to Greensboro, then University of Virginia.
Also, he went to Harvard for three different stints. Virginia was his longest
stay. He went there about ’67, retired in ’83. He was a professor of
creative writing at all those places.
Back
to Peter’s being a storyteller. Peter’s fiction is very deceptive…you are
reading along and then realize there is a story underneath that. One
reviewer said that, “the experience of reading a Peter Taylor story is like
finding clues.” Peter’s main theme is freedom and the lack thereof and how
one negotiates his place in the social order. How much one can be free…how
much one can’t. The stories are often concerned with how one establishes any degree of
control in a shifting world; how one has to live in the world, no matter
what that world is. When you don’t, it leads to unhappiness, grotesquerie,
madness.
We
finished the interview and as I was putting away my things, Dr. McAlexander
stopped my fussing with my things to say:
“You
know, I made this biography of Peter so that it would be accessible.”
I
knew what he meant. His choice of the word, “accessible” was a politically
correct way of saying he made the book easy to read and understand. I
remarked back, “It’s not just a coffee table book, is it?”
He
paused, then said, “It’s like Peter’s work. It is meant to be read,
understood and appreciated.”
I like that.
Appearance
- Southern Festival of Books
- Friday, October 12, 2:00-3:00 pm
- Nashville Public Library, Conference
Room 1B
Writing About Writers: The Lives of Peter Taylor and Dawn Powell
Hubert H. McAlexander and Tim Page
Hubert H. McAlexander
bibliography
Peter
Taylor
: A Writer's Life (Southern Literary Studies)
Louisiana State University Press, (Hardcover - September 2001)
Southern Scribe Review
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Conversations With Peter Taylor
(Literary Conversations Series)
University Press
of Mississippi, (Cloth - November, 1987)
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Critical Essays on Peter Taylor
(Critical Essays on American Literature)
- G.K. Hall, (Hardcover - February, 1993)
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The Prodigal
Daughter: A Biography of Sherwood Bonner
- Louisiana State
University Press, (Hardcover – 1981)
- University of
Tennessee, (Paperback-September, 1999)
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A
Southern Tapestry : Marshall County, Mississippi, 1835-2000
Donning Co.
Publishing, (Hardcover – December, 2000)
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- © 2001
Robert L. Hall, All Rights Reserved
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Southern
Scribe
