Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon

When Peter Taylor arrived at Kenyon in the fall of 1938, he was twenty-one years old, a published author who had just written a story that he knew was far better than anything he had ever done. He felt surer of himself, and the basic persona that he would henceforth present to the world had now coalesced. His first glimpse of the Tennessean, a classmate recalled, was of a young man wearing a snap-brim fedora and looking decidedly more sophisticated than the usual undergraduate. The next day, the young man could be seen walking across the campus with a copy of the Southern Review tucked conspicuously under his arm. In accompaniment with Peter’s literary image was his social one. He was like a great comic actor, the same friend commented, playing the role of the aristocratic Southern dandy, like the English artist-dandy, a kind of public act that he could not refrain from then puncturing; such was his sense of humor and irony. He was also still, as a Memphis friend had described him, the “world’s youngest middle-aged man.” But his prudery and his inhibitions were also the subject of self-parody.¹

Overiding all, Peter Taylor’s basic warmth and good spirits were disarming. He drew people to him. Most of the Kenyon students were in fraternities, and to get his literary students away from the usual undergraduate scene, John Crowe Ransom had arranged that they all live in Douglass House, a ramshackle Carpenter’s Gothic residence across from the post office and next door to one of the local cafés. The place housed eleven, including faculty member Randall Jarrell, assigned there as a kind of housemother. The friendships formed at Douglass House would be among the most important of Peter Taylor’s life.²