The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor

"Yeah, it’s a couple of creative writing students. You don’t really think of 1939 as a heyday of creative writing, but they have gone to Kenyon College in Ohio to learn to write, and a couple of them decide to spend Thanksgiving weekend driving down to New York City to see their fiancés, and everything goes about as wrong as you might wish. What it is really about is the gap between the sense they have of themselves when they set off, when they are bragging to their housemates and buddies that they may never come back, and the sense they have of themselves when they return, after having a little taste of the life that awaits them. They are still just college students hanging out with their pals at Kenyon, but they’ve had a glimpse of who they might slowly become. I think that’s right. The genius is in the telling, in Peter Taylor’s case. There’s this wonderful episode—maybe this encapsulates it—where their car breaks down and they have to get a train back to university. And you have the rhythm of the train, which sticks in the mind of the narrator like a tune, and the rhythm has been turned into words, and the words are: Not yet, not yet, not yet. You’ve not yet become the person that you will probably end up being. That phrase sticks with him even once he returns to his dorm room house and has A late snack with all his buddies, who have taken over their rooms because they have the nicest rooms in the house. They start having a midnight feast, and they return to that scene with all their friends having invaded what was their home. And that phrase keeps coming back to him: Not yet, not yet, not yet. Something’s coming. There’s a sense of anticipation, of where the road will lead you, and who you might turn out to be at the end of it."