Robert Taylor, 84; critic was man of letters, connections

The cause of death was injuries sustained in a fall earlier this month. Mr. Taylor was a longtime resident of Marblehead.

“Bob was a true intellectual while being gentlemanly in all regards,’’ said Matthew V. Storin, former editor of the Globe. “He surely enriched the lives of countless readers and the community with his ability to convey so much expertise in literature and the fine arts.’’

A renaissance man who was a fixture in Boston cultural journalism for half a century, Mr. Taylor reviewed film, classical music, and drama for The Boston Herald, where he worked from 1948-1967. He held posts there as editorial writer, music editor, art editor, and columnist. Mr. Taylor, who started at the Globe as staff writer for the Sunday magazine, later wrote a column for the paper’s Living section in addition to his reviewing.

After his retirement from the Globe, in 1990, Mr. Taylor continued to regularly contribute reviews and his weekly Bookmaking column. The column, which Mr. Taylor wrote from 1978-2000, was the closest thing the local literary scene had to a newsletter: an invaluable roundup of listings, news, and opinion.

In 1989 the New England chapter of the writers organization PEN presented Mr. Taylor with its Friend to Writers Award in recognition of the column and his other contributions to publishing and literature.

“Bob could write about anything and everything because he knew anything and everything,’’ said Richard Dyer. Dyer, for many year’s the Globe’s classical music critic, was hired by Mr. Taylor when he was arts editor.

Mr. Taylor also brought William A. Henry III from the Globe’s editorial page to cover television. Henry won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

“It was a rare conversation with him when you didn’t leave knowing something you didn’t know before, and probably should have,’’ Dyer said.

Mr. Taylor was the author of four books: “In Red Weather,’’ a novel (1961); “Saranac: America’s Magic Mountain’’ (1986), about the tuberculosis sanatorium in upstate New York; “Fred Allen: His Life and Wit’’ (1989), a biography of the radio comedian; and “New England: The Home Front, World War II’’ (1991).

“He was so perceptive about so many things,’’ Sinclair Hitchings, retired keeper of prints at the Boston Public Library, said of Mr. Taylor. “When Bob walked into a gallery, he assumed that unless he found evidence to the contrary, the art was legitimate and a genuine expression of that person. For artists to be taken on the level at face value, I can’t tell you how much that means.’’

Mr. Taylor might have seen himself as advocate, but never a cheerleader. His reporting and commentary on Merrill C. Rueppel during his tenure as director of the Museum of Fine Arts helped lead to Rueppel’s ouster in 1975. And when Mr. Taylor assayed work he found to be unworthy or overpraised, he could be devastating.

Concluding a 1980 review of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,’’ he suggested that the much-celebrated installation “has but one parallel in my experience, Francisco Franco’s Valley of the Fallen, dedicated to the dead of the Spanish Civil War. There’s the same mix of what we ought to feel, combined with the same awful inability to realize those emotions. You ought to see ‘The Dinner Party’ because of its relevance to our current culture; as a work of art, however, it is valueless.’’

A distinctive figure in the Globe’s hallways with his bow tie and tweed jacket (seersucker in summer), Mr. Taylor seemed the very model of donnish erudition. And, in fact, he was a professor of English at Wheaton College, in Norton, from 1961 until 1996. But there was nothing stodgy or academic about Mr. Taylor’s merry sense of humor and ardently eclectic tastes.

Attending a rock concert by Cheap Trick at the Boston Garden, he noted how he “had received a lesson in America’s continuing fascination with hardware. Cheap Trick is the bonnet of a Stutz Bearcat gleaming in the sun, the feathery wake of a speedboat and a boy trying to pick up KDKA Pittsburgh with his cereal-box receiver.’’

Mr. Taylor was at his best, perhaps, as a book reviewer. More than three decades later, colleagues continued to marvel at his ability to write a highly creditable review of Thomas Pynchon’s famously dense 750-page novel “Gravity’s Rainbow’’ in 585 words.

“As book reviewer, Bob had a perfect stroke, like a great golfer or tennis player,’’ former Globe book editor David Mehegan said. “Because he had read, and knew, so much, he dared to speak with a kind of authority that an editor, and a reader, could trust.’’

In conversation, Mr. Taylor was as likely to mention the latest Sylvester Stallone movie (disapprovingly) or David Byrne and Talking Heads (approvingly) as he was Vladimir Nabokov or James Joyce, the two literary masters he perhaps revered most. For many years, Mr. Taylor belonged to a convivial reading group that monthly parsed a selection from Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake.’’

Mr. Taylor served as a trustee of the Abbot Public Library, in Marblehead, and was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Saint Botolph Club. In 1967, he was director of publications at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Robert Sundling Taylor was born in Newton. His parents were Elsie (Sundling) and Frank M. Taylor, a traveling salesman. Mr. Taylor began going with them to the Museum of Fine Arts and Gardner Museum when he was 10. At 14 he sold his first piece of writing, a poem, to The Portland (Maine) Evening Express.

A graduate of Arlington High School, Mr. Taylor served as a radar operator on a destroyer escort in the Pacific from 1943-46. He received his bachelor’s degree from Colgate University in 1947 and the following year did graduate work in English at Brown University.

At Brown, Mr. Taylor developed one of his more incongruous passions. Short of funds and with a date with a Smith College student in the offing, he repaired to the racetrack in an effort to fatten his wallet. He failed to do so, but a lifelong love was born.

A passion for the ponies was part of the lore that attached itself to Mr. Taylor over the years. He was both occasion and source for a continuous stream of anecdote, both cultural and otherwise. The same man who had played chess with Dizzy Gillespie also shook hands with Dmitri Shostakovich and dated a then-unknown chorine named Shirley MacLaine.

Mr. Taylor successfully solicited Andre Malraux to write for the Globe _ only to have the great French man of letters’ acceptance arrive after the deadline date. A participant at the first and only meeting between Jorge Luis Borges and V.S. Pritchett, Mr. Taylor had his hat swiped by Anita O’Day as she sang onstage at the Newport Jazz Festival.

What might have been Mr. Taylor’s most memorable encounter with the great came early in his career.

“One spring midnight,’’ he once recalled, “Duke Ellington materialized beside me at the counter of the Waldorf Cafeteria on Tremont Street (I was a copy boy who had just finished the 4-12 stint) and we sat down and drank coffee and talked until 4 in the morning, after which I hitched home a ride on a newspaper truck. For the next 20 years I received his Christmas card, a tent-sized affair unfolding a huge printed Love Ya Madly, Duke.’’

The card expressed a widely held sentiment.

Mr. Taylor leaves his wife, Brenda (Slattery), and a daughter, Gillian, of Geneva. A son, Douglas, died in 1997.

Funeral services will be private.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.

Correction: Because of an editing error, an obituary yesterday on Robert Taylor, the former chief art and book critic for the Globe, contained the wrong attribution for a quotation. It was Richard Dyer, the newspaper's former classical music critic, who said of Mr. Taylor: "It was a rare conversation with him when you didn't leave knowing something you didn't know before, and probably should have."