Elizabeth Taylor
AT MRS LIPPINCOTE’S
224pp. 1 84408 309 8
BLAMING
208pp. 1 84408 308 X
A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR
320pp. 1 84408 322 5
ANGEL
256pp. 1 84408 307 1
IN A SUMMER SEASON
224pp. 1 84408 320 9
MRS PALFREY AT THE
CLAREMONT
224pp. 1 84408 321 7
Virago. Paperback, £7.99 each.
Elizabeth Taylor has just been Virago’s “author of the month”. Six of her novels are being reissued, some with new introductions by fashionable writers – Valerie Martin, Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel. The volumes sport a new livery: black-and-white photographs of well-groomed young ladies (some of them bizarrely irrelevant to the novel in question) against candy-coloured backgrounds. All very smart and modish, though readers more familiar with Virago’s earlier editions of Taylor may miss those uncompromising green covers with their hit-and-miss Modernist paintings. The titles chosen for the relaunch cover the full span of Taylor’s career. As well as her first and last novels – At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945) and the posthumous Blaming (1976) – works have been selected to represent each decade: A View of the Harbour (1947), Angel (1957), In a Summer Season (1961), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971). Taylor cognoscenti will quibble; I would have argued for the sprightly Palladian (1947), or for at least one of her excellent short-story collections. But the edition will give Taylor’s persistently modest reputation a much-needed boost, and will perhaps encourage a new generation of readers to see through the worthy, Woman’s Hour atmosphere which has hitherto clung to her reception. I say “perhaps”: much is made by the commentators here of the author’s critical undervaluation, of her unfailing appeal to a small, dogged band of enlightened devotees. There is something protective, even defensive, about their praise. “How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!”, exclaims Elizabeth Jane Howard; “I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time”, echoes Paul Bailey. What, one begins to wonder, was wrong with the second time?
The facts of Taylor’s life have a stubborn blandness critics find hard to stomach. Born Elizabeth Coles in 1912 in Reading, she was educated at the Abbey School (here it is conventional to genuflect to the influence on Taylor of another Abbey old girl, Jane Austen). Leaving school in 1930, Elizabeth Coles worked as a governess and in Boots lending library, “flirting briefly” with Communism and amateur dramatics. In 1936, she married John Taylor, who subsequently ran his family’s confectionery factory; they had two children. Separated from her husband by the Second World War, she began writing for publication, producing, between 1945 and her death in 1975, a dozen well-received novels, five collections of short stories and a book for children. Professional authorship and the life of a well-to-do middle-class wife and mother, living in Penn, Buckinghamshire, seem to have dovetailed smoothly, to the chagrin of some readers. As Valerie Martin notes, in the preface to At Mrs Lippincote’s, “we must accept the possibility that this consummate artist was a very nice woman who lived in a small town, surrounded by a happy family”.
In the face of such apparent cosiness, it is tempting to overplay her left-wing sympathies, her self-conscious indebtedness to women writers, or to play down the parochialism, the relentless Englishness, of Taylor’s outlook.Even her staunchest admirers concede the smallness of Taylor’s world. Hers is an agoraphobic vision. Her London consists of the shabby-genteel hotels and shabbier bedsits within a hundred yards’ radius of the Cromwell Road. Her England seldom extends further than the Home Counties, or more precisely the commuting country of six-bedroomed villas built in what she calls “Underwriters’ Georgian”. Her characters uproot reluctantly and travel resentfully, finding that Greece in real life is “so much fallen masonry”, or that exploring mosques barefoot means Turkish verrucas. Nor is there much by way of plot. Her heroine is typically disclosed to us floundering in the wake of some event which has changed her life without adding to her moral resources. The phase – one cannot quite call it action – takes place over six months or a year. The events themselves – a death, an affair, sometimes both – are resolutely elided, as if unseemly or obscene.
Desertion is Taylor’s great theme: wives deserted by adulterous husbands, widows whose primary loss is compounded by the fraying of family and friendships, or by the betrayals of ageing itself. This is far from a tragic sensibility, however. That belongs properly to Blaming’s American novelist Martha, whose work details the “stifling little world” of the woman on her own:
“Objects took the place of characters – the cracked plate, a dripping tap, a bunch of water-sprinkled violets minutely described, a tin of sardines, a broken comb; and a lone woman moved among them as if in a dream. The writing was spare, as if translated from the French.”
Taylor, by contrast, is hard-headed: “It is seldom safe to confide in lonely people”, she points out briskly in At Mrs Lippincote’s, “better to trust in busy, popular people, who have no time for betraying one and no personal need to do so”.
Despite the warning, her fiction draws us into such confidence, only to disabuse us, time and again. For all their suffering, her solitary figures are as capable of deceit, cruelty, vanity, even complacency, as their most popular, or socially adept, peers. Indeed it is this amoral neediness, this ruthless sense of personal entitlement, which links Taylor’s protagonists – provincial, selfish, pusillanimous middle-class women – with the artists and writers who befriend, observe and exploit them. When the aspiring author Ludovic Myers returns to his flat, having helped the elderly Mrs Palfrey recover from a fall, he writes in his notebook “fluffy grey knickers . . . elastic . . . veins on leg colour of grapes, smell of lavender water (ugh!)”. For her part, Mrs Palfrey, with all her ramrod integrity, does not scruple to pass off her rescuer as her grandson when the need arises.
In Taylor, bourgeois femininity and the writerly mind are sometimes mutually parasitic, sometimes analogic, sometimes locked in a fatal struggle for dominance. “I would not like to think of myself as a little Boswelly person”, Taylor wrote to Robert Liddell in 1955,
and my mother brought me up so much better than I have turned out. To abuse hospitality was the most horrid thing; worst of all. I often think how she would despise me when I am driven by curiosity to ask the children what they had for lunch when they were invited out.
The remark prefaces a wickedly funny account of a recent visit to their mutual friend Ivy Compton-Burnett, in which her hostess’s decor, diet, mannerisms and manners are dissected with surgical sangfroid. The competition for ascendancy between the well-brought-up lady and the Boswellian traducer, the prig and the ingrate, drives Taylor’s aesthetic from within. “Roddy, my dear”, says Julia, in At Mrs Lippincote’s, “I have no particular objection to arse-creeping, but I will not do it in church.”
Food, in Taylor’s fictions, becomes a battleground as well as an index of character. When, in A View of the Harbour, the successful novelist and chaotic housewife Beth accuses her husband of belittling her work (“an irritating and rather shameful habit”), she clinches the argument, and confounds her spouse, by adding triumphantly that there is nothing else to eat: “The junket has not set and there is no cheese”. In a Summer Season’s housekeeper, Mrs Meacock, has learnt her culinary skills from an American family: “it was rare for a dish of meat to go to the dining-room without its rings of tinned pineapples”; she embellishes her glamorous whips, soufflés and mousses with ostentatious glacé cherries. Her spare time is devoted to compiling an anthology of “Five Thousand and One Witty and Humorous Sayings”: “such a contented woman”, thinks her self-absorbed employer, “dividing her enthusiasm between puddings and literary work”. Despite the consoling omnipresence of cigarettes, fish and chips, and the “desultory” biscuits served up to unwanted guests, to read Taylor’s fiction is to encounter a vivid cultural history of the post-war English pudding. Julia feeds her sickly son arrowroot mould, but likes to get her recipes from good literature. She accommodates to wartime austerities by serving up baked apples from Villette. A Masonic ladies’ night in the 1960s, in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, features a dessert named for the hostess: “Pêches Denise” turns out to be “half a tinned peach sitting on sherry-soaked sponge cake”. The 1970s see the rise of petits fours and foreign cheese, of cheesecake smuggled in from the delicatessen, of ice cream in the freezer.
There is relish, but no condescension, in such writing. Taylor has a Jamesian eye for the fatuities of Englishness, seldom descending into crude satire on the one hand or sentimental drollery on the other. Her vision is remorseless but not pitiless: her moral ultrasound lacks compunction, but her diagnosis is always humane, compassionate. The exception is Angel, unique in Taylor’s fiction in that it covers the whole lifespan of a single character. Angelica Deverell is born into a grocer’s family, and lives over the shop. Charmless, humourless, ill-educated and almost totally unread, she lacks either cultural capital or self-knowledge. All she has is a powerful imagination and the un-restrained fury of a poltergeist. At fifteen, she reinvents herself as a popular novelist, and spends the rest of her life in a grotesque fiction of her own fabrication. “Inflexible . . . eccentric, implacable, self-absorbed”; it is as if Margaret Thatcher had, by sheer force of will, decided to become Charlotte Brontë. Despite some of the most blood-curdling tea-parties in literature, and some finely drawn comic cameos, Angel has neither the psychological precision nor the human warmth of Taylor’s other fiction: it is at best a lively jeu d’esprit, at worst a sterile exercise in improbabilities.
Part of the failure of Angel lies in the thinness of its male love-interest: a womanizer and inveterate gambler, Esmé squanders our sympathy as freely as he does Angelica’s fortune. Taylor’s early heroes, and villains, somehow lack the sex-appeal we are supposed to find in them: simultaneously prissy and pompous, they often seem culled either from the Trevor Howard, stuffed-shirt school of masculinity, or from the smarmier David Niven mode. In her later work Taylor tried less hard, and had more success, with her sexy men: In A Summer Season’s feckless Dermot manages to be naturally attractive with no more help than a strategic Irish brogue deployed like a heat-seeking missile.
The summer season is the deceptive lull between two sexual revolutions. Kate Heron, a well-to-do mother and widow, on the cusp of middle age, has married Dermot, ten years her junior and allergic to gainful employment. Living with them is Aunt Ethel, an indomitable suffragist and militant spinster; a woman with robust views about everything from breakfast (a test of character) to sex. Aunt Ethel writes to her equally vigorous friend Gertrude that Kate has lost sight of the sort of woman she is: “A typically English woman, I should say – young for her age, rather inhibited (heretofore), too satirical, with one half of her mind held back always to observe and pass judgement”. Into this uneasy household comes the ravishing Araminta, teenaged daughter of family friends. With her depthless insouciance and chilly allure, Araminta has only to walk into a room to change the agenda: she turns up to neighbourly gatherings in a “precarious” home-made black silk sheath, commenting only that “It’s hell when I want to pass water . . . . Its so tight round the hem, d’you see, that I have to take it right off”. “Whatever non-plussed means”, thinks Kate’s randy son, Tom, “Mother is looking it. Dermot had become very Irish, he also noted.” In her preface to this edition, Elizabeth Russell Taylor regards In a Summer Season as an entertainment, unconcerned with “consciousness or big themes”. I disagree. Betty Friedan, who died in February, took a generation by storm with her study of this very cohort of non-plussed women. Taylor’s exploration anticipates The Feminine Mystique by two years. Kate’s vague attempts to unfurl with the times – “playing darts in the village pub, going to race-meetings, having breakfast in bed, kissing her husband in public” – are doomed to fail, as Aunt Ethel has predicted.
Taylor’s own interest in “the horses” is seldom mentioned in the potted biographies, despite the frequent, and knowledgeable, placing of bets in the novels.
Somehow it makes sense of her moral economy to know that a thorough education in horse-racing was part of her own cultural capital. Liddell remembers: “She told me how sad it made her to go to races and see young people throwing their money away – had their parents never taught them to study form?”. Surely this is the essence of Elizabeth Taylor’s narrative power: a desire for the worthy to succeed, a clear-sighted understanding why they often don’t, and above all a tireless attention to form.
