Taylor

I have steadily made my way through all of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, and there’s a strong chance that this is the final one on my reading list? She is very like William Maxwell – that the amount I like her is dependent very much on my mood, and seems to shift almost hour by hour. When I’m in the right mood, she is an exceptionally perceptive, amusing, precise writer. When I’m in the wrong mood, her novels just seem to wash over me.

Thankfully, I think I was in broadly the right mood for In A Summer Season. Like Love by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I read for the previous club, this concerns an age-gap romance where the woman is rather older. Unlike Love, though, the romancing has all happened offscreen already. Kate Heron is a widow who has now married a man ten years younger than her – Dermot, who is filmed with ideas for businesses, but little acumen and even less willingness to see things through. Kate is wealthy enough to mean he doesn’t need to buckle down to anything – though there isn’t really any indication that he has married her for her money. More on that marriage later.

Also living with them are Kate’s two children from her previous marriage – Tom, who works for his grandfather’s family business and is desperate to prove himself, and Louisa, who is a faithful Christian but perhaps equally interested in the priest as she is in the faith. Taylor captures the disconnect between people who live alongside each other, even when they care for each other. One person’s priorities and obsessions will not be another’s. They live parallel lives, unable or unwilling to communicate the depth of their experiences.

Despite being a widow with two grown children, Kate is still pretty young – by modern standards, at least. Yet there are oceans between her and the younger generation. This is her, responding to a remark made by Tom’s current girl:

“Blue suits you so,” Prue now said.

“They condescend,” Kate thought. “They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish, and are led by that desire into an excess of insincerity. They are appalled for us that we are middle-aged.” She could remember trying to protect her own parents from the fact that their lives were virtually over.

She supposed blue did suit her, she agreed vaguely, to add something to the conversation; but talk about clothes bored her. It was like talk about sex. It had an enervating quality which had nothing to do with the subject herself.

Lest we forget, Kate is only in her 40s! And I love this paragraph, because it shows what Taylor does so often. Beneath the veneer of well-to-do people interacting amicably is a depth of feeling that continues to swirl and flow, even while the people obey the conventions of their class and milieu. I think Taylor is a very sexual writer, but it is seldom in the actions on the page. It is, instead, in the minds, motivations, and memories of her characters.

And what of the marriage between Kate and Dermot? In Kate’s mind, we see her considering Dermot as hovering between her generation and her children’s generation – ‘on the mezzanine floor as it were’. But it is not only their age that creates a disparity between them – though that is the factor that gossipy Aunt Ethel returns to, and the reason that most people attribute any fractures to. Instead, really, it is a clash of personalities. It’s clear that Kate’s first husband was more sensible, restrained, dispassionate, and that Kate has turned to an exciting, unreliable man who can bring something spontaneous and passionate out of her. But, in reality, it seems to bring out a reluctant maternal relationship instead.

There were voices in the kitchen, and then Kate came bustling in. Ever since a few evenings before, when Dermot returning drunk and late for dinner had spoken harshly to her, she had moved in a bright little whirlwind of her own making, with not a minute to spare for anyone. She was always on the wing, setting out on one errand after another, and no one could hope to detain her or say a word that would be listened to. Their words were what she dreaded – their thoughts she knew – and, trapped at mealtimes, she warded them off with a torrent of her own. The flow was more easily come by when she had had several drinks. In attaining this end, Dermot, full of uneasy contrition, was ready to encourage her.

A major flaw in In A Summer Season, to my mind, is that we never truly believe this is a happy marriage. We are told that they are deeply in love, but we are never really shown it. The quarrels and disconnect is the norm from the outset of the novel, and Dermot is too sulky and selfish for us to really believe that Kate has ever found an equal partner in him. There is a jarring difference between what Taylor expects us to believe about the marriage and what she is putting on the page, and that was a shame. Because we don’t really see emerging cracks – we just see the narrative catching up with what we’re already seeing. (And that’s when someone from Kate’s past comes back on the scene, but – unlike the blurb of my edition – I won’t spoil that.)

Because of this telling-but-not-showing, this isn’t one of my favourite Taylor novels. But it still definitely has her trademarks: complex and interesting characters, beautiful writing, and sharp wit. Just look at the last words of this paragraph, about Kate’s business-owner father:

At half past five, the factory gates were opened, and a policeman on point duty tried to untangle the traffic. In the swarm of bicycles, even Sir Alfred’s car was held up. He stared irritably before him, like a wasp caught in a spider’s web, impatient that he, for all his power, could not escape. His chaffeur blew softly but constantly on the horn, making slow progress through swerving and colliding bicycles. Nevertheless, Sir Alfred would not for anything have set out five minutes earlier to ease the congestion. He preferred to leave and be seen leaving at the same time as his men. There seemed some virtue in this to him, and he would not have believed that other people saw the thing differently. ‘I’ve never asked a man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, or haven’t done,’ he liked to say. This was untrue as well as uninteresting.

Just sublime. So, overall, I find the usual things to admire and enjoy in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, and I was mostly in the right mood to value them. I just wish she’d made Dermot a slightly more sympathetic character so that the trajectory of the plot had more impact.

Blaming was Elizabeth Taylor’s final novel, written while she knew she was dying – and death and mourning are very much at the heart of the book. It opens with Amy and Nick on a cruise. It is to celebrate Nick’s recovery after months of illness, and the first chapter or so is what you might expect of a Taylor novel set at sea – acute observations, gentle interactions, characters reflecting on their own lives as they go about the minutiae of each day.

And then… Nick dies, and it becomes a very different sort of book.

The reader hasn’t spent much time with Nick, so we do not really mourn him – meaning that we can observe Amy’s grief almost impartially. We grow to know her as a widow, and it is through this lens that we truly begin our readerly relationship with her, even though it is the newest and briefest period of her life. Back home, she already begins to feel an awkwardness with her son and daughter-in-law. Taylor describes the surprising, unsettling qualities of grief well, and carefully avoids any passages of exposition which lay bear emotions. It is gradual and beautiful.

One of the people Amy and Nick met on the cruise was an American novelist called Martha. The relationship was a little imbalanced even at the beginning – Martha seemed to want to give more and take more than they did. As ever, Taylor is subtle: Martha is not an imposition they sardonically mock. She is welcomed as a friend – but perhaps not to the extent she wants to be.

And, of all the people in Amy’s life, it is Martha who becomes central after Nick has gone. She arrives, clearly intending to stay for a while. And the novel then becomes about two people, slowly and often ungraciously getting to know each other. There is a sort of dependence that is only limitedly related to friendship. And it is certainly still Martha who wants the relationship to be maintained, even while – to the outside – she seems to be offering more. Taylor is wonderful at dialogue, and particularly good at the prose between dialogue – even more impressively, she can go from the mind of one speaker to the other, and make it feel natural in the narrative. It’s difficult to do without feeling disorienting. I loved the ‘surprisingly to Amy’ at the end of this section:

‘What happened to the domestic help? Who used to come in, what was it, two mornings?’

‘Mrs Carpenter?’

‘Whoever.’ Martha shrugged.

Amy, suddenly fed up with it all, leaned back and smiled, pretended to look as if Martha’s yawning were catching, and she might drowse off any minute.

‘Ernie saw to Mrs Carpenter,’ she said.

Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or for you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed that sort of tenacity as coming from having no choice.

‘What was the war like?’ she now – surprisingly to Amy – asked.

And what sort of novels does Martha write? Taylor describes them in perhaps my favourite section of the novel – what a wonderful satire of the sort of novel that proliferated in the ’70s:

Sometimes she thought about Martha and wondered what she was doing, and from curiosity borrowed one of her novels from the library. It was very short, but all the same she skipped through it – and thought what a stifling little world it was, of a love affair gone wrong, of sleeping-pills and contraceptives, tears, immolation; a 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 the lone woman moved among them as if in a dream. The writing was spare, as if translated from the French.

What doesn’t feel very of its period, on the other hand, is the presence of ‘Ernie’ mentioned in the earlier quote. He is a live-in servant with his own variety of a servants’ hall – albeit it is just him in there, cooking for Amy and then eating uninspiring snacks himself. I loved how Taylor wrote his discomfort at the effrontery of Martha coming down to his quarters – and his growing dependence on her interruptions. But how many households had live-in domestic staff in the mid-70s, particularly one which seems well-off but not upper-class? Ernie’s presence is often both amusing and poignant, but didn’t feel quite of the novel’s time.

I should say, Blaming is often quite funny – particularly where Amy’s grandchildren are concerned. It’s certainly not a comic novel, but Taylor knows how to weave together the comic and tragic in a way that is recognisable from reality. Actually, a small criticism: Taylor is so good at small observations, and so I was surprised at a couple of moments – both connected with sounds – that leapt out at me as not working. See what you think…

Already she wore so many [bracelets] that when she raised her arms to smooth her hair, there was a rippling, chiming sound as they softly clashed down to her elbows.

and

An old magnolia grandiflora was dropping leaves with quite a clatter onto the pathway.

I found ‘clashed’ and ‘clatter’ such odd choices in these passages, which are quite far apart in the novel. Perhaps they are meant to be discordant, but these moments didn’t work for me. They jarred in an author who is usually so good at precision.

Overall, Blaming is a very good novel and a worthy closing to Taylor’s brilliant career. I haven’t even touched on the cleverness of the title, and the different meanings it has. Is it a quintessential 1976 novel? No, probably not. But every year sees the end of eras as well as the beginning of new ones, and this novel is really a farewell to the decades that preceded it.