Blaming

Book 8: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, Jonathan Keates, Jonathon Keates

Genres: Classics; General Fiction; Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!' Elizabeth Jane Howard * A finely nuanced exploration of responsibility, snobbery and culture clash from one of the twentieth century's finest novelists. When Amy is suddenly left widowed and alone while on holiday in Istanbul, Martha, an American traveller, comforts her and accompanies her back to England. Upon their return, however, Amy is ungratefully reluctant to maintain their relationship, recognising that, under any other circumstances, the two women would not be friends. But guilt is a hard taskmaster, and Martha has away of getting under one's skin ... * 'Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning-point in one's own experience' Elizabeth Bowen 'No writer has described the English middle classes with more gently devastating accuracy' Rebecca Abrams, Spectator 'A Game of Hide and Seek showcases much of what makes Taylor a great novelist: piercing insight, a keen wit and a genuine sense of feeling for her characters' Elizabeth Day, Guardian

Release date: July 7, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 207

Sample

‘Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor’s novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I’ve returned to her too – in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it’ Sarah Waters

‘Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person’s dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail – the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life’ Valerie Martin

‘The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction … In all of Taylor’s novels and short stories, there is subtle humour, acute psychological perception and great tenderness … But it is her unflinching dissection of what goes on beneath the surface of people’s lives that makes the worlds of her novels so magnetising. The very English art of seeming is both respected and satirised. Again and again, the world of objects, routines and domestic necessities is expertly drawn, and beneath that the world of half-conscious feelings, suppressed longings, denied impulses, stifled resentments … She is adept at capturing the ways people interact – and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely related can live curiously parallel existences’ Rebecca Abrams, New Statesman

‘Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen – soul-sisters all’ Anne Tyler

‘How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!’ Elizabeth Jane Howard

‘Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one’s own experience’ Elizabeth Bowen

‘I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure, and they will … if they read her as she wanted to be read … learn much that will surprise them’ Paul Bailey

‘Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’ Rosamond Lehmann

‘One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor writes with a wonderful precision and grace. Her world is totally absorbing’ Antonia Fraser

‘Elizabeth Taylor has an eye as sharply all-seeing as her prose is elegant … even the humdrum becomes astonishing when told in language that always aims for descriptive integrity, without a cliché in sight. As a result, Taylor excels in conveying the tragicomic poignancy of the everyday’ Daily Telegraph

‘How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart’ Jonathan Keates, Spectator

The Englishness of the English novel in the twentieth century has a great deal to do with our native fondness for hierarchies. Where, it might be asked, would our fictional traditions be without a passion for pigeonholing other people, assigning contexts to them, creating whole worlds against which to place them on the basis of features such as accent, schooling, houses, possessions and taste, good or bad? In this respect it’s not hard to imagine English fiction over the past hundred years as something like a large country house, whose inhabitants occupy very carefully defined areas, only seldom coming into contact with one another and not always relishing the experience when they do. Social realists are banished to the servants’ hall, experimental voices sometimes escape from the attic, mandarins lock themselves in the library, satirists stalk the corridors, but the summer parlour, with its chintz and fine porcelain, is reserved for one particular species – the lady novelist of good family whose works can be enjoyed, without fear of being thought too arty or clever, for their perfect amalgam of serious intentions and impeccable decorum.

Elizabeth Bowen is the obvious example here, a writer of real genius who never forgot that she was a lady, and Ivy Compton-Burnett is another, her identity as a gentlewoman perhaps more urgently underlined through an awareness that her father was in trade and her great-grandfather a labourer. Such authors find a constituency not just among those who genuinely admire their work for its original utterance and refinement of technique, but among the sort of readers for whom the worlds they portray are mercifully devoid of anything like coarseness or vulgarity. This ‘people like us’ attitude is not confined solely to women. A certain kind of male literary enthusiast enjoys such novelists because, through whatever imaginative gender-reversal, this is the kind of artist he would rather fancy becoming.

I have no wish to be Elizabeth Taylor in this or any other life, and I resent, besides, the way in which she has tended all too easily to be lumped within this particular category of twentieth-century English writers. She was indeed a friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen praised her work. The majority of her characters belong to the middle or upper middle classes. Their grammar is often unnervingly precise. All these things ought to label her clearly enough, but nobody familiar with her work would ever reduce it to such a level of reductive typecasting. It was nevertheless something from which she suffered throughout her professional career. It seems extraordinary, for example, that her books were generally judged middlebrow rather than highbrow, to the extent that their critical reception sometimes tended to suggest a position at the superior end of the popular women’s fiction market. There are undeniable moments throughout her work when her usual resourcefulness and self-awareness seem temporarily to have been dissipated. A sentence like ‘Separated from their everyday life, as if in a dream or on a honeymoon, Kate and Dermot were under the spell of the gentle weather and the blossoming countryside’, from In a Summer Season, has a bland, generic quality which seems inauthentic to her best writing. Yet at her finest she has an unrivalled grasp of the complex workings of even the most banal emotion, highlighting the potential poignancy within the sometimes enormous space which lies between a feeling and its expression.

The point to remember about Elizabeth Taylor is that she always knew more than anybody guessed with regard to the various forms of ordinary life which surrounded her. We have only to read the hilarious yet at the same time grimly tragic Angel to understand this. A piquant indication of such alertness appears in her last novel Blaming, written while she was dying of cancer and published posthumously in 1976. The ex-sailor Ernie Pounce, Amy’s bizarre factotum, describes meeting a lady wrestler. ‘We had a cheeseburger together after the session, and she was explaining how she keeps in strict training. No spirits or potatoes, plenty of steak. She had very high standards about fair play too. “No nails,” she said. “Hair-pulling or biting; but no nails.” She was quite explicit about that.’

We may be tempted to read this speech purely in terms of that snobbishly inflected light relief – bless the lower orders, aren’t they funny! – which characterizes the appearance of cooks, housemaids and landladies in the plays of Taylor’s contemporaries, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Doubtless it has a smack of this, but Ernie is more than a comic turn within the novel’s dramatic layout. From being practically useful to the newly widowed Amy, he becomes indispensable as a confidant, a figure not unlike those in French neoclassical drama, whose job is to receive the emotional offloadings of the principal characters and offer comfort with the aid of their own dogged normality.

Blaming offers a superb illustration of its author’s ability to devise fictional structures in which anything like a straightforward plot arranged as an episodic narrative sequence is almost nonexistent Taylor was always more of a modernist than anyone gave her credit for, and the apparently boneless quality of many of her novels (Palladian is a good example from the earliest phase of her career) seems designed to compel us to home in on those crises of apprehension and interpretation between characters which form the real focus of her creative interest. What takes place in Blaming looks, when summarized, fairly simple. Amy, whose husband Nick dies suddenly while the pair of them are on holiday in Istanbul, is helped through the practical difficulties surrounding her loss by Martha, an American novelist whom at first she is reluctant to contact again after the two women have gone their separate ways. Eventually Martha secures an invitation to visit. Her presence in Amy’s life is irritatingly intrusive, but a curious bond starts to form between the two women. ‘In a way, Martha became part of the passing of time’, yet Amy continues to resent her prodigality and impulsiveness. She herself develops an ever-closer liaison with the family doctor Gareth Lloyd, under the saturnine gaze of her son and daughter-in-law James and Maggie, altogether less endearing than their two children.

That, more or less, is it, apart from a final episode which comes closer than any other to the traditional idea of things ‘happening’ in a story and which I have no intention of spoiling for the reader (despite most people’s habit of turning to the introduction after finishing the book). What, then, is Blaming about? Early in the book, Amy, curious to read Martha’s novels, borrows one of than from the library. She 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.

Apart from the final detail – and how well Blaming itself would render into French – it is hard not to see here the precise opposite of Elizabeth Taylor’s own mature novels, especially this one. Whereas in early works like At Mrs Lippincote’s aspects of colour, shape, scent and touch play a significant role in focusing the attention of both the characters and the reader, Blaming suggests something like a barely suppressed anger in the way whereby Amy and others force themselves to notice the physical and the visual when time might be better spent on the evaluation and articulation of feeling. The furious dismissal of Istanbul and its attractions at the beginning is an augury of this deliberate inwardness, so that objects appearing later in the book, such as Ernie’s new teeth and the clothes worn by James and Maggie’s guests, seem merely annoying distractions. Even the garden at the back of Gareth’s house is reduced to a correlative of his boredom and longing for Amy.

By paring the purely descriptive element to the bone, Taylor can concentrate on the world of guilt, recrimination and remorse at the heart of her novel. The prevailing mood is one of subdued bleakness which possibly reflects the writer’s own sense of time being against her as she worked, while being entirely consistent with the moral viewpoint pervading her previous books. Though the characters themselves, restless Martha, fretful Amy, aggravating James and the inquisitive grandchild Dora, seem to forge relationships with one another through a medium of disappointed expectations, their creator continually invokes our indulgence towards them for such a negative approach to the business of emotional connection. Human behaviour, she implies, is never as good as we require it to be, yet so much of what we might take for potential evil is really due to the failure to speak out, to those peculiar qualities of reticence and secrecy which are judged to be peculiarly influential in forming the English state of mind.

It’s a Russian rather than an English writer of whom this resigned attitude to human imperfections most reminds us. Anton Chekhov finds the same source of inspiration in the unspoken, the emotionally garbled and confused, the casual understatement providing the words which will somehow speak volumes more than some elaborate flourish of rhetoric. The other more obvious influence on Taylor’s artistic self-restraint is Jane Austen, an often dangerous role-model for novelists who mistake her reserve for mere good manners. That Taylor clearly appreciated just how mercilessly her mixture of clarity and understatement could work is shown by the scene between Maggie and James at the beginning of Chapter 5 of Blaming, whose dialogue, springing from a professed desire to be usefully consoling to Amy, works towards a position where nothing whatever is to be done for her by either of them. The model here is obviously the similar moment in Sense and Sensibility where Mrs Dashwood’s son and daughter-in-law convince themselves that they need give her none of their recently inherited money. It is an act of homage, but also one of shrewd recognition. Whatever Austen’s and Taylor’s ladylike demeanour in their personal lives, neither woman was a lady in the exuberant exerci. . .