Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont

Book 2: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bailey, Paul Bailey

Genres: Classics; General Fiction; Friendship; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Named by the Guardian as one of 'the 100 best novels,' and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont is a humorous and compassionate look at friendship between an old woman and a young man from a 'magnificent...writer, the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike' (David Baddiel, Independent) On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper. Then one day Mrs Palfrey strikes up an unlikely friendship with an impoverished young writer, Ludo, who sees her as inspiration for his novel. 'Elizabeth Taylor's exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader's joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor's depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds' -Robert McCrum 'the 100 best novels', Guardian

Release date: December 21, 2021

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Print pages: 224

Sample

Praise for Elizabeth Taylor

‘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.

I have to begin this appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel on a personal note. I was working as an assistant in Harrods when my first book, At the Jerusalem, was published in 1967 – a fact which, for some reason, struck the diarist of The Times as being of interest to the paper’s readers. A year after publication, I met Elizabeth Taylor at a party. She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as the setting for a novel, and that she had gone to Harrods’ magazine department to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not anticipated seeing someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.

When I read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 1971, I remembered Elizabeth Taylor’s confession. Ludovic Myers, the young man who comes to Mrs Palfrey’s aid when she falls in the street and who subsequently befriends her, is a novelist manqué. Throughout the course of Mrs Palfrey, he is writing a study of old age which – altering a phrase uttered over a pre-dinner sherry by his new, elderly friend – he gives the title They Weren’t Allowed to Die There. He works at Harrods, in the sense that he takes his manuscript into the (now vanished) banking hall, where he scribbles away happily, surrounded by Honourables on their uppers and tired county ladies resting their feet before the train journey back to the shires. Ludo, like me, is an ex-actor, who has done his stint in a tatty repertory company and has no desire to repeat the experience. In other words, I am flattered to think that I gave Elizabeth Taylor a little bit of inspiration for what is undoubtedly one of her finest books.

Laura Palfrey, the widow of a colonial administrator, is what is known as a ‘handsome woman’. She has ‘big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl’. The description continues, without a trace of sneering on the author’s part: ‘She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.’ Thus, wittily and vividly, Mrs Taylor establishes her heroine’s presence on the second page of the novel. She also establishes Laura’s resilience: ‘Even as a bride, in strange, alarming conditions in Burma, she had been magnificent, calm – when (for instance) she was rowed across floods to her new home; unruffled, finding it more than damp, with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her. She had straightened her back and given herself a good talking-to, as she had this afternoon in the train.’ That accurately placed cliché – ‘a good talking-to’ – immediately informs the reader that Laura Palfrey and self-pity have never sustained a relationship; that here is a human being prepared to endure or surmount whatever inconveniences or obstacles life puts in her path.

But Laura isn’t making the journey to some snake-infested outpost. She is entering the portals – the pompous term seems appropriate – of the Claremont Hotel in Cromwell Road. She is about to join the ranks of the rejected: Mrs Arbuthnot, crippled with arthritis; Mr Osmond, forever dashing off outraged letters to the Daily Telegraph; Mrs Post, constantly knitting; the bloated Mrs Burton, reeking of whisky by lunch time. These fellow survivors would be in a state-supported home were it not that they have money enough to fortify their pride by living out their days in a residential hotel. It is the reader who acknowledges that they have been cast aside, not they. Of the five ‘regulars’, only Mrs Burton seems to have a continuing contact with the world outside the Claremont, in the person of her brother-in-law who dines, and drinks, with her as often as he can. The others, particularly the latest inmate, are all waiting for someone or something to turn up. Soon after her arrival in this genteel hell, the proud and plucky Laura Palfry hears herself praising a considerate grandson who does not exist. She has a grandson, of course, but Desmond’s disposition is not of the kind that warms to the upright and independent woman who happens to be his mother’s mother. In her anxiety to remain a cut above (another apt cliché) her companions in reined-in distress, Laura transforms Desmond into the grandson of her imagining – a lively, interesting, charming youth; not the dull, pedantic, quickly bored young man whose company she as quickly finds unendurable. It is a measure of Elizabeth Taylor’s art that it suggests that Mrs Palfrey should be pained at having to practise this harmless deception.

The little lie turns into what Laura Palfrey would call a ‘whopper’ when, in an inspired moment, she persuades her rescuer, Ludo, to pose as Desmond. She invites him to dinner at the Claremont, where he disposes of the ghastly three courses with a rapidity she finds both touching and disconcerting. He has charm and good manners, despite the fact that the sole on one of his shoes is loose and makes a flapping sound on the carpet when he enters the dining room. He seems to meet – she is relieved to observe – with the approval, however reluctant, of Arbuthnot, Burton, et al. Laura begins to enjoy her wickedness – for such, given her stern moral code, it seems to her.

The residents of the Claremont are drawn by Elizabeth Taylor with a sympathy that is strengthened, not diminished, by her beady-eyed detachment from them. Her peculiar gift is for noticing the casual cruelty that people use to protect themselves from the not always casual cruelty of others. Her ear for insult is, every so often, on a par with Jane Austen’s. Mrs Taylor was happily aware that the English upper classes are blessed with a talent for making a put-down sound like a compliment: the secret lies in the tone of voice. In novel after novel, she has her characters saying what should have been unspeakable things with the utmost graciousness.

Lady Swayne, who honours the Claremont once a year with an all too brief visit, is the epitome of a certain kind of awful graciousness: she’s the spiritual sister of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Elton. Her way with a prejudice is to apologise for giving it expression:

… all of her most bigoted or self-congratulatory statements she prefaced with ‘I’m afraid’. I’m afraid I don’t smoke. I’m afraid I’m just common-or-garden Church of England. (Someone had mentioned Brompton Oratory.) I’m afraid I’d like to see the Prime Minister hanged, drawned and quartered. I’m afraid I think the fox revels in it. I’m afraid I don’t think that’s awfully funny.

Mrs Taylor is no less observant with Mrs de Salis, who succeeds in not becoming an inmate at the Claremont. It’s a brilliant touch that the only photograph of her son (‘My beautiful Willie’) that she has in her possession shows a pretty and passe chorus boy of a bygone age. The Willie Mrs Palfrey, Mr Osmond, Mrs Burton and Mrs Post encounter at a memorably ghastly party that is one of the most hilarious scenes in the book is an altogether different specimen, with a pouchy face and receding hair. Willie swathes each bottle of cheap plonk with a napkin, as if he were pouring champagne.

Elizabeth Taylor, whose political views were leftish, did artistic justice to those whose opinions she almost certainly despised. The people in her novels and in her incomparable short stories are, mostly, well off: they attend gymkhanas, they travel, they collect antiques. She rescues them from easy satire and shows them becoming aware of the bleakness of life, and its pain. The old people in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont are, I suppose, familiar types, but not in Mrs Taylor’s hands. Hers is a brave art, for all the smallness of its scale – it invites one to look afresh at human beings those of us of a liberal persuasion tend to dismiss as ridiculous and reactionary. Because of its subject matter, her delicate and subtle art was not treated in her last years with the seriousness it deserved. Such a blinkered view is no longer defensible – if, in fact, it ever was. Her reports from the chintz-bedecked battlefields are of lasting value, for the simple reason that they are exquisitely written. And, anyway, life is still life, whether it’s viewed from a seat at the point-to-point or a stone by the slag heap.

Let me end as I began, with a personal reminiscence. In August 1973, I wrote a long article on Elizabeth Taylor’s work for the New Statesman. A few days after its appearance, I received a letter from her. In it she wrote:

I feel, after a time, that my books have dropped into a pit, and must lie there for ever and ever. And there they were, brought to the light of day once more, and by someone who had truly read them.

I continue to read them, as I read the books I have come to love – for pleasure, for edification. 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, London 1982

Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. This discovery, that he did not know, had a little disconcerted Mrs Palfrey, for she did not know it either, and began to wonder what she was coming to. She tried to banish terror from her heart. She was alarmed at the threat of her own depression.

If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay, she promised herself, her lips slightly moving, as she leaned forward in the taxi, looking from side to side of the wide, frightening road, almost dreading to read the name Claremont over one of those porches. There were so many hotels, one after the other along this street, all looking much the same.

She had simply chanced on an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper while staying in Scotland with her daughter Elizabeth. Reduced winter rates. Excellent cuisine. We can take that with a pinch of salt, she had thought at the time.

At last the cab slowed down. ‘Claremont Hotel’ she read, as clear as could be, in large letters across what must be two – even, perhaps, three – large houses made into one. She felt relieved. The porch pillars had been recently painted; there were spotted laurels in the window-boxes; clean curtains – a front of emphatic respectability.

She hauled herself out of the taxi and, leaning on her rubber-tipped walking-stick, crossed the pavement and climbed a few steps. Her varicose veins pained her today.

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

Followed by the driver and her luggage (for the hotel gave no sign of life), she battled with revolving doors and almost lurched into the hushed vestibule. The receptionist was coldly kind, as if she were working in a nursing-home, and one for deranged patients at that. ‘What a day!’ she said. The taxi-driver, lumbering in with the suitcases, seemed alien in this muffled place, and was at once taken over by the porter. Mrs Palfrey opened her handbag and carefully picked out coins. Everything she did was unhurried, almost authoritative. She had . . .