INTRODUCED BY PHILIP HENSHER '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 A brilliant novel about the damage caused by relentless 'niceness'. Uncritical, encouraging, 'the soul of kindness', Flora's help is the cruelest hindrance to those who love her most. 'Here I am!' Flora called to Richard as she went downstairs. For a second, Meg felt disloyalty. It occurred to her of a sudden that Flora was always saying that, and that it was in the tone of one giving a lovely present. Elegant, blonde and beautiful, Flora has everything under control: her perfect home, her husband Richard, her friend Meg, adoring Kit, and the writer Patrick. Flora entrances everyone, dangling visions of happiness and success before their spellbound eyes. All are bewitched by this golden tyrant. Except, that is, for the clear-eyed painter, Liz, who can see that Flora's kindness is the sweetest poison of them all.
Release date:
December 2, 2010
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
234
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The English have always excelled at the novel of community, in which the focus is not on a single psychology but the connections
between a small and tight-knit group. In Emma, you can see it waiting to be born, in those ninety or so shadowy names behind the looming giant of its protagonist. Cranford sees it at its most enchanting; The Way We Live Now at its darkest. The Victorian vision of society created Vanity Fair and, supremely, Middlemarch, where the webs of awareness possessed by each character overlap and spread, and form a larger awareness, possessed only
by the overseeing novelist.
The Soul of Kindness is a remarkable late example of the form. If it looks backward in one sense, to those interlocking circles of acquaintance
and social awareness of an Eliot or a Thackeray, in another it looks forward to a social theory which gained currency only
much later. Sociologists had been working on ideas of social connection and inter-relation for decades; in the early 1960s,
a social scientist called Michael Gurevich had worked on the structure of social networks, and, as The Soul of Kindness was published, Stanley Milgram, one of the most famous of American social psychologists, was working on data which would result in a celebrated paper, ‘The Small World Problem’ of 1967. Mathematicians working on Gurevich and Milgram’s
data would conclude that the entire US population was linked by only three individual relationships, were all acquaintances
of acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances. Society, they said, was connected by a surprisingly small number of weak
and strong relationships. In time, the theory would be given a worldwide application, and in a play by John Guare, a name:
‘Six Degrees of Separation’.
Elizabeth Taylor was not a rigorously scientific analyst of society in the Milgram manner, but in three marvellous novels
of the 1960s, she intuitively grasps this sociological observation, and turns it into formal miracles of the novelist’s invention.
In A Summer Season, The Soul of Kindness and The Wedding Group revel in the loose and strong connections between a large group of characters, some of whom know each other intimately, others
vaguely, and some not at all. They delight in demonstrating how people who may never meet, are perhaps only known to each
other by name, or not even that, may exert an enormous influence on other people’s lives. In Angel, a woman whom Nora – and the novel – glimpses only once and only at the very end of the novel is given a name, Laura, wreaks
a terrible vengeance on Angelica Deverell by a remote connection. Kate Heron’s dead husband, Alan, throughout In A Summer Season influences the behaviour and conversation of people he never met in life. In a virtuoso chain of connections in The Wedding Group, the shadowy figure of Leofric Welland remotely brings about a startling piece of bad behaviour. The people at either end
of the chain, Midge and Leofric, will never meet; have hardly heard of each other; and yet their infractions are connected
indissolubly.
There is a central figure in The Soul of Kindness, but as the novel proceeds, Flora seems to retreat into a frieze of connected characters, all very sharply drawn, and with an engrossing sense that their stories, their lives, have independent directions
and strongly different flavours, as physicists term the characteristics of quarks. They seem to the reader to be bound into
such a powerful unity that it comes as a great surprise to remember that they don’t all know each other. The remoteness of
the far ends of the chain allows Taylor to bring off a dazzling formal coup at the end of the novel.
As [Flora] was getting into her car, a short, ungainly young woman with straggly hair came along the street. She stared blankly
at Flora, then opened the gate and went up the path. Flora hesitated for a moment before starting the engine, then she saw
the girl pull the key through the letter-box, open the door, and go inside.
It comes as a shock to us that Flora and Liz have never seen each other before, since we know them so intimately. A brief
comment from each of them about the other follows. ‘That was your goddess, wasn’t it?’ Liz says to Kit; ‘a rather horrible-looking
young woman called there, just as I was leaving the other day’ is Flora’s version, talking to Patrick. The extremes of the
dramatis personae are brought together brutally, in an anonymous letter which Liz writes to Flora about Flora’s unconsciously
bad behaviour. It is a moment of formal perfection comparable to the moment at the end of Vanity Fair when Becky Sharp hands the letter to Amelia Osbourne. Neither Flora nor Liz claim our complete sympathy, and we have the
same discomfiting sense of remote and determined worlds coming together; ones which were never meant to touch.
Many of the lives in The Soul of Kindness are affected by the comically well-meaning Flora, who often gets her way, to nobody’s benefit. Her father-in-law, living
in irregular and separate harmony with his tolerant mistress, Barbara, is persuaded first to get a cat, then to marry. It suits neither of
them. With tragic consequences, the besotted Kit is encouraged in his fruitless passion for both acting, which he has no talent
for, and Flora, which Flora prefers not to notice. Mrs Lodge, Flora’s wonderfully drawn housekeeper, has her longed-for retirement
delayed indefinitely with subtly exerted blackmail; we feel her terrible pain in one of the novel’s few ecstatically lyrical
flights, as she longs for the country of her girlhood:
‘… You know I love you, and little Alice. But I’m just hungry for the country, and I really can’t bear it any longer. It feels
like being in prison. I miss so many things. I haven’t heard a cuckoo this year. I wake up and wish I could just hear it once
– but you never would in London, and if you did it wouldn’t be the same.’
She was silent and stood there so quietly by the window. In her imagination she could hear the sudden, erupting cry, bursting
through the early-morning mist, echoing from one tree to another … All those young summer birds she had missed – the pale
slim thrushes especially!
Flora’s unintended cruelty is the focus of much of the book, from the moment she writes ‘You were the most wonderful mother’
to her (non-dying) mother at the beginning. Her few failures of enterprise, such as, hilariously, failing to marry poor old
Meg off to her dismal homosexual friend Patrick, strike us as moments of optimism.
But if, in some ways, The Soul of Kindness is a variant on Emma, concluding with the heroine being offered a moment of enlightenment and ably rising above it in ghastly self-assurance,
the structure of the novel moves away to paint more independent lives. The various ménages and connections are, more often than not, portraits of unspoken chafing; Mrs Secretan and her eccentric
housekeeper, Miss Folley, who steams open letters about herself and has to live with the consequences – ‘but what she had
done [in writing about Miss Folley, Mrs Secretan] tried to reason, was what everyone had done at some time. Miss Folley it
was who had done what no one does – or had better not do’. There is, too, Patrick’s ginger boyfriend Frankie, complacently
subject to embarrassing fits of devotion – ‘Frankie, wilting from being over-worshipped – nothing so tiring, he had found
…’ And, tragically, the empty marriage of the Pringles, and Elinor’s hopeless state; one of the occasions where the genuine,
thoughtful kindness of Flora’s husband Richard is glimpsed by Flora, and angrily rejected by her, just as his generous treatment
of her mother leads to a seriously selfish row.
But most of all, The Soul of Kindness is cherishable for some marvellous, odd and unmistakably truthful vignettes. The beautiful scene in which Flora’s Irish nurse
in the maternity home starts to gossip with her: ‘And well, so this young fellow and me, we joined up with Sister Blackie
and her young man from the Rugger Club, and we went to the Police dance. It was like a ball more, and evening dress and all,
for the ladies.’ Percy, alone for once, watches a television quiz show and shouts at the television – ‘Those answers that
Percy knew he spoke out loudly and promptly; when he was at a loss, he pretended (as if he were not alone) that he had not
quite caught the question, or was too busy blowing his nose to make his reply, or had to go to help himself to whisky.’ (In
a celebrated aside, Taylor elsewhere says that she can’t think why women novelists are said to be unable to write men talking,
since wherever she goes, she hears them booming away: but how on earth did she know, one might ask, about Percy alone with
the television?) And, best of all, the wonderful moment when Flora, encouraged by Patrick as a married woman to read Henry Miller, turns out not to know the vocabulary: ‘What does this
word mean, Richard? Truly? Well, I suppose it had to be called something.’ We know that Flora is, and knows herself to be
erotically desirable: ‘She was glad there was a way of coaxing him out of his black humour. She turned him to face her, her
silky arms round his shoulders. An end to the sulks. Benignly, she made a present of herself.’ Still, the Henry Miller moment
makes the reader seriously wonder. (I hesitate to guess in print what the word she didn’t know was.)
Robert Liddell, in his fine study of Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett, calls The Soul of Kindness ‘one of her best novels’, and observes that it demonstrates Taylor’s evident belief that ‘when the alternative to loneliness
is boredom, which is frequently the case, loneliness is much to be preferred.’ Liddell was one of Taylor’s main correspondents,
and, since he carried out her instructions to burn most of her letters after her death, we can assume he knew as well as The Soul of Kindness does the explosive potential of an honest letter. In one of her very best short stories, ‘In and Out the Houses’, collected
in The Devastating Boys, Taylor depicts a small rural community brought together and connected by the oddest of means. A precocious small girl, known
to be writing a novel – ‘some people felt concerned, wondering if she might be another little Daisy Ashford’ – goes from house
to house, observing and passing on titbits of sensational information about the villagers’ neighbours. In the end, the novel
turns out to be ‘about little furry animals, and their small adventures, and there was not a human being in it, except the
girl, Katherine, who befriended them all.’ Without her, the intricate web of connections falls apart. She goes back to school
‘and then no one in the village knew what was happening any more.’
Flora is one of Taylor’s most demonic figures – attractive, but demonic, like Midge in The Wedding Group or ‘Angel’ Deverell in Angel. But the reader is allured by her; in part for her vivid, misplaced energy, but most of all because she forms so many of
the connections of this marvellously varied and subtle human tapestry. The social world of the novel may seem initially limited;
they are comfortable, talkative, well-upholstered people. But by the end we have seen not a small group of fourteen or so
characters, but some of the links which bind us all, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes rudely, together.
Philip Hensher, 2010
Towards the end of the bridegroom’s speech, the bride turned aside and began to throw crumbs of wedding cake through an opening
in the marquee to the doves outside. She did so with gentle absorption, and more doves came down from their wooden house above
the stables. Although she had caused a little rustle of amusement among the guests, she did not know it: her husband was embarrassed
by her behaviour and thought it early in their married life to be so; but she did not know that either.
It was a beautiful day. For the last week, friends had told Flora and her mother that they were praying for fine weather for
them, and Flora had smiled, easily, languidly, as if the idea of a shower of rain in September were absurd. The sun came in
shafts through the open parts of the marquee and even quite brightly through the canvas. The purling of doves mingled with
the sound of Richard’s peroration. He was a little reddened – from the nature of the day, the position he was occupying and
his wife’s inattention. Then, just as he was coming to his last words, she stepped back again, close to him, and slipped her
hand into his. She looked radiant. So everyone was saying a few moments later. Oh, I shall miss them, she was thinking. My doves!
Such a lovely, tall, blonde bride, her mother thought. A blonde bride is always best. It was as if she had borne her – dear
Flora – just for this wonderful occasion and, between her birth and now, all that had happened was forgotten; only the two
triumphs counted for anything. So vividly, even to this day, she could hear Sister Willett saying, ‘It’s a lovely girl’. And
‘Such a lovely girl!’ all the neighbours were saying this afternoon. Flora in white. She was born to be a bride. And no mother
thinks any young man is good enough for her own girl, Mrs Secretan consoled herself.
The bridesmaids bowed their heads smilingly over their champagne glasses as the best man praised their beauty, and the hubbub
of conversation broke out again, given an airy quality by the height of the marquee and the thinness of its walls. Mrs Secretan
circulated. ‘Yes, rather a pretty frock, isn’t it?’ ‘No, I don’t feel tearful. Too, too agitato in church and too, too happy here.’ She was widowed and had been for a long time and now faced loneliness. Her friends had
expected tears, and still did. They watched her move on to Richard’s father – a widower – and an idea occurred to some of
them, for weddings beget weddings, it is always said. Most did not know that Mr Quartermaine’s mistress was among them, a
smart middle-aged woman called Barbara Goldman, talking at this moment to Richard – might well have been his godmother, some
thought.
‘They ought to be changing,’ Mr Quartermaine said, reaching for a watch across his great stomach. The calyx of his carnation
was showing, Mrs Secretan noted. She glanced quickly away from it, as if it were something embarrassing like undone fly-buttons.
If anyone were to spoil the wedding, it would be he, she had thought over and over again in the last few weeks. With her zealous
attention to detail, she had charged several of the ushers – cousins, for Flora was an only child – to see that he did not drink too much, and her own
brother had been asked to keep him as much as possible apart from Barbara Goldman – whom she had not wanted to invite – lest
he should call her ‘Ba, old girl’, and slap her bottom.
Mrs Secretan’s enthusiasm for detail had foreseen all disasters. Lying awake in the middle of the night, she would suddenly
envisage Flora stung on the nose by a wasp at the very last moment before leaving for the Church, and so the gardener was
made to search for and dispose of windfalls, and Mrs Secretan herself made a dozen or more jam-pot traps and set them about
outside the house. Precautions were taken against infections, fatigue and anxieties; but there were few precautions she could
take against the bridegroom’s father. What could be done, she did.
He was so large and Mrs Secretan herself so much shorter than her daughter, that it was a triumph when she managed to place
herself between him and a waiter going round with champagne. One glass less, she thought. Every little helps, was advice she
constantly gave.
‘Where’s Ba got to?’ Percy asked. ‘I’m sick of my relations. They make me feel old. That lad of mine went on too long with
his speech. He should have sensed the people getting restless, wanting their glasses charged.’ He twirled his own empty one.
‘Even Flora got bored – feeding the pigeons.’
‘Doves,’ said Mrs Secretan.
‘Well, she’ll have to get used to listening to a lot more than that. We’re all great talkers.’ He had hoped to make a speech
himself and, not having been asked to, he now told his hostess how old-fashioned the practice had become. ‘Old-fashioned,’
he repeated; ‘and bourgeois. Ah, here’s Flora, looking as fresh as a daisy.’ A vague girl, he thought her. Not very bright,
but biddable.
‘Darling, there’s something spilt all down your front,’ said Mrs Secretan.
‘But it doesn’t matter. I’m just going to change.’
The best man had glanced at his watch and murmured to the chief bridesmaid. Mrs Secretan had arranged the schedule long beforehand.
‘One last look,’ she whispered and held her daughter at arm’s length. When she turned round again, she saw Percy Quartermaine
edging off, nudging his way among the flowered hats towards some more champagne: and then, to her dismay, she saw him slide
something into a waiter’s hand. She moved on, smiling gaily to right and left, to have a brief warning word with her brother.
Flora and her friend, Meg Driscoll, slipped out of the marquee as if they were up to some mischief, and hurried across the
lawn to the house. With her train looped over her arm, Flora ran among the doves, calling to them and laughing.
‘Oh, you and the doves!’ a boy called. It was Meg’s young brother, dashing after them with a camera. ‘You and the doves, please!’
Flora let go her train and turned and, putting out her hand, waited for a bird to settle on her finger-tips.
‘It is a symbol, isn’t it?’ asked Meg, stepping aside out of the photograph.
‘Before it flies away!’ the boy, Kit, said with breathless anxiety as a bird perched. He put his eye to the view-finder.
‘It won’t,’ said Flora.
‘Bride and doves,’ Meg said. ‘It should be the best photograph of all. Except that there’s no bridegroom.’
The photograph was taken and the dove cast lovingly into the air and Flora and Meg went into the house, Kit following.
‘I didn’t think boys were interested in brides and weddings,’ Flora said, over her shoulder. Then, as she was stepping in
through the drawing-room windows, she turned to smile goodbye to him. Coming too closely after her, he put his foot on her train and, as she turned, it was torn.
‘Oh, Kit!’ cried Meg. ‘And why on earth are you following us?”
He kept his head down sullenly, choked with misery and embarrassment his freckled face reddened. But, quite wonderfully to
him, Flora put her hand on his shoulder and began to laugh. ‘In a minute I shall take this off for ever and ever. You can
tear it to shreds and I shan’t care.’
‘Come, we must hurry,’ Meg said and took Flora’s arm. They were behind schedule in spite of Mrs Secretan, and Flora, fussing
too long with her veil, had already been twenty minutes late at the church. The day now seemed to Meg to be dragging on.
‘I shall send you the photograph,’ Kit said, raisi. . .
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