When she was approached in 1975 and asked to write a biography of her friend,
the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard refused, “because –
among her many Austen traits – [Taylor] led a life that contained very
little incident”. Perhaps Howard was being deliberately obtuse. She must
have known how little her friend would have liked any exposition of her
personal affairs, how carefully she had fostered the image of a respectable
lady novelist, and how deeply she mistrusted the practice of writing
biographies. In interviews, as well as in her published writing, Taylor
allowed only the most basic facts of her life to come out, and these have
hitherto informed a widespread understanding that she was, in Valerie
Martin’s intentionally quaint phrase, “a very nice woman who lived in a
small town, surrounded by a happy family”. The facts Taylor offered her
public, carefully sterilized, could hardly have supported a more nuanced
view.
She was born Betty Coles in Reading in 1912 and attended the Abbey School
(Jane Austen’s alma mater, and the likely source of many misleading
comparisons between the two writers), after which she went to secretarial
college, her poor maths examination results having prevented her from
applying to university. She worked briefly as a governess to the
seven-year-old Oliver Knox (later a popular novelist, and the cousin of
Penelope Fitzgerald), then as a librarian in High Wycombe. In 1936 she
married John Taylor, a successful local businessman, the son of the mayor of
High Wycombe, and had two children with him, a son and a daughter. Between
1945 and 1972 she published eleven novels, four short story collections and
a book for children; another novel was published posthumously in 1976. She
was friendly with several fellow writers – as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard
and Kingsley Amis, she knew Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Francis
King, Robert Liddell and Barbara Pym – but she lived at a conscious remove
from literary London, preferring to conduct most of her friendships by
letter, since “very often one learns more about people that way”. She died
of cancer in 1975, at Grove’s Barn, the house outside Windsor that she had
lived in with her family since 1957. But even in so retiring a life there
were secrets. In his memoir Elizabeth and Ivy (1986), Robert Liddell
describes how Taylor asked him to destroy, after her death, all of her
letters to him – he seems to have complied.
A parallel might be drawn between the assumption that, because it was
outwardly conventional, Taylor’s life was lacking in drama, and the
prevailing misapprehension of her talents as a writer. Even now, and despite
praise from some of the best and most prominent English authors of the past
fifty years, Taylor’s fiction is commonly thought of as cosy, rather
stilted, and more or less middlebrow. Her milieu is admittedly narrow: it is
a world of gossipy Home Counties tea parties, shabby-genteel London boarding
houses, polite village dances. Her characters are often novelists, but only
very rarely are they genuine artists (an obvious exception is Ludo in Mrs
Palfrey at the Claremont, 1971), tending instead, like the heroine of Angel
(1957), to be imperceptive, sensationalist yarn-spinners. What is
astonishing is the depth and ferocity of Taylor’s compassion for these
ordinary, unappealing characters. Her themes are loneliness, especially the
loneliness that can exist within a marriage, self-deception, disappointment
and fear. The surface of her writing is always elegant and calm, but beneath
the surface move strong currents of passion and despair.
It is for this ability to find, in staid suburban England, a full spectrum of
suffering, and for her delicate, witty, shimmering style, that she has
always been admired by discerning readers as a highly original artist, a
laureate of what can be hidden by (and endured by means of) a flat
propriety. A good example of her technique is the late (1972) tragicomic
story “The Devastating Boys”, one of her best, in which Harold and Laura, a
middle-aged couple from the Home Counties, take part in a scheme to provide
a holiday home for deprived London children, with Harold – in a pompous
attempt to appear progressive – making “no stipulation, but that they must
be coloured”. As the visit progresses, Laura moves from an initial terror of
the two boys, through gratitude for the way their presence has improved her
relationship with Harold – “in the evenings they had so much to talk about”
– to a fear of being left alone with him again. On one level, the story is a
light satire on middle England’s mores, gently exposing the couple’s (fairly
harmless) prejudices and pretensions, on a deeper level, it is about a woman
coming to recognize the terrible emptiness of her life. Clearly, its author
was no stranger to violent emotions.
Nicola Beauman’s lucid and compelling biography of Taylor, the first to be
completed (another was started, but abandoned for lack of interest in the
1970s) will do much to correct the portrayal of its subject as insipid, and
may attract new readers to her work. Beauman has turned up “five hundred
extraordinary letters, an unpublished novel and several unpublished short
stories”. Many of the letters are to Ray Russell, “the closest friend
Elizabeth would ever have”, and they are full of surprises. In 1936, the
year of her marriage, the apparently bourgeois Taylor became a member of the
Communist Party, and it was in the Party offices in High Wycombe that she
met Russell, an apprentice furniture designer and amateur painter,
distinguished by his “immense strength of character and good looks”, not to
mention his keen political intelligence and artistic sensibility.
Taylor was immediately taken with him, and they embarked on an intense
extra-marital affair, which endured through a long separation imposed by the
Second World War. Their correspondence provides a fascinating record, of
Taylor’s early development as an unpublished novelist, and this was clearly
one of the most important episodes in her life, one which had a profound
influence on her work. Beauman convincingly suggests ways that the affair
might have fed into the novels and stories, informing the relationship
between the two lovers at the centre of A Game of Hide and Seek (1951),
which she thinks of as Taylor’s “most flawless, most nearly perfect” book.
The relationship continued until the late 1940s, when Taylor’s husband
(whose infidelities Taylor knew about) demanded that she end it; but she
kept “tenuously in touch” with Russell until her death, assuring him that
she would go on loving him.
Beauman has waited until after John Taylor’s death before unveiling her
discoveries about Russell, but has not extended the same courtesy to the
Taylors’ children; in her acknowledgements, she reports that having been
authorized by John Taylor to write the biography, she submitted the
manuscript to John and Elizabeth Taylor’s son and daughter who were “very
angry and distressed” about the book, and have asked to be dissociated from
it. Beauman acknowledges her uncertainties about publishing while they are
alive, and justifies her decision by saying that “To leave out the truth, if
it can be established as truth, is simply not possible . . . and also
disastrous for Elizabeth’s reputation”. This argument has its merits, but
Beauman’s suggestion that Taylor might have been aware that her letters to
Russell had survived – might indeed have “hoped that one day the letters
would enhance her literary reputation” – seems sentimental (and is anyway
contradicted by Beauman elsewhere in the text). The Elizabeth Taylor who
emerges, with admirable clarity, from these pages, was an intensely private
woman, passionate but self-effacing, dedicated above all to the quiet
pursuance of her art.
As a biographer, Beauman is somewhat erratic: dispassionate and authoritative
for the most part, but given to sudden flights of empathy (we are shown, for
example, the young Betty Coles dawdling “on the edge of the hockey or
cricket field, making daisy chains, longing and longing to be set free”), as
well as the occasional jarring authorial intrusion. She quotes from the
fiction to illustrate the life, often as unguardedly as if she were quoting
from the diaries or letters. Her claims that Taylor should be regarded as “a
modernist in the tradition of Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, choosing to
dispense with conventional narrative form” are unconvincing and unnecessary
– despite the Chekhovian subtlety and compassion of Taylor’s best work – and
indicative of her rather slapdash way with critical terms. But she is very
good on literary influences, including Chekhov and E. M. Forster, on the
ways that Taylor’s life informed her work, and on the impulses and decisions
that ultimately shaped both. This is an enlightening book, as well as an
enjoyable one, and an important step towards securing for Elizabeth Taylor
the kind of attention she deserves, as one of the most surprising and
rewarding English writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Nicola Beauman
THE OTHER ELIZABETH TAYLOR
444pp. Persephone Books. £15.
978 1 906462 10 9
Edmund Gordon works as a researcher for the estate of Penelope
Fitgerald.
