The novelist Elizabeth Taylor’s career began with a stroke of bad luck. She sold her first book, an understated satire about a young wife on an Air Force base in wartime Britain, in 1945. A few months earlier, “National Velvet” had made the twelve-year-old actress Elizabeth Taylor an international star. Over the next thirty years, as one Taylor became a household name, the other published eleven more novels and several collections of short stories. She died in 1975, a few weeks after her namesake’s remarriage to Richard Burton.
Taylor, the writer, spent most of her life in the suburbs outside London with her husband, the owner of a local confectionary factory. Her quiet routine, she said, gave her time to write. In interviews, she described working out the plots of her books while she did the ironing. “I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God,” she told the London Times_,_ in 1971. But, she added, “another, more eventful world intrudes from time to time in the form of fan letters to the other Elizabeth Taylor. Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini.”
Taylor, who published short stories in the New Yorker from the late forties to the end of the sixties, may be best known as a practitioner of the plotless, slice-of-life magazine story (though it’s also been said that she’s “best known for not being better known”). Her main subject is the placid daily existence of middle-class suburban women: cooking, cleaning, gardening, caring for children, chatting with friends. Like her stories, her novels are stitched together out of a series of fragmented scenes. They are remarkable, and occasionally frustrating, for their implacable evenness of sympathy and lack of a unifying consciousness—often, just as a character’s narrative interest has been established, Taylor’s focus will swing away, almost perversely, to a new point of view. Like E. M. Forster, who, along with Virginia Woolf, is one of Taylor’s most obvious influences, she relies on seemingly arbitrary events—casual deaths, unexpected coincidences—to suggest the confusion and disorder underneath the surface of everyday life. Almost invariably, her books end on a note of irresolution, falling into silence like exhausted debaters at the end of a long argument.
Taylor was praised by writers who worked in a similar style, such as Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann; Kingsley Amis, perhaps her most vehement supporter, called her “one of the best English novelists born in this century.” But her novels were alternately criticized for their self-consciously artistic form and their circumscribed subject matter—and Taylor herself was sometimes characterized as a watered-down Virginia Woolf who lacked Woolf’s high bohemian glamour. Saul Bellow, a judge for the Booker Prize the year Taylor’s novel “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” was nominated, opened the first meeting with the words, “I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups.” Even Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, bemoans her subject’s conventional life choices, and speculates that some trauma in Taylor’s past must have led her “to dread the idea of a room of one’s own, of the courage needed to go into it and close the door.”
Domestic routine has long been seen as the enemy of artistic ambition—at best, an annoying interruption; at worst, a dangerous distraction. But many writers have lately reclaimed the work done in the home—cooking, cleaning, caring for children—as a subject for fiction. And Taylor’s writing, with its sly humor and careful observations about everyday life, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. The feminist press Virago has reissued her novels in the U.K., and NYRB Classics has now published three of her novels (as well as a selection of her stories) in the U.S. The latest of these, “A View of the Harbour,” may be Taylor’s most nuanced study of the push and pull between domestic and artistic labor. The book reflects her struggle to reconcile the two, and makes an implicit argument that even the most mundane matters of family and home are worth everyone’s attention.
Taylor was born in 1912 and grew up outside London, near a stretch of the Thames popular with artists and intellectuals during her childhood. In Beauman’s biography, she comes across as precocious and single-minded: by twelve, she was submitting poetry to the Bloomsbury journal Life and Letters; by sixteen, she had written three “very sad” novels and several plays. Despite being from a lower-middle-class family—her father was an insurance agent and her mother trained as a dressmaker—Taylor attended the best girls’ school in the area, where she took private Greek lessons, won the English prize every year, and refused to do any math. She became an atheist, played the lead in amateur theatricals, and went swimming naked in the Thames with sensitive young men.
None of her early novels were published; the sensitive young men didn’t pan out; a firework went off during one of the plays and left the vision in her left eye permanently damaged. Barred from university by her math grades, she trained, briefly and miserably, as a typist, and worked as a governess, a kindergarten teacher, and a librarian. Eventually, she turned to politics, and to marriage. By 1937, she had a husband, a child, and an active membership in the Communist Party.
Taylor’s published fiction bears few overt traces of her early enthusiasm. But the heroic artists of her childhood left their mark. One of her central themes is the conflict between creative autonomy and social responsibility; seven of her twelve novels feature writers or painters as characters. Like other writers who grew up on the edge of the cultural ferment of the twenties—that “perpetual summer,” as a character in one of her stories calls the period—Taylor, in her fiction, examines that older generation with a half envious, half critical eye: the vantage point of a younger sister watching her elder siblings get ready for a dance.
“A View of the Harbour,” Taylor’s third novel, was published in 1947. It is set in a declining coastal town in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and, as the title suggests, it is a study in perspective. Taylor builds up a picture of the town through the eyes of a dozen of its inhabitants. The organizing symbol is a lighthouse, wheeling around and momentarily illuminating each character’s thoughts in turn.
The image of the lighthouse and the way Taylor dips in and out of the minds of her characters inevitably recalls Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” But the range of characters in “A View of the Harbour”—a retired shopkeeper, hugely fat and paralyzed from the waist down; her listless daughters; their tenant, who works on a fishing boat and can’t decide which daughter he’s in love with—is broader than any in Woolf’s fiction. A good part of the novel is devoted to the inner lives of women who cook other people’s food, serve their drinks, clean their clothes, and take care of their children. A subtle but persistent undercurrent of sexual longing and frustration runs through almost every scene.
Tying all this together is an argument about the proper subject of art and the conditions under which it can be made. The novel sets up two artistic types: Bertram, a retired naval officer hoping to begin a second career as a painter of coastal scenes, and Beth, an old-fashioned domestic novelist married to the town doctor. Bertram is a visitor, the only artist to come to town since the war. His last name—Hemingway, a cruel name for a watercolor painter—marks him as a caricature of a certain sort of solitary artist. “All his life at sea,” Taylor writes, “he had thought of retiring thus, of taking rooms at some harbour pub, of painting those aspects of the sea which for thirty or more years he had felt awaited his recognition.” Bertram’s qualifications for this position appear to be a sensitivity to light and color, a knowledge of basic painting terms, and an unencumbered schedule. Sketching the harbor from the lighthouse, he sees the town as a series of luminous details: the white and green of the ocean, the “cubist effect” of the harbor buildings, the peeling sky-blue and apricot plaster of their walls.
In contrast to Bertram, Beth is introduced against the backdrop of domestic chaos. At breakfast, as she tries to read the reviews of her last novel, her young daughter, Stevie, starts to cry, because her older sister, a morose and awkward twenty-year-old unhappily stranded at home, has put on her coat too roughly. Her husband, waiting in the car to take Stevie to school, starts honking impatiently. As he drives away, her best friend, on her way to London for the day, drops in to ask if she needs any new clothes. Beth finally sits down to work on her novel. Just as she’s reached the climactic death scene of an only child, her own child comes back from school.
“A View of the Harbour” is written in two distinct registers that echo Beth and Bertram’s competing perspectives. There is the lyric exploration of consciousness—the sensory impressions and fragmented perceptions with which Taylor conveys the inner lives of her characters—and, in counterpoint, the detailing of daily minutiae. Taylor’s characters are accident-prone and harried by errands; their reveries are interrupted by the quotidian—running out of toilet paper, washing the dishes, thinking about food. In its first two chapters, “A View of the Harbour” addresses diarrhea, astigmatism, paralysis, rheumatism, bronchitis, and depression—plus there is an ominous story about a girl who raised her hand to be excused in class but “didn’t get there in time.” One of the book’s major plot twists relies on an accident involving boiling water and an overfilled kettle.
In the contest between Beth and Bertram, Bertram at first seems to have the upper hand. Having cut himself off from his social ties, his time is his own. With nothing to impede his creative focus, he spends his days wandering around the harbor, trying to find the best spot to set up his canvas. Beth, on the other hand, is unable to block out the world for extended periods. Even when she finds time to work, she worries that what she has written is contaminated by her domestic circumstances. Looking back over her novel in progress, she sees “little jarring reverberations now here, now there,” the traces of interruptions caused by her children: “Here I nursed Prudence with bronchitis; here Stevie was ill for a month; here I put down my pen to bottle fruit.”
But, as the book progresses, Bertram becomes increasingly frustrated with his inability to capture the “prevailing light” of a scene. On the paper, “the greens became mud, the birds suggested no possibility of movement, stuck motionless above the waves, the crests of the waves themselves would never spill.” He needs to try a new medium, he thinks—oils instead of watercolor, perhaps—or maybe he has too many distractions.
Taylor hints that the real reason for Bertram’s failure is quite different. He can’t reproduce the light-filled scenes of his imagination because the world that he imagines no longer exists, if it ever did. “An artist sees human nature differently—with different eyes,” he says loftily, but his artistic vision seems to make him less, not more, perceptive than other people. As he walks through town, he notices its outdated storefronts and misspelled signs, the debris of its former prosperity, but not the ebbing livelihood of its inhabitants. He sees men clearing rusty coils of barbed wire, the remnants of a coastal defense system, off the beach, but not the broader changes caused by war: the bad food and worn clothes of postwar austerity, the dearth of military-aged men, the exhaustion and the paranoia.
His blindness is bound up with a self-protective inability to recognize what’s obvious to everyone he meets: that he’s an old man, that he’ll never be successful, and that his artistic ambitions are a form of distraction. Unwilling to admit this to himself, he spends more and more time running small errands for his neighbors. By the end of the book, he’s married to a younger woman with an imperious personality, and he spends his time polishing the silverware and managing their daily routine.
Bertram is not the book’s only object of satire. Beth is self-absorbed and often foolish. She describes her dreams at length to uncaring listeners and fails to notice that her husband and best friend are having an affair. Taylor never misses a chance to poke fun at her love of interminable deathbed scenes and Victorian funeral processions. Still, by the end of “A View of the Harbour,” she has finished her novel and drawn a flourish under the last line.
Taylor wrote “A View of the Harbour” while she was raising two young children, and Beth’s fears about the effect of her domestic circumstances on her writing seem in part a reflection of Taylor’s own. In one of her letters from this period, she caps a long roster of famous female authors with the fatalistic conclusion, “Women writers do not have children.” Another, written a few years earlier, expounds on this theme at greater length:
Taylor wrote these words in 1941. Three quarters of a century later, raising children and writing books are still frequently viewed as all-consuming, mutually exclusive activities; Taylor herself often felt torn between the two roles, and, as she grew older, became increasingly withdrawn. But, as she negotiated art and life, authorship and motherhood, public recognition and private happiness, she found her own way forward, by making her refusal to choose the subject of her work.
