I live near Strand-on-the-Green, a stretch of the Thames riverbank at the western edges of London, and whenever I walk along it I think of two people in particular. Writers, as it happens: two of my very favourites. First, Nancy Mitford, who lived in a house called Rose Cottage, set on the road behind the river, close to Kew Bridge. Until recently it was painted rose-pink, and it was Nancy’s home during her pre-war married life with Peter Rodd (the kind of husband who would then have been called ‘unsatisfactory’).
Second, Elizabeth Taylor (as I think of her: the Elizabeth Taylor), part of whose novel Blaming is set in a fictional representation of no. 65 Strand-on-the-Green. The house stands right on the Thames, was built in around 1705 and is named Zoffany House, for the painter, who lived there until his death in 1810. Later it was owned by friends of ET’s. In the novel it is called Laurel House; it fascinates me somewhat that this residence - which to my mind is about as desirable as a house can be - is portrayed in the book as nothing particularly out of the ordinary; thus far have things shifted when it comes to the property market.
But we all know that, and it is by the by….
Blaming, published in 1975, is the simple story of a middle-aged woman, Amy - the owner of Laurel House - who is suddenly widowed while on holiday, and forms a reluctant relationship with a young American, Martha, who helps her through this crisis then - to Amy’s guilty discomfort - visits her in England. The novel, ET’s twelfth and last, is not my favourite but it has all her lucent gift, so self-effacing and so astounding: those oblique, scenic, almost disparate sentences, which one suddenly realizes have accumulated and acquired great power…. Blaming stands independent of the circumstances in which it was written, but these are nonetheless remarkable. They are described by ET’s daughter Joanna Kingham in an afterword to later editions:
My mother knew that she was dying when she wrote this novel. As the cancer inside her developed, so did the determination to finish this book. It was the same determination that she used to fight the illness, remain cheerful, and above all, live to the last moment.
… She died before the book was published.
Now this, I find profoundly moving and impressive. It does affect the way in which I read the novel, which is anyway a sombre affair although - as ever with this most controlled of writers - there is not the smallest hint of an authorial presence, of her own bleak situation: an innate mannerliness, which was part of Elizabeth Taylor’s artistic make-up, would have tightened the screw against any such sentimental leakage.
And she finished her novel. Without compromise, with standards entirely maintained. There is surely no doubt that she would have written more, and brilliantly - she was just sixty-three when she died - but there was a completeness to her career, and thus, for a writer of her stamp, to her life (if it is not presumptuous to say this about another person). She was often deeply affected by reviews, which were of a stupidity and obtuseness that has led me to ignore such things ever since; people obsessed with political ‘significance’ in the novel, viciously attacking her comfortable middle-class Home Counties milieu from the sanctuary of their fifth-floor study in Connaught Square… In 1982 a small group of writers, including Elizabeth Jane Howard, was asked to pick a list of ‘Best Novels of Our Time’, among which was Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. This selection - known to be a personal choice of EJH - was mocked by the sneerati, to a degree that now seems quite extraordinary. It led Kingsley Amis to write thus to the Spectator:
Elizabeth Taylor herself gave her status no help by having no public life, not being seen on television, not pronouncing on the state of the world and not going round explaining that her underlying subject was the crisis of the bourgeois conscience. It was hard to believe that this rather ungregarious wife of a businessman living in no great style in the Thames valley, fond of a gossip over a gin and tonic, could be the author of any kind of novel, let alone an important one… But importance isn’t important. Good writing is.
I am glad that ET did not see the contempt with which Angel’s elevation to a best novel of our time was greeted, although I wish that she had read Amis’s gallant anger in her defence, which should (probably didn’t) have put the critics to shame. However they were good friends in her lifetime - she died when his marriage to EJH was still intact, and in a letter described a lunch with ‘the Amises’ that ended at 7pm… She knew that she was valued by people who knew.
And she finished her novel. I think about this every time I walk past Zoffany House. It seems to me very lucky to do a ‘job’ that doesn’t require retirement; one in which we can, if we so choose, end our lives and our jobs together.
Retirement, as a concept, frightens me. I don’t mean this in the broadest sense - people are entitled to retire, of course they are: it is more that idea of the last time of doing something. I remember for instance the last time that I saw Sylvie Guillem, aged fifty, on her retirement tour, watching her wholly undiminished butterfly-wing speed, the incomparable ease with which her hips rotated in their sockets, as if oiled by the gods… that performance was not the last, but quite soon it would be, on the stroke of midnight on January 1st 2016, and how would that be? A last position. A last curtain call, which would go on forever, but eventually would have to end. A last retreat into the wings. These thoughts made it impossible for me to enjoy watching her, which was an idiotic waste of the greatest performance artist I have ever seen.
That charisma… that presence… how does real life absorb it? Not long ago I was reading an obituary of the playwright Trevor Griffiths (who died in March aged 88), whose work slightly obsessed me as a teenager, and whose 1973 play The Party - staged at the National Theatre - was famously the last in which Laurence Olivier performed on stage.
Again: how did a performer like Olivier retire from the stage? Of course he continued to work (remember Brideshead, the utter deliciousness of every last gesture and inflection, the restrained force that still almost devoured the screen) so this was not retirement as such. Yet he had been defined by theatre, which he himself had redefined: Romeo, Hotspur, Richard III, Titus, Astrov, Oedipus… His wife, Joan Plowright, had told him not to do Shakespeare - ‘if you do King Lear I’ll kill you’ - but something modern; accordingly the supreme classical actor of the mid-twentieth century took a last role as a Glaswegian Trotskyite with a twenty minute speech which took four months to learn; an act of defiance in every sense, as it was his fear of forgetting lines that had led to this retirement. Premature, as it now seems. Olivier was sixty-six, an age at which Mick Jagger was just getting his second wind (although eventually, even for him, there will be a Last Time, indeed whenever I have seen the Stones I have thought that this could indeed be the last time, maybe the last time, but praise the lord I have been completely wrong).
And I haven’t even started on tennis, the ongoing saga of Nadal-Djokovic-Murray, their valorous last stands against the depredations of time and leaping gazelles half their age; the last stroke hit by Roger Federer, who made the game into a kind of art, and retirement an expression of his own intrinsic elegance…
But enough. How lucky we are, not to be circumscribed by physical predestination, by nothing indeed except mortality. My dream is to be a version of P.D. James at ninety (a version in which I am living in Zoffany House), who gave a bright-spirited birthday interview in which she talked about the book she was writing - and the one after that - although, she said, she hated the idea of dying with a book unfinished…
The downside of not retiring. I’ll take the risk.
I had never heard of (the) Elizabeth Taylor, and I am intrigued! You have given me something new (but old) to read, which is my favorite new kind of thing to read.
I'm never going to retire from writing. But I would like to retired from everything else so I can spend more time writing!