Angel

ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1912–1975) was born into a middle-class family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel,
At Mrs. Lippincote's
, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including
A Game of Hide and Seek
(available as an NYRB Classic), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper's
, and other magazines), and a children's book,
Mossy Trotter
, while living with her husband and two children in Buckinghamshire. Long championed by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor's novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
(2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon's
Angel
(2007). In 2013 NYRB Classics will publish a new selection of Taylor's short stories.

HILARY MANTEL is an English novelist, short-story writer, and critic. Her novel
Wolf Hall
won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

ANGEL

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Introduction by

HILARY MANTEL

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Biographical Notes

Title

Intro

Angel

Dedication

Part 1
 

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Copyright and More Information

I must begin with a confession. Although Angelica Deverell is not a real author, I feel as if I have read her books; and indeed, as if I have come dangerously close to writing them.

When I was a schoolchild of seven or eight, half-dead with boredom and frustration, and required to write a “composition” by Sister Marie, I decided to enliven my ink-spattered page by writing not “it was a fine day” or “the sky was blue” but rather, “the sky was a perfect azure.” Sister Marie called me out to the front of the class, eyed me suspiciously, read out loud the startling phrase, and slapped me. It was for making blots, she said. But really, I believed, she slapped me because she thought I was getting above myself.

I now think “the sky was blue” would have been better; or no doubt the sky could have been left out of it altogether. But I was right in one respect. Sister Marie was acting as a social commentator, not a literary critic. One day it's azure sky, the next it's red revolution. When, as a precocious schoolgirl, Angelica is begged by her mother and aunt to “say something in French” she chooses a stanza of “La Marseillaise.” A rebel from a back street—though in search of a revolution in self-esteem, not in society—she is raising the bloody standard against boredom; against the crushing low expectations of her milieu; against the threat of living an ordinary life.

When I try to work out where I had picked up such an affectation as “azure,” I can walk without hesitation up to the attic in my grandmother's house, where there was a little cache of books—in effect, the only books in the house—which I read at lunch-times when I came home from school. These were precisely the kind of books which made Angelica Deverell rich and famous, but I don't know who, in fact, their authors were. The covers were greasy and blackened, the stitching frayed, the edges of the pages were mustard in colour, but the content was, as Angelica would say, “coruscating” and possibly “iridescent.” They were about upper-class gals with soaring spirits and unorthodox beauty—red hair, or “auburn locks” featured. They were pining after some lost or unsuitable man, and on a collision course with their families and convention. Their backdrop was the hunting field, where they were dauntless under an azure sky. At dusk the ballroom awaited; but this was not the ballroom of the whispering virginal debut. They were beyond first-night nerves, beyond condescending to the disapproving rustle of dowagers' fans. These heroines moved through the scene at midnight, through the melancholy ruins of the buffet, on to the dazzling expanse of moonlit terrace, and stood alone, listening to the cry of ancestral peafowl (if no nightingale was available), while the orchestra played a last poignant waltz. I expect the gals dwindled into matrimony, but I don't remember the end of these books; I only remember forever beginning them, senses filled with the frou-frou of silk petticoats and the perfume of gardenias. It was all a great change from Enid Blyton.

Angel
is a book in which an accomplished, deft and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless and wildly overpaid one. Taylor is a writer of impeccable taste, while Angelica Deverell is a high priestess of schlock. Taylor excelled at the short-story form, where Angel, with her almost demonic energy, seems made for the epic. Taylor is quietly and devastatingly amusing, while her creation never makes a joke, and is upset and suspicious if anyone makes one in her vicinity. Taylor is observant, while Angelica never notices the life that goes on about her; for her, the only true reality is inside her head.

Born in 1912, and producing her stylish books for three decades after the Second World War, Elizabeth Taylor was not the sort of writer who lives so as to excite prospective biographers. A clever, formal restraint is the hallmark of her fiction, and though the compass of her works is restricted she has a formidable technique. All the same, what Taylor knows—and it is the one odd fact that ties her to her creation, and drives her book—is that good writers and bad writers, when they are talking about their art, sound remarkably the same. Their early struggles are the same. Their inner triumphs feel the same. The only way in which they differ is that the bad writers, once they get the initial break-through, usually make more money.

The phenomenon of Angelica Deverell illustrates the axiom that nobody ever went broke underestimating public taste. Nobody told Angel of this fact; she just instinctively knew it. She writes the books she wants to read herself. Her mind is passionate and commonplace, quick and shallow, and so she fulfils a perennial demand that readers make, to be “taken out of themselves,” to be “transported.” From book to book, Angel does not learn; nor could you learn from her books. She switches her settings when she is jaded, picking up her characters from an Edwardian house party and putting them down in a banqueting hall in ancient Athens, but she doesn't change her formula. When at last she does—when the demands of her ego override her instinctive knowledge of her market—then her royalties begin to dwindle. For any writer, good, bad or—as we mostly are—an ever-changing mixture of both,
Angel
provides a series of sharp lessons in humility.

The book begins in the last year of Queen Victoria's reign, in the red-brick terraces of the drab brewery town of Norley, where Angelica, the shopkeeper's daughter, having sulked and idled through fifteen years of existence, reveals to those about her that she is writing a book. Anyone who comes from an unbookish family, and who has made the same announcement, will vouch for what comes next. Her widowed mother and her aunt, a lady's maid, approach her with “looks of bright resolve, as if they were visiting some relations in a lunatic asylum.” They feel amazed, exposed and betrayed: “Story-writing!” her aunt exclaims. “Where's she got that from?”

Angel feels herself the rightful heir of a world from which she is excluded. Her aunt works just outside Norley at Paradise House, and Angel is named after the daughter of the family who employs her. Angel has spent much of her life, in fantasy, strolling the lawns and warming herself before the marble hearths. Yet “fantasy” seems too weak a word for her sense of entitlement, her driven desire to warp reality by visualising it as different. Angel has a tyrannical imagination that excludes experience, even excludes the spirit of enquiry; she has no idea in which direction from Norley the real Paradise House lies, and on the one occasion she is invited to visit she dismisses the idea in a way that seems pettish but which is actually protective of her inner vision. Angel believes she has the right to impose her imagination on others. She tells her teacher that she spends her leisure hours playing the harp: when the woman looks dubious, Angel is angry because her private world has been slighted. But she is grimly accepting of knock-backs because she knows she is only biding her time. Her triumph will be to turn her fantasies loose, in all their devouring power: and make them pay.

Angel spends only one evening scribbling in an exercise book before she decides—in fact, she knows—that she has found her vocation, the only thing that will make her happy, and the only possible route out of Norley. We admire her tenacity, her robust self-starter's confidence, and we know she has some ability, in her florid way—enough style to make her schoolmistress nervously “scan Ruskin and Pater” before reluctantly concluding that Angel's homework is not plagiarised. But we fear for her when she bundles up her first torrid effort—
The Lady Irania
—and sends it to the only publisher she has heard of, the Oxford University Press. But Angel is not cowed by rejection, and a little later she strikes lucky. Her manuscript lands on the desk of Theo Gilbright of Gilbright & Brace. Fascinated and appalled, he asks to meet the author.

Angel, who has never been away from Norley, sets off alone to London, and off goes the reader with her, heart thumping, through the wretchedly hot and dirty streets, to an alien building where she is given a cup of tea in what she hopes is Dresden china. Despite the derision of his partner, Theo is inclined to take a risk on the manuscript. But there must be a few changes, he suggests. Perhaps they might tone down the more risqué passages—Angel, who is as ignorant of convention as she is scornful of it, has made Lady Irania's virtue the prize in a card game. Perhaps certain domestic details could be refined; for instance, one does not need a corkscrew to open champagne.

It is the book's central moment—perfectly judged, and almost too painful to be funny. Angel marches out into the hostile streets, and weeps in the ladies' lavatories at Paddington Station. She should have given in, she thinks, compromised, because now she has lost what she most wanted in life. “Yet still she felt something obdurate in herself, even in her state of frailty and defeat. It was a hard, physical pain in her breast, which might have been indigestion, but was vanity.”

But even as she is making her way home to Norley, Theo Gilbright is thinking, “so are we to risk ‘Irania' as it stands, card-scene and all?”

The critics are savage; the public is ecstatic. Angel thinks the public is right and the critics are jealous. One bestseller follows another, and Angel is able to take her bright brave little mother away from the corner grocery—which was her solace as well as her living—and transplant her to an opulent new house in the suburbs. The minor characters are beautifully observed. There is Theo, harassed but unfailingly kind. There is Aunt Lottie, who quarrels in the spitefully genteel language of a lady's maid, and Lord Norley, the local grandee, who comes calling one day; possessor of a brewery fortune, he has a hazy idea that by taking tea with Angel he is paying his debt to culture. With him is his niece Nora, a “poetess,” who is enraptured by Angel—not just by her fame, but by her dramatic
jolie-laide
looks, her bony elegant body, the frailty that Angel has managed to conceal from everyone else. Lord Norley also brings his nephew Esme, the pretty, treacherous waster who will become Angel's husband.

Angel buys him; he agrees to be bought. Esme is Angel's opposite. He is a painter, his style observant and restrained, his taste advanced and original. But he works only sporadically, lacks tenacity, lacks courage, and he is easily diverted into days out at the racecourse, and expensive sexual adventures. A less subtle writer would have solicited our sympathy for Esme, as altogether more human than the increasingly demanding and eccentric Angel, but Taylor allows us to understand that Esme is not likable and has no friends. We understand that real life, real relationships, will always be second-best to Angel. She cannot engage; she gives too much to fiction and has nothing left over for life. We foresee that when she at last comes to own the ruin that is Paradise House, she will, in restoring it to its old grandeur, build a prison for herself.