The Sleeping Beauty
Read The Sleeping Beauty Online
Authors: Elizabeth Taylor
MODERN CLASSICS
82
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor, who was born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1912 and educated at the Abbey School, Reading, worked as a governess and librarian before her marriage in 1936: ‘I learnt so much from these jobs,’ she wrote, ‘and have never regretted the time I spent at them.’ She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life. Her first novel,
At Mrs Lippincote’s
, appeared in 1945 and was followed by eleven more, together with short stories which were published in various periodicals and collected in five volumes, and a children’s book,
Mossy Trotter
. Taylor’s shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle- and upper-middle-class English life soon won her a discriminating audience, as well as staunch friends in the world of letters. Rosamond Lehmann called her ‘sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’. Elizabeth Taylor died in 1975.
At Mrs Lippincote’s
Palladian
A View of the Harbour
A Wreath of Roses
A Game of Hide-and-Seek
The Sleeping Beauty
Angel
In a Summer Season
The Soul of Kindness
The Wedding Group
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Blaming
Short Story Collections
Hester Lilly and Other Stories
The Blush and Other Stories
A Dedicated Man and Other Stories
The Devastating Boys
Dangerous Calm
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748131600
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1953 The Estate of Elizabeth Taylor
Introduction copyright © 2012 David Baddiel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
To
OLIVER AND EVELYN
With Love
In a newspaper once, I described Elizabeth Taylor as ‘the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike’. I felt chastened soon after this when I read a piece on Taylor by the estimable writer Philip Hensher, who said (in an undoubtedly Austenian tone) that: ‘Any woman novelist who writes grammatically, it sometimes seems, will sooner or later be compared to Jane Austen, but in Taylor’s case, the comparison is peculiarly inappropriate.’
I still think my missing link idea is true, though. Let’s begin by drawing the relationship between Austen and Updike: the canvas of both is always a small, provincial section of the middle-classes; their narratives explore love and marriage and its breakdown within that canvas; and they both subscribe to the need to, in Updike’s words, ‘give the mundane its beautiful due’. They both, in other words, find art in the everyday, rather than the fantastical. Or perhaps they find the fantastical in the everyday.
Elizabeth Taylor operates along all these lines.
The Sleeping Beauty
is a novel entirely committed to finding the fantastical in the everyday:
It looked a sad, unwelcome garden with its yellowing leaves. Rotten fruit lay in the grass. A mist was breathed upwards from clumps of rusty leaves and the mauve flowers. Remote, pervasive, so Englishly moody, with its muted colours and still air and medlar-scent, it appeared expectant, ready to match itself to an intruder, to be in tune with the nostalgic or the romantic; with magic for lovers; and echoes for the forlorn.
The story of
The Sleeping Beauty
is like this garden: very small, very English but, at the same time, strange, exotic, disturbing, and wreathed in a kind of rich melancholy. Vinny Tumulty is a repressed, and, when we first meet him, rather creepy figure, who derives pleasure from comforting the recently bereaved. He is in the aptly named seaside town of Seething, out of season, performing this task for Isabella, whose husband Harry, an MP, has recently drowned. Staring out of the window of Isabella’s house, he sees a shadowy female figure walking by the sea, about whom he develops a mystical certainty: ‘It was too dark for him to see the woman’s face, but he was certain, from her walk, that it was beautiful.’ This figure turns out to be Emily, a woman whose beauty may or may not have survived the plastic surgery performed upon her following a car crash. As a kind of penance for the mysterious and possibly scandalous background to the crash, she has buried herself within the life of her sister Rose, spending all her time helping to look after Rose’s mentally disabled daughter, Philly.
Like Austen, and like Updike, Taylor is interested in whether or not love can survive damage, and the damage that pervades Seething is everywhere. The debris of scattered relationships lies around the town like flotsam and jetsam from its grim sea: Isabella’s husband is dead, as is Rose’s, both through strange accidents, both with some shadow of scandal hanging
around their lives; Vinny has his own secret, hidden away in another, equally grey, town; Laurence, Isabella’s son, is at once hateful towards and completely dependent on his mother, a cycle he repeats towards a local children’s nurse, whom he thinks of simply as ‘the girl’; the hilariously sure-of-herself Mrs Tumulty, Vinny’s mother, appears to have driven her husband to an early grave through such strictures as, when they were on safari, expecting ‘him to make an effort of standing up when she entered his tent, even if he bent double in doing so’. And Vinny and Emily themselves are perhaps two of the most emotionally shut-down people ever to form the basis of a love story. Vinny, ‘nearing fifty’ and feeling ‘more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration’ experiences his first meeting with his beloved not as most writers would teach us he should, as an intense attraction, but almost the opposite, almost revulsion: ‘He could only feel the shock of it, the inexplicable recoil from, her beauty – as if a moth had brushed his cheek and terror had driven him to beat it off; a terror ridiculous, instinctive and humiliating.’ Emily, meanwhile, is so closed off that she doesn’t speak until a third of the way through the novel, and even then we learn nothing of her internal life until much later; up to that point, we, like Vinny, can only imagine her ‘lying under the spell of her alien beauty and Rose’s devotion enclosing her like a thicket of briars’.
The most moving part of
The Sleeping Beauty
is the way that love gingerly breaks through all this dead matter. It is not fast, or swooping, this love: to reach Emily, Vinny requires ‘patient drudgery’. It necessitates small steps, awkward meetings on landings, long semi-silent sea walks around Seething. Even in a fantasy, a picnic Vinny imagines taking her on, ‘He still could not find any dialogue for them. Emily remained monosyllabic.’ Desire is complex, nuanced, a thing that is to be deconstructed:
‘Desire, of itself, had scarcely existed for him, obstructed, or obliterated, as it so often was, by his sense of personality.’ But eventually, tentatively, love emerges from the shadow of all this uncertainty: ‘He watched, as if it were the most surprising and exotic revelation, her pink heels lifting from her slippers as she climbed the stairs.’
This tentativeness never quite leaves them. Even when most of their obstacles have been overcome, there is no joyous coming together for Vinny and Emily – rather they are left ‘at last with the burden of one another’s personalities; the terror of striking a false note; or none’. And crucially, their love – this very Elizabeth Taylor type of love, love found unexpectedly in middle-age, after the point at which the idea of it happening has been forsworn – does not permeate the world of the book. Vinny and Emily’s love lights up only each other’s soul, not the soul of Seething. It feels to all the other characters – Rose, Isabella, Laurence – that something has been reborn, but, in their own lives, what that something is remains obscure: ‘They felt anticipatory; but nothing happened … no miracle happened.’ Taylor hangs on to the reality of love, which is that its effects are intense but small. Love changes only the lives of the lovers; for the rest of us, as Mrs Siddons says, ‘We shall soon be putting the clocks back or forward.’
This reality, this keeping the backdrop mundane, is what separates Taylor from the stereotypical ‘Women’s Writer’ she is sometimes mistaken for. An author who writes so much about love and its travails can easily be mistaken for a Mills & Boon maven, but her great art is not to make love into a fairy-tale, even when, as in
The Sleeping Beauty
, she is using the paradigm of a fairy-tale. Her strokes are never broad, always detailed, and the more intense for it. Read again the sentence above where Vinny is moved by Emily’s heels emerging from their slippers. This miniature
noticing
of detail is radical and modern. It may
now be a common idea, that the tinier and sharper the descriptive focus, the more powerful the significance, but not in Taylor’s day. By 1960, in
Rabbit, Run
, possessed even in that short time by a very different idea of men and women, Updike can write ‘her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane’ but Taylor preceded him, in realising the power of the microscopic.
She cannot, however, precede him in other ways. Sex is a driving narrative force in all three of my great literary triumvirate, but in Austen the act itself remains, of course, unspoken, while in Updike it is shouted, screamed and rendered in minute detail. Taylor is, as missing links should be, somewhere between the two. The erotic world she depicts has moved away from overly restrained gentility – she can announce, perhaps startlingly, of Rose, that she is ‘obsessed by sex as only those who fear it can be’ – but it is still too constrained, too English, perhaps, openly to embrace any kind of illegitimate desire. What in Austen would be some unnamed act whose consequence is social shame and exclusion, and in Updike would be wife-swapping, in Taylor is bigamy, a very 1950s way of dealing with anti-monogamous urges, and a crime, a crime whose consequence the novel leaves unresolved. But sex is always there, hinted at, behind the thinnest veil of comic politesse: ‘He had seen too many mothers like her … to wonder how she had ever come to have a child. He now took that miracle for granted, supposing that everyone has his informal moments.’
This observation of Vinny’s about Isabella – like Isabella’s later unabashed, possibly tipsy confession that she had wanted more children but ‘after Laurie there was all that bother with my Fallopian tubes, whatever they may be’ – makes me laugh. Which is perhaps the last and most important reason to group Elizabeth Taylor with Jane Austen and John Updike; she is able
to look into the vagaries of love and romance and passion and desire and sex and delicately pick out the comedy of it all. And like all the greatest comedians, her comedy is of a type that often makes the reader feel as much like crying as laughing – laughter in the dark, or perhaps more accurately, in Taylor’s case, laughter in the gloom.
David Baddiel, 2011