Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

modest liveliness & extreme compassion

“If I were going to copy any kind of fur, Mrs. Arbuthnot thought, consoling herself, it would not be squirrel.”

Has a great writer ever gone unread for a stupider reason?

Elizabeth Taylor — the British novelist, not the actor — has for years lain obscured behind billboards of irrelevant Google results (VIDEO: Elizabeth Taylor Interview with Barbara Walters; SHOWBIZ CHEAT SHEET: David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor Shared a Cigarette the First Time They Met). 

Elizabeth Taylor the novelist’s reputation has lately, thanks to a handsome line of reissues by the New York Review of Books, been enjoying a renaissance. It’s about time. She’s an understated master — Penelope Fitzgerald minus the obscure density; Barbara Pym with more pizzazz and not quite so many curates (I don’t know what a curate is, but I seem to be constitutionally incapable of enjoying a book that includes one).

Even once the billboards have been cleared away, Taylor’s greatness does take a few chapters to appreciate. Her novels are so modest in presentation that, until your sensitivity adjusts, it’s easy to mistake them for parlor games with laughably low stakes. “I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups,” Saul Bellow said of Taylor, dismissing her from Booker contention. He should have listened harder. Her books are wildly, hilariously, richly alive. They simply don’t make a big fuss about it.

My favorite is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It tells the story of a proper British widow, Mrs. Palfrey, who, not wanting to be a burden to her family, moves into a grim London hotel that has become a kind of way-station for the elderly. It isn’t a nursing home, quite — in fact the prospect of the nursing home is both a horror and a useful mental touchstone (at least we’re not there) for the residents of the Claremont. But it is bleak.

“When the porter had put down her suitcases and gone, she thought that prisoners must feel as she did now, the first time they are left in their cell, first turning to the window, then facing about to stare at the closed door: after that, counting the paces from wall to wall. She envisaged this briskly.”

She adjusts — and we do too — to a world in which the brightest object on the day’s horizon is the posting of the dinner menu (celery soup, roast Surrey fowl). For company Mrs. Palfrey has four or five other widows and a single widower, all devoted to their knitting and their crossword puzzles, cattily murmuring about who has or hasn’t had visitors. Aghast at the endless emptiness of the afternoon, Mrs. Palfrey occasionally forces herself to take a walk, which she spends murmuring bits of poetry to herself in the hopes of keeping her mind sharp. The loneliness of aging — the loneliness of living — has never been so keenly depicted. 

“The silence was strange — a Sunday-afternoon silence and strangeness; and for the moment her heart lurched, staggered in appalled despair, as it had done once before when she had suddenly realised, or suddenly could no longer not realise that her husband at death’s door was surely going through it. Against all hope, in the face of all her prayers.”

All of which, I fear, makes this sound like a miserable book. And it is sad — heartbreaking, even. But it isn’t depressing. The feeling I get reading it is like the feeling I get listening to a Mozart requiem: a piercing, necessary, and somehow cleansing pain. Taylor sees, and refuses to look away from, the predicament of aging — but by capturing it in such graceful, responsive prose, she somehow renders that predicament tolerable.

And of course she’s aided in this by humanity’s greatest tool for misery-toleration: humor. These old people wrangling for status, racing each other to the menu board, are, in addition to everything else, funny. Life in the Claremont is not just an unrelenting slide to the grave — it’s also a return to high school, complete with volatile alliances and unrequited loves.

And the queen bee of Claremont High is Elvira Arbuthnot (that’s Mrs. Arbuthnot to you). She’s bitter, malicious, and severely arthritic — and she doesn’t suffer alone. She forces poor, fretful Mrs. Post to retrieve her library books and then berates her for bringing back the wrong ones. She interrogates Mrs. Palfrey about why she doesn’t live with her daughter in Scotland (“Mrs. Palfrey had not been invited to, and she did not get on well with her daughter, who was noisy and boisterous and spent most of her time either playing golf or talking about it. ‘I doubt if I could stand the climate,” she replied.”) To the extent that this expansively humane book has a villain, Mrs. Arbuthnot is it.

Which makes it all the more disturbing when, halfway through, Mrs. Arbuthnot is banished to a nursing-home. She doesn’t admit that that’s what’s happening, of course. She says that she’s moving to a much better hotel. The Claremont has been going downhill, she says. “‘We used to have bridge,’ she said wistfully. ‘A dowager countess stayed here.’” The truth is that Mrs. Arbuthnot has been wetting the bed — “and in the nicest possible way, which in the circumstances could not be very nice, had been asked to make some other arrangement.”   

Mrs. Palfrey, ever polite, asks if she can visit Mrs. Arbuthnot in her new hotel. “ ‘I can’t think that either of us would gain from that,’” Mrs. Arbuthnot spits out. She is imploding from misery and shame.  

“What she had been through, no one should ever know — those middle-of-the-night dreams of relieving herself, of finding after long searching a Ladies’ room in some mazy hotel — oh, the release of it! Only to wake up and find the bed saturated, and herself stiff and helpless. It could not go on, she knew.”

Taylor is doing the impossible — she is softening our hearts to a character who had seemed irredeemable. If the scene ended there, it would be enough.

But Taylor isn’t through with Mrs. Arbuthnot, or with us. Here comes Mrs. Post — Mrs. Arbuthnot’s punching bag, her unappreciated helper, the character who brings out the very meanest in the mean girl. 

“She was wearing, in spite of the warm afternoon, her mock (and, as far as Mrs. Arbuthnot was concerned, her mocked at) fur coat of grey shaded stripes. If I were going to copy any kind of fur, Mrs. Arbuthnot thought, consoling herself, it would not be squirrel.” 

And so Taylor gives us one last glimpse of Mrs. Arbuthnot at her worst — classist, judgmental, pointlessly nasty — and still she pries open our hearts. Yes, have compassion for an old lady’s incontinence, Taylor says; but have compassion for her cruelty too. Because this is how meanness works. The nasty thought (it would not be squirrel) works for Mrs. Arbuthnot as a kind of psychic aspirin (consoling herself) — it dulls the pain while corroding the stomach.  

This one page scene — in which a group of elderly women wait, mostly in silence, for a car to arrive — contains as much drama, as much insight, as much tension, as entire shelves of prize-bedecked novels. You feel, reading it, drained, enlivened, stricken, amazed. You need to put the book down and take a walk. You need a cup of tea.