The Wedding Group
Authors: Elizabeth Taylor
MODERN CLASSICS
183
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) is increasingly being recognised as one of the best writers of the twentieth century. She wrote her first book,
At Mrs Lippincote’s
, during the war while her husband was in the Royal Airforce, and this was followed by eleven further novels and a children’s book,
Mossy Trotter
. Her short stories appeared in publications including
Vogue
, the
New Yorker
and
Harper’s Bazaar
, and have been collected in five volumes. Rosamond Lehmann considered her writing ‘sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’ and Kingsley Amis regarded her as ‘one of the best English novelists born in this century’.
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
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: 9780748126217
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 © The Estate of Elizabeth Taylor 1968
Introduction copyright © Charlotte Mendelson 2010
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
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London, EC4Y 0DY
To Renny and Rosalind
Joanna and David
Poor Elizabeth Taylor.
No wonder she needs an introduction. First, she was a publicity-shunning, pearls-wearing sweet-manufacturer’s wife from Reading, who shared a name with a violet-eyed, multiply-married superstar. Second, her natural territory was domestic life, which has never been fashionable. Third, the titles of her books were mostly unworthy of her, prim and repressive. Is it any wonder that people hesitate to read her novels?
If only we could rename
The Wedding Group
. Elizabeth Taylor deserves so much more than semi-obscurity. She is seriously good. Indeed, she is the perfect mid-twentieth-century novelist: less dated than Ivy Compton-Burnett, less snobby than Dorothy L. Sayers, less given to occasional silliness, whisper it, than my beloved Iris Murdoch, against whom I will not usually hear a word. However, once a novelist excels at something – whether it is Austen with her small canvas or Murdoch with her bohemian monsters – she tends to be known and praised and then damned for it. Part of Taylor’s problem is that, even in her lifetime, her novels, like the woman herself, were assumed – by those who did not actually know them – to be
demure: too civilised to excite passion. This is quite wrong. Elizabeth Taylor was also a former member of the Communist party, and a governess; she had secrets, including a lover, which her friends continued to keep hidden after her death. She wasn’t male, or from the upper- or working-classes, or insane or gay. Does that mean she couldn’t write good fiction? If you think so, close this book.
So, in a parallel universe in which novelists receive exactly the fame they deserve, let us imagine that she has another name, and different titles. Will her twelve novels, her four volumes of stories, be taken seriously now? Be realistic. This is twenty-first century Britain, where feminism is derided almost to death and the private lives of women, including what Taylor called the art of motherhood, are treated with a contempt which our supposedly unenlightened ancestors could not have imagined. What hope is there for her stories of suppressed lust and quiet heartbreak, set against a backdrop of bread-and-butter pudding?
There is hope, because her characters are real. They live real life. And they suffer, because that is what people do.
The Wedding Group
is a magnificent novel of loneliness and little lies. It begins with the unsatisfactory home-life of Cressy, granddaughter of one of the most insufferable artists ever to bestride a fictional world: preening Harry Bretton. Bretton is the founding patriarch of Quayne, an artistic family compound where his womenfolk bake bread ‘on a large scale’ and weave and, with careful expressions of ‘pleased anticipation’, listen to his views about Aquinas or his favourite subject, himself. Quayne is a monument to Bretton’s ego. Taylor wrote exceptionally well about artists, but Bretton is particularly vile: Stanley Spencer crossed with Eric Gill (whom Taylor knew) but without the talent or, probably, the horrors: just an ordinary domestic monster, fat with self-love:
He crossed the studio to his unfinished painting of ‘The Raising of Lazarus’, and… pointed out to himself, as he might have done to a ring of admiring students, the organisation of the whole, the slanting, fore-shortened figures, and the richness of all the day-to-day textures that he loved so much – herring-boned tweeds and lumpy knitting-stitches and basket work and braided hair. Lazarus was in striped pyjamas, for he particularly liked painting striped pyjamas. He tried to concentrate on the picture… but other, extraneous thoughts came into his mind instead – the words ‘Sir Harry Bretton’, for instance. That he was
not
– and it would have sounded so well – was a grievance of long-standing.
Cressy rebels. Who could blame her? She escapes to a ‘beautiful’ room of her own, the fusty attic of extremely close antique-dealing siblings, where she lives in poverty on baked beans and processed – not homemade – cheese, delighting in the modern world of which she has so long been deprived. There is beauty at Quayne, but she does not want it: ‘the cabbages were curled and purple and full of raindrops, and their leaves creaked stiffly as Mo [her cousin] held them in her arms.’ Meanwhile, in a big house full of flowers and antiques and modern art, the ageing, sprightly, desperate Midge prepares
poulet à l’estragon
and
crème brulée
for David, her spoilt journalist son, and devotes herself to keeping him so happy that he never wants to move out and leave her alone.
No other novelist would have handled what ensues with such restraint. In
The Wedding Group
, unlike some of Elizabeth Taylor’s other novels, there is no crashing melodrama; no wars or fires. Nobody murders Midge or walks in on antiquarian incest or leaves anyone else, although the threat is there. Instead, Taylor deploys her knowledge of how little we know
ourselves and others – ‘no one can misunderstand a mother so completely as her own children’ – to illustrate the worlds of pain behind the expensive curtains: the endless little tragedies of parenthood, marriage, old age.
The Wedding Group
is full of sadness, particularly loneliness: the kind so bad that it can be eased by the sight of an empty lit-up bus, or an uninhabited room. ‘A long emptiness before her, and all the days the same.’
Yet Taylor does not pile on the suffering, or strain to make us sympathise with her feckless, selfish protagonists, with her tearfully pushy adolescents or manipulative parents. There are so many perfect lines in this novel, but one of my own favourites is ‘the room looked like some old-age pensioner’s last, lonely refuge’: so sharp, so painful, and so clever because, in a story about the aching loneliness of the old, this is a description of young Cressy’s attic idyll.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, Elizabeth Taylor’s understanding of heartache, this is also a genuinely funny novel, from Cressy’s politely conversational ‘I hear your husband left you’, to the mystery of why birds’ anxious pecking doesn’t give them ulcers, or the ‘good old days’ when a maniac stabbed one of Harry’s paintings with a penknife and made him, temporarily, a little more famous. No other writer interleaves pathos and humour with such brilliant, invisible skill, often in the same sentence: ‘Oh God now
he’s
ill, David thought angrily’, or ‘People are always coming here to collect for something – poppies and lifeboats and the cruelty to children’.
Taylor also understands better than most ‘the terrible emotion of embarrassment’. So many of her characters suffer simply because they cannot bear to speak the truth, to admit that they are angry or alone. Her short story, ‘Hester Lilly’, contains the matchless, simple line: ‘Deception enveloped them,’ and all Taylor’s novels are rich with ulterior motive, concealed longing, ham-fisted attempts to keep things running smoothly without
snagging on emotion. The scene in which Cressy stands up to Harry Bretton is a masterpiece of painful parental love and artistic arrogance, perfectly balanced with the drunken witterings of the shabby family chaplain, who, trying ineffectually to dispel the storm clouds, keeps referring to a forgotten film. ‘“It was a good fillum,” Father Daughtry said, spreading Ginger Rogers on the troubled waters.’ With that one line, Elizabeth Taylor won my heart.