Harry’s Place Arts

According to this article in The Atlantic, Virago is re-issuing six novels by the underrated English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Virago’s website isn’t working so I can’t say which six novels these are but evidently The Soul of Kindness, my favourite, is not one of them.

A character that turns up often in Elizabeth Taylor is the self-deluded female egocentric, and in The Soul of Kindness she produced a monster-goddess, Flora, the creator of a world of illusion which other people agree to inhabit and to reassure her of its peace and sunniness. Flora is beautiful, a loving wife, an affectionate daughter, a happy mother, a kind friend. She is well-meaning and the novel demonstrates how the path to hell is paved with good intentions, however the hell is other people’s, not hers.

Flora attempts to match-make her best friend Meg with Patrick the writer. Meg falls for Patrick all right, only Patrick is gay – that is obvious to everyone except Flora. Meg slogs through the novel, bearing unrequited love, impending spinsterhood, her dull job and her difficult brother. She is a study of how misery absolutely grinds you down and wears you out. Meg’s brother romantically adores Flora (everyone but Flora knows this) and she encourages him to try to be an actor. He has no talent and he spends his time hopeless and unemployed. Flora’s father-in-law Percy, an excellent portrait of an irascible self-made man, lives contentedly, learning to play the piano and visiting his long-term mistress in the evenings. Flora pushes him into marrying the mistress, and the poor old bloke finds himself with nowhere to go to anymore, his days all out of shape.

The Soul of Kindness is set in London and the Home Counties and if I was discouraging visitors to England I would get them to read it. It begins in autumn and throughout the book it has just stopped raining, it’s about to rain, or it’s raining. People are fed up on the Underground, friendless at the Labour Party conference and lonely in pubs.

So why read it then? There is the sharp characterisation and the logic of a story that is ruthlessly worked out. With everyone else’s collusion Flora keeps her world as she wants it and the last sentence of the book displays the monster-goddess triumphant, other people’s defeats being her sacrificial victims. There’s the easy, economical prose. It’s less than 200 pages long but a lot gets said. Elizabeth Taylor writes small, telling scenes such as neighbours forced, out of politeness, to walk together from the train to their homes and feeling the social strain or a woman seeking friendship letting her need for it show too much and blowing her chances. Here is Percy enjoying himself:-

“A quiz programme . . .Those answers that Percy knew he spoke out loudly and promptly; when he was at a loss, he pretended (as if he we were not alone) that he had not quite caught the question, or was too busy blowing his nose to make his reply, or had to go to help himself to whisky. . .

He also contradicted and made rude remarks to the quizmaster who, like so many other things today, irritated him. “Speak up, you bloody fool. You didn’t say anything of the kind. Any idiot knows that. And goodbye to you until next week, only I shan’t be there thanks. . .

He lifted the lid of the piano. . He began to play, peering at the music-book through cigar-smoke, this thick, nicotine-stained fingers plodding up and down the arpeggios – the cigar burning away in an ash-tray at the end of the treble notes –and an occasional oath springing from his lips.”

The scenes join together to form a world of social embarrassment, trapped lives, drift and disappointment. But though this world is full of sadness, it is a vivid world, its creator, unlike Flora, has eyes that are wide open and an acerbic voice. There is social comedy as well as sadness and a sense that you get with Jane Austen, that one person at least is on to the games we play.