The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Elizabeth Taylor

  • Weather or Not

    Last week, contemplating a drive south, I looked up road closures on a couple of routes. At the same time, I was reading Elizabeth Taylor’s “In a Summer Season”:

    “As a person much confided in, she had learnt how to let her mind wander a little on a tether, and now she looked out of the taxi at the sun flashing high on buildings and thought what a lovely late afternoon it was. The trees in Portman Square were hazy with buds and the sky was as pale as pearls. It was the first spring-like day there had been; behind were months of icy winds, little bouts of snow, thawings, then freezings, a wretched time since Christmas.”

    Page 15, Virago Press 1983 edition, first published 1961.

    I look out my window. Here in Portland, not to be confused with Portman Square, we have not yet come to “this first sunny evening of the year, the house had all its windows thrown open, as if of itself, like a flower, it had responded to the sun” (p. 19).

    Elizabeth Bowen’s “In the Heat of the Day” also begins in London with weathering words, but at the other end of the cycle:

    “The season was late for an outdoor concert; already leaves were drifting on to the grass stage – here and there one turned over, crepitating as though in the act of dying, and during the music some more fell. … War had made them idolise day and summer; night and autumn were enemies.”

    Page 3, first Anchor Books edition, July 2002, originally published 1948.

    With every passing day, the past recedes like a tide, images of shells, seaweed, colorful beach towels – open umbrellas grow out of the sand like sea anemones, barnacle dressed rocks litter the floor of our thoughts, night and day, and the waves break farther and farther out but go on and on “like the drip drip drip of the raindrops,” Cole Porter said. But to get back to the Bowen: “The incoming tide was evening. Glass-clear darkness, in which each leaf was defined, already formed in the thicket behind the orchestra and was the other element of the stage” (p. 4).

    Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” also begins in weather:

    “That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The island stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the rims of the ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.”

    Page 3, Anchor Books, May 2000. First published 1938.

  • Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Mr Klein on Hydra, and Bendrix in the Wrong Bed

    The theme tying the Palfrey, Klein, and Bendrix books together, apart from I read them near simultaneously, is how to live given our peculiar predicament in place and time. For Mrs Palfrey and Klein, the quandary is old age, for Maurice Bendrix, another of Graham Greene’s difficult but entertaining characters, it’s another man’s wife.

    Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey finds herself widowed and looking for a suitable place to live out her remaining years. Daniel Klein returns to Hydra, the Greek island he first visited in his youth, now, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus et al his companions, “in Search of a Fulfilled Life.” And Graham Greene, obsessed with another man’s wife, tries to reconcile lust, love, man, and God in London at the end of World War II, no less. The trio of books forms a sandwich of bread fiction with filling of popularized philosophy.

    In Elizabeth Taylor’s “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont,” first published in 1971, recently widowed Laura Palfrey decides she would prefer living in London at a partially residential hotel where she can take her meals and companions or not as part of the deal. She doesn’t have much of a plan, so the random but lifelike twists and turns come naturally, while old age seems to bring the same existential questions one faced in one’s foundling youth but perhaps put on the back burner during one’s years of forced employment or marriage, more concerned about the bread than the filling. But in old age, one returns to the choices of fillings. How, for example, we might fill our time.

    Daniel Klein, in “Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life,” argues for simplicity in old age, the art of doing nothing contentedly, a choice of course requiring a bit of privilege. But his point, in part, is that even those with a ton of privilege often waste it trying to stay young, while old age offers a predicament thoroughly to be enjoyed. Part of that enjoyment includes the gift of being untied from the train tracks of sex.

    Graham Greene’s Maurice Bendrix in “The End of the Affair” enjoys no such respite. Another Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a movie-trailer-like Introduction better left unread or at least saved until after you’ve read the book, “The End of the Affair,” first published in 1951, is another of Greene’s fictions borrowing enough it seems from his own experience to qualify as fictional memoir, a good choice for those readers who might need the explanations of gossip as critical backdrop.

    So, how does one live one’s old age? Well, one could do worse, for starters, than reading about it.