ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1912–1975) was born into a middle-class family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available as NYRB Classics), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other magazines), and a children’s book, Mossy Trotter, while living with her husband and two children in Buckingham-shire. Long championed by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor’s novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon’s Angel (2007). In 2014, NYRB Classics published You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There, a selection of Taylor’s stories, edited by Margaret Drabble.
ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of eight works of fiction, including the novels Cost and Sparta. She is also the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. A Guggenheim fellow, she edited The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics in 2007.
OTHER BOOKS BY ELIZABETH TAYLOR PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
Angel
Introduction by Hilary Mantel
A Game of Hide and Seek
Introduction by Caleb Crain
You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor
Selected and with an introduction by Margaret Drabble
A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Introduction by
ROXANA ROBINSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1947 by Elizabeth Taylor
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Roxana Robinson
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Alfred Wallis, The Hold House, Port Mear Square Island, Port Mear Beach, c. 1932;
Tate, London / Art Resource, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taylor, Elizabeth, 1912–1975.
A view of the harbour / Elizabeth Taylor ; introduction by Roxana Robinson.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-849-2 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-848-5 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PR6039.A928
823'.914—dc23
2014038281
ISBN 978-1-59017-849-2
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR
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INTRODUCTION
I first encountered Elizabeth Taylor when I was in my teens and came across her novels in the house of a glamorous aunt. My aunt had been a fashion editor, and was tall and chic and witty. Her invisible glitter irradiated everything in her house—paintings, furniture, books. Her library held a wide, floor-to-ceiling wall of books, and whenever our family visited, the grown-ups would sit and talk, and I would roam across the shelves, scanning the spines.
Taylor’s titles were of a kind that was fashionable during the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s—A Game of Hide and Seek, A Wreath of Roses, The Soul of Kindness, In a Summer Season—graceful allusive phrases, clever, ironic. Shirley Hazzard’s were similar: The Bay of Noon, The Evening of the Holiday, The Transit of Venus. And Elizabeth Bowen’s: The Death of the Heart, The House in Paris, The Last September. All these British women had worldly, amused voices, deeply informed views of the educated upper-middle class, and brilliant prose styles. It wasn’t only women who used titles of this sort: Graham Greene wrote The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter. (And it wasn’t only Brits. Out of admiring homage I called my first story collection A Glimpse of Scarlet.)
I pulled a Taylor novel from my aunt’s shelf and began to read. I was hooked at once. Taylor’s sentences are like Renaissance jewelry, intricate, composed, flawless.
The cats lay against her shoulder, their gentian eyes wide, their silken nostrils quivering a little at the hated outdoor air, the wind blowing their fur into little divisions. They yearned to get back indoors, to lie on the radiator . . . As Prudence carried them back to the house they looked over her shoulder at the sea contemptuously.
Taylor’s prose is exquisite but not sentimental: These cats are not adorable but contemptuous. A quietly subversive strain runs throughout her work. In A View of the Harbour, bedridden old Mrs. Bracey is not sweet, wise, and selfless, but bossy, bawdy, and raunchy. Beth Cazabon, the lady novelist, is so absorbed by her work that she absentmindedly nearly destroys her family. Lily Wilson, the young war widow, is not staunch and brave but utterly ravaged by fear.
I was entranced by the beauty of the writing and the way Taylor recognized the beauty in the world. I was struck by the way she wrote about the writer’s life. Her treatment of Beth Cazabon is satirical, but it’s also compassionate and truthful: Beth’s fears about her work, about failure, and relevance, and posterity, are real. Trying to choose between the words “vague” and “faint,”
She dipped her pen into the ink. “Vague what?” she began to wonder once more. “This isn’t writing,” she thought miserably. “It is just fiddling about with words. I’m not a great writer. Whatever I do someone else has always done it before, and better. In ten years’ time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust. And, even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares? People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written. They could not easily care less. No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on? The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if ‘vague’ will do better than ‘faint,’ or ‘faint’ than ‘vague,’ and what is to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game.”
I had already begun to think in an unconscious and formless way about being a writer myself. These words gave me a small shiver of excitement and alarm, and a tiny jolt of superiority. I was interested to think that a real writer might suffer from these fears and anxieties. I was partly sure that when I was a writer I would never find myself in that swampy uncertain place, and partly afraid that I would never become a writer.
Now I know these fears are familiar to most writers, because isn’t that the way we spend our days? Trying to choose between one word and another (I’m doing it right now) without any certainty of success? Now I think that seeing the thoughts of a writer in distress offers a kind of solace: The naming of a fear lessens it, and the sharing of it provides fellowship. It’s comforting to realize that your own fears might have been felt by Henry James or Virginia Woolf.
In fact, Woolf is a powerful presence here. Taylor uses her
own diamantine prose to create a narrative mosaic with a shifting point of view, as Woolf did in To the Lighthouse, and Beth’s internal questions about writing echo Woolf’s musing catechisms about the creative process.
Taylor makes the lighthouse a central presence in her book, with an artist who observes it: “He had the feeling that the air trembled and waited, and then, yes—light swung out boldly from the lighthouse . . . flash, wink, pause . . . endorsing what the artist had already decided, that the day was gone.”
Taylor also shares Woolf’s courteous and implacable feminism. When Beth sets off to London to meet with her publisher (it astounds her best friend to learn that the publisher is a woman), she settles onto the train, guilty at having abandoned her domestic responsibilities. She thinks:
“A man . . . would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, nor leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I now discover I have forgotten it. The artfulness of men,” she thought. “They implant in us, foster in us, instincts which it is to their advantage for us to have, and which, in the end, we feel shame at not possessing.” She opened her eyes and glared with scorn at a middle-aged man reading a newspaper.
“A man like that,” she thought, “a worthless creature, obviously; yet so long has his kind lorded it that I (who, if only I could have been ruthless and single-minded about my work as men are, could have been a good writer) feel slightly guilty at not being back at the kitchen-sink.”
Like Woolf, and Jane Austen before her, Taylor writes about the English educated upper middle class. For someone like me, who had grown up reading Anna Sewell, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Enid Bagnold, and C. S. Lewis, and later, Austen, the Brontës, and Woolf, Taylor was writing about a world that I knew very well.
These are characters who are informed and literate, comfortable but not affluent, socially at ease but not aristocratic. All writers write about their own tribes, but this doesn’t restrict their range: The domestic drama is both crucial and fundamental. As Freud would remind us, the family narrative is limitless: The family is itself the drama. The kitchen, the bedroom, and the dinner table are stages for some of the greatest struggles we will ever know.
Emotions don’t change, but mores do, and Taylor’s mid-century English world observed a moral code that was different from the one we know. The notion of honor may have been more widely used, and not only as a patriotic response but as an idea that defined character and shaped behavior: The narrative of The End of the Affair was driven by honor. Today we may have a more provisional and temporary sense of honor and commitment, obligation. But in Taylor’s world honor itself was an enormous moral force. Powerful and compelling, it could supersede passion, giving the notion of renunciation a dignified potency.
Taylor, despite her decorous prose, is deeply conscious of the savage tides of emotion: eros, terror, grief, failure, ecstasy. In this modest domestic setting the great emotions overtake the soul, as they do everywhere. The tone of A View of the Harbour is so quiet and lovely that it seems the narrative must be benign, heartwarming. But the language warns us of the somber core of the book. “In silence they walked round to the front of the house, where the wind waited for them at the corner, striking suddenly like an assassin.”
Taylor records the family dramas, the overtakings of the soul by passion, in precise and luminous language, dealing an exquisite double blow of beauty and pain.
After that first encounter with her work, each time my family visited, I would go to my aunt’s tall shelf, take out one of Taylor’s books, and sit down with it to read. I also began collecting my own copies. At that time there were many secondhand bookstores, and every time I went into one I looked under “Fiction—T.” Over time I found and bought them all: thirteen novels, and a number of story collections.
I remember reading out loud to my mother from one of the novels. By then it was one that I owned. My mother was a reader, and a writer, too.
“Listen to this,” I said to her, offering a writer’s greatest tribute, though I was not yet a writer. “Listen to this sentence.”
I read it out loud, because it spread a kind of dazzling, careless, lilting beauty into the world. And what I wondered was, How did she do it?
—ROXANA ROBINSON
A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR
1
No gulls escorted the trawlers going out of the harbour, at tea-time, as they would on the return journey; they sat upon the rocking waters without excitement, perching along the sides of little boats, slapped up and down by one wake after another. When they rose and stretched their wings they were brilliantly white against the green sea, as white as the lighthouse.
To the men on the boats the harbour was at first dingy and familiar, a row of buildings, shops, café, pub, with peeling plaster of apricot and sky-blue; then as the boats steered purposefully from the harbour-mouth to sea, houses rose up in tiers, the church tower extricated itself from the roofs, the lettering on the shops faded and the sordid became picturesque.
The view remained the same, however, to Bertram, who leant on a wall by the lighthouse. He seemed stationed between sea and land; water rocked queasily on both sides of the arm of the harbour wall where he was. He looked over the boats and seagulls to the public-house on the harbour front.
When he got up in the mornings and went to one of the front windows of that pub to do his breathing exercises, the view was reversed. The lighthouse was the pivot and the harbour buildings, the wall, the sea were continually shifting about it; re-grouping, so that it was seldom seen against the same background. In the same way the harbour wall would lengthen or diminish to almost nothing. ‘Ideal for an artist,’ thought Bertram, taking out his sketch-book and running a line across the middle of a page. He drew in the buildings in squares and oblongs – the largest stone house at one end of the row, the pub, the Mimosa Fish Café, the second-hand clothes shop, the Fun Fair, the Seamen’s Mission, the Waxworks, the lifeboat house. Above he sketched in more roofs and the church tower.
Then he noticed that in the narrow house wedged between the big house and the pub a door opened and a woman came out with a black scarf on her head and a white jug in her hand. She went quickly towards the next house, the doctor’s house, her head bowed over the jug. Often at tea-time he had noticed her going that way with a white jug; at other times she went in the opposite direction to the pub, then carrying a pink jug.
Bertram slipped the sketch-book back into his pocket and took out his pipe. He was not much of an artist, in spite of having found a very good way of painting waves with tops folding over whitely, realistically. As soon as he had mapped out his little scene, curiosity waylaid him, the woman or a man in an apron writing something white upon the window of the Fish Café, having wiped off the ‘Egg and Chips and Tea 1/3’ which Bertram had noticed passing on his way to the lighthouse. ‘Nice Fried Fillets,’ Bertram murmured, ‘not, I hope, Beans on Toast or misspelt Rissoles.’
The inscription, whatever it was, completed, the man went inside. The scene was empty again, except for men gathering up coils of rusty barbed wire (there had been a war on) from the foreshore.
‘The light’s going,’ Bertram said to himself.
All his life at sea he had thought of retiring thus, of taking rooms at some harbour pub, of painting those aspects of the sea which for thirty or more years he had felt awaited his recognition. ‘Make a fine picture,’ he had said, at every sunset, every moonrise, every storm, every jewelled coast-line, seeing not the scene itself but the crystallisation or essence of it, his picture of it, completed in his imagination. ‘Bertram Hemingway, that delightful painter of marine and plage subjects.’ But on paper, with water-colours, the greens became mud, the birds suggested no possibility of movement, stuck motionless above the waves, the crests of the waves themselves would never spill. ‘Perhaps oils,’ he thought. ‘Always trouble with medium. Media, rather. When you go into a harbou
r café you don’t expect to get tinned salmon.’
The Waxworks Exhibition looked sealed, windows covered with grey lace; next door, the second-hand clothes shop was having a lick of paint; the first coat, salmon-pink, framed the display of dejected, hanging frocks; shutters covered the Fun Fair; one of the men had separated himself from the loops of barbed wire and had entered the café; he came to the door now with a cup in his hand, shouted something to his mates, his palm curved like a shell at his mouth. The sound came faintly across the harbour.
Yes, the light was going. Turning, Bertram saw the trawlers spread out widely upon the horizon. Loneliness came down over him. He knocked his pipe against the stone wall and began to go back down the curving mole. ‘Bertram Hemingway, R.N., Retd., the well-known . . .’ ‘Other famous men began late in life,’ he interposed quickly to himself. ‘Look at . . .’ But even if he could have found an example he did not bother, for there was that woman again, tripping along the other way, dodging into her house, her head held up this time, a hand white upon the dark scarf at her throat. No jug. She seemed never to bring them back. Except from the pub. Then she walked slowly, carefully, like a little girl.
A car drew up at the house she had left, the doctor’s house. Out he stepped, slammed the door, paused for a moment to look at the fishing-fleet (most people did), and then, carrying his case, approached the house, knocked, waited, was swallowed up.
Bertram went along the front. ‘Yes, I’ve made a sketch or two,’ he rehearsed for the landlord’s benefit, ‘blocked in the skyline . . . interesting cubist effect these groups of buildings . . . but then the light went.’
In the window of the Waxworks was a showcard announcing in shadowed lettering the latest attraction – ‘The Duke and Duchess of Windsor’; there was some faded crinkled paper, too, and some mice-dirts.
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