Taylor Remade the Novel of Old Age
The novel, as a genre, favors the young over the old. This preference is long-standing. The form rose to prominence, in eighteenth-century Europe, because it registered the psychological disruptions of a newly dynamic capitalist world. For members of the growing middle classes, social position was no longer prescribed at birth. Instead, one had to make one’s way in life. Readers and writers found themselves repeatedly drawn to a certain kind of narrative: the coming-of-age story.
The bildungsroman, or novel of formation, identified youth as “the most meaningful part of life,” as the scholar Franco Moretti has written. The heroes and heroines of Goethe, Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, and George Eliot—among many other authors of the novel’s golden age—are young people, striving and yearning. Their aspirations are licensed, and sometimes wrecked, by a new social order characterized by acceleration, mobility, and change. The works of Austen and Dickens may be stuffed with imperious old dowagers and wrinkled eccentrics, but it is Elizabeth Bennet or David Copperfield to whom the story almost always belongs.
The result is that old age rarely gets adequate representation in the novel. Elderly characters typically appear in supporting roles, and the subjective experience of aging is seldom analyzed in depth. The literature that does study it tends to be grim and pessimistic, with humiliation as a central theme. Think of the deteriorating, besotted writer in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” or the morally compromised old professors in J. M. Coetzee’s “Age of Iron” and “Disgrace,” or, more recently, the unsparing treatment of nursing-home life in Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive, Again.” King Lear spoke of the disintegration of man into a “poor, bare, forked animal.” In the literature that stands in the shadow of “Lear,” old age is represented not merely as a period of diminished capacity but as a debased, even unhuman, form of life.
“Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” the 1971 novel by the English writer Elizabeth Taylor, tells a different story. Although the book’s view of aging is essentially tragic, the gloom is leavened by a gentle humor about the fictions we create to cope with life’s disappointments. The novel follows Laura Palfrey, a widowed grandmother, as she settles into life at the Claremont, a London hotel that doubles as a home for the genteel elderly. Ashamed that her grandson never visits, Mrs. Palfrey passes off Ludovic, a handsome, struggling writer, as her progeny. Ludo, for his part, has his own secret: he’s composing a novel inspired by the Claremont called “They Weren’t Allowed to Die There.” Taylor circles these characters with a probing, dispassionate eye, and her account of aging suggests that literature may, in fact, be a more crucial form for the old than for the young. When one’s possibilities grow constricted, fantasy becomes a means of rescue.
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In the words of one critic, Taylor is “best known for not being better known.” Burdened by her famous name, she has never achieved the level of mainstream appreciation that she is due. Yet a small band of critics and writers ranks her among the most psychologically penetrating English novelists of the twentieth century.
Taylor, unlike Mrs. Palfrey, never reached advanced old age. She died, of cancer, in 1975, at sixty-three. She published twelve novels and four short-story collections; many of the stories first appeared in The New Yorker, and were her main source of fame during her lifetime. Her fiction often follows bourgeois British women whose quiet domestic lives are marred by desperate loneliness and bitter disappointment.
Such work is easily underestimated. The novels, in particular, are formally conservative, limited in scope, and exquisite—akin, the novelist Neel Mukherjee writes, to “perfectly turned Meissen porcelain.” But, as with Taylor herself—who presented as a perfectly conventional housewife, despite being an atheist, and a card-carrying Communist in her twenties, and having an affair that lasted more than a decade—there’s more here than meets the eye. In the novella “Hester Lilly,” a prim wife, seething at her husband, longs to commit “some violent and abusive act, to hit him across the mouth.” A dutiful daughter in “A View of the Harbour” coldly reflects, “She wanted to get married and she wanted her mother to die.” Taylor’s fiction is studded with artist characters whose work takes a melodramatic bent—most memorably the haughty Angel Deverell, the romance-novelist protagonist of “Angel.” Although Taylor herself rejected such modes in favor of studied restraint, it’s clear that she understood their appeal.
Taylor’s fiction pushes public life to the margins; “A View of the Harbour,” from 1947, reserves mention of the Second World War to a parenthetical remark (“there had been a war on”). The private life of feeling is correspondingly magnified, and a single glance, or modulation of voice, can become freighted with significance. Taylor’s characters are trapped in meaningless lives; in studying their loneliness, thwarted chances, and love blocked or impeded, she is occasionally startling. In “A View of the Harbour,” she surrounds a widow, oppressed by her empty house, with wax figures, beseeching forms that underscore the woman’s isolation and fear. In “A Game of Hide and Seek,” an adolescent heroine learns that the boy she loves is to be sent away. Her response, characteristic of Taylor’s work, suggests an agony barely held in check:
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“Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” recently reissued by New York Review Books, extends these themes of loneliness and enclosure. The Claremont is a grim, narrow world unto itself. The novel begins with Mrs. Palfrey arriving in the rain; it ends soon after she’s carried out on a stretcher. But, despite its slightness, it’s perhaps Taylor’s finest work, a story that resists both sentimentality and cruelty. Although Taylor had written of old women before—bossy, bedridden mothers, snobbish alcoholics—she never created anyone as appealing as the dignified Laura Palfrey.
Mrs. Palfrey enters the Claremont armed with a rubber-tipped walking stick and stoic resolve. She learns to navigate the hotel’s clientele: the absurd Mr. Osmond, scribbling reactionary letters to newspapers; the jolly drunk Mrs. Burton, pressing the bell for whiskey; the domineering Mrs. Arbuthnot, who spitefully condoles Mrs. Palfrey when she has no visitors. She eats her celery soup alone, at a separate table, determined to find her place in this strange new world. The conventional bildungsroman follows a young man who moves to the city to make his fortune; “Mrs. Palfrey” studies an old woman who moves to a hotel to live on hers. Call it a coming-of-old-age novel.
One day, walking along the pavement in the rain, her varicose veins aching, Mrs. Palfrey falls. She is rescued by Ludo, an aspiring novelist who lives in a cheap basement apartment and subsists on cans of spaghetti. In gratitude, Mrs. Palfrey invites him to dinner, where she passes him off as her grandson, Desmond, an unfeeling pedant who lives in London but never visits.
It is a mark of Taylor’s compassion that she presents the friendship between Ludo and Mrs. Palfrey as a romance. Ludo is a flirt, and Mrs. Palfrey deeply lonely. After she falls in the street, Ludo clasps her in his arms “like a lover.” At dinner at the Claremont, he balances a piece of cheese on a biscuit, dodges it about “before her laughing mouth, her protesting fluttering hands,” and pops it between her teeth. At his shabby apartment, they sit, sipping sherry and reading aloud a quiz from the evening paper. Ludo is a substitute grandson; he is also a reprise of Palfrey’s beloved dead husband. (Ludo’s love interest, a capricious shopgirl, has her hair dyed “an old woman’s grey.”) He becomes the lone source of joy in Mrs. Palfrey’s radically constricted social world.
To make up a grandson may seem rather daring for a lady like Mrs. Palfrey. But in old age, she finds, the once-secure foundations of identity tend to dissolve. Age demotes her to an inferior class; her Claremont room reminds her of a maid’s bedroom. Gender distinctions, too, seem to collapse. The Claremont’s women look increasingly like old men, the vitriolic Mr. Osmond like an old woman.
Mrs. Palfrey, for her part, is likened to Lord Louis Mountbatten in drag. The comparison to one of Britain’s most famous colonial leaders suggests a political dimension largely absent in Taylor’s other work. Mrs. Palfrey’s husband, the novel suggests, was a colonial administrator in Burma, and her time in the “Far East” is repeatedly cited as preparation for the exotic locale of the Claremont. She remembers how, when she was young, “nearly all the world was pink on her school atlas—‘ours,’ in fact.” Taylor’s story of aging functions as a wry allegory for the twilight of the British Empire. Like that other great novel of institutional living, Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” “Mrs. Palfrey” examines a way of life slated for extinction.
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For the Claremont’s denizens, merely existing is a feat of will. “It was hard work being old,” Taylor writes. “It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost.” Aging is like proceeding through a tunnel that gets progressively narrower. Our social world, our prospects, and our physical capacities diminish, and we increasingly make use of the limited materials available. This is what Taylor did with her modest yet exquisite art—and this is what Mrs. Palfrey does in her relationship with Ludo.
Indeed, Taylor suggests that it is Mrs. Palfrey, not Ludo, who is the novel’s supreme fiction-maker. Reflecting on her long marriage, Mrs. Palfrey thinks, “They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art.” A similar transformation occurs through the course of the book. With time, the critic Jane Brown Gillette observes, Mrs. Palfrey’s fiction—that Ludo is her grandson—becomes real. When the actual Desmond shows up at the Claremont, inquiring about his grandmother, his response to the news of her hospitalization is so callous that the residents conclude that he cannot possibly be her relative. The superior reality of Mrs. Palfrey’s fiction is thereby confirmed. Through her powers of fantasy, she substitutes a loving grandson for a cold one. Fiction triumphs over—and alters—reality.
In the novel’s final pages, Mrs. Palfrey collapses in the doorway of the Claremont. The hotel’s manager orders her to be carried into the vestibule; he wants her out of sight. I have mentioned that even Taylor’s lightest work will sometimes slip into a register of menace. In “Mrs. Palfrey,” that undertow of violence targets the heightened vulnerability of the elderly. To be old, Laura Palfrey remarks, is to be “helplessly exposed”—forced to submit to fear, pain, and unjust treatment.
Mrs. Palfrey’s first fall, in front of Ludo’s apartment, allows her to remake her reality. Her second fall jolts us back to the world as we know it, in which the old and injured are shuttled out of view. The reissue of this charming novel will not persuade many to rethink the attitudes toward old age that have, in the last two years, borne terrible fruit. But it will, for a moment, bring Mrs. Palfrey—and her creator—out of the vestibule and into the light.
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