Elizabeth Taylor, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont”

The cover of the Virago edition of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont shows Rupert Friend wearing a modish blue muffler, with his head tossed back as he roars with laughter, and Joan Plowright (also mufflered, though hers is pink) in profile, looking robust and contemporary. It’s a still from the 2006 film of the book, and you can’t blame the publishers for using it, but as I read, the image got further and further from the book’s action. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Elizabeth Taylor’s foray into Barbara Pym land and there’s very little in the way of full-throated laughter. In fact it’s hard to know how it could have been made into a film without being made either cutesy or sentimental.

There is certainly humor in the novel: Taylor’s sharp observations can be very funny. But by the end, this is an unflinching look at the loneliness and humiliation of old age  that tallies in many particulars with Penelope Lively’s How It All Began. The difference is that Laura Palfrey, the heroine — yes, I think we can call her a heroine — of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a woman of a different era from Charlotte Rainsford of How It All Began. Like Charlotte, she’s a widow with a middle-aged daughter. We glean that she spent a great deal of time abroad as a Foreign Service wife. Stoicism and patience are her strengths. She certainly needs them at the Claremont, a dreary London hotel where she takes up residence. We get to know a core of other long-term boarders  and at first we might be in E.F. Benson territory, with the bibulous Mrs. Burton, the mousy Mrs. Post, the wicked Mrs. Arbuthnot on her crutches and ludicrous Mr. Osmond with his perpetual letters to the newspapers. Taylor isn’t above poking fun at them — even Mrs. Palfrey is described amusingly: “She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.”

Funny is too easy, though. One day Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls outside the basement flat of the charming young Ludovic Myers, who takes her in and cleans her up and gives her a cup of tea. This, obviously, is the Rupert Friend part. The two form a desultory friendship and at the Claremont Ludovic is taken for Mrs. Palfrey’s grandson. Possession of an attractive young person does wonders for her status, and Taylor could have played this for laughs: the real and impostor grandsons, the jealous old ladies, the hand-knit sweater with the too-long sleeves, intended for Desmond (real) but given to Ludo (fake). Instead, with the lightest of touches, Taylor indicates Ludovic’s own loneliness and his own sense of honor and independence. It’s honest and touching, but far from heart-warming. Much more interesting than that.

Edith Wharton, “Old New York”

When I was talking to Pat Ryan of the New York Times about this wonderful piece in that newspaper (commemorating Mrs. Wharton’s 150th birthday on January 24), I remembered Wharton’s marvelous series of novellas called Old New York, and realized I needed to read them again.

Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th St. in Upper Manhattan: a country house to Old New Yorkers

My clearest memory was of the first, which involves the sensitive eldest son of a domineering businessman. Lewis Raycie is sent to Europe for a Grand Tour in the 1840s, entrusted with $5,000 to buy pictures for what his father wants to call the “Raycie Gallery.” Charged with purchasing work from the Italian Renaissance, Lewis (under the influence of John Ruskin) buys instead works by Giotto, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca. His homecoming is disastrous. This story is called “False Dawn,” and like the others, it involves some shifting of time-frames; by the end of the story, the paintings are worth five million dollars and have been sold to buy pearls and a Rolls-Royce. From the 1840s we go to the 1850s, to the longest tale which is called “The Old Maid.” (Yes, it’s the source of the 1939 movie with Bette Davis.) Let’s just say it involves several perennial Wharton themes, including the conflict between the security of a bourgeois life and the urge for adventure. This one’s very moving. Wharton never had children but she wrote over and over again about thwarted mothers and complex familial arrangements, always taking into account the tricky weave of emotions surrounding maternity. By contrast, “The Spark” is a simpler thing,  set in the 1890s but with the key action — which we as readers never see directly; interesting choice — occurring during the Civil War. It’s basically a portrait of a stolid society man, Hayley Delane, who fascinates the narrator because of some inexplicable core of generosity that seems to surprise Delane himself. Finally, set in the 1870s comes “New Year’s Day,” which starts with the marvelous line, “‘She was bad… always. They used to  meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother.”  The “she” under discussion is Lizzie Hazeldean and as is usual with Wharton, she’s neither as bad as the mother thinks nor as good as the narrator believes at one point.

Of course New  York is a character in all of these stories. Wharton grew up an awkward, clever society girl in a tight-knit world that she returned to repeatedly in her writing. She managed to break away, but her most famous novels, like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, keep circling around the question of how the individual fits into her community and what is gained or lost by that embrace. She often uses physical settings to underline action. Take the business with the Fifth Avenue Hotel in “New Year’s Day” — a hotel is full of transients, people who don’t belong. (The word “promiscuous” was sometimes used in those days to describe the social mix.) So when Lizzie Hazeldean of Old New York is seen exiting the hotel on New Year’s Day (a day traditionally spent with family), in the company of a man she isn’t married to, and the hotel is on fire — well, that hammers home Wharton’s point about potential social conflagrations when people don’t stay fixed in their circles.

Old New York was published by Appleton & Co. in 1924 and it must have been successful, for it was followed by three more “Old…” city books, all in the same attractive illustrated format. Unfortunately, none was as good as this. In 1931 Appleton published Old New Orleans by Frances Tinker, and in 1933, Old San Francisco by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. E.F. Benson contributed Old London in 1937 but it’s not as good as the “Lucia” novels. I’ve always wondered whether Wharton was commissioned to write Old New York by some clever editor with the extended series in mind, or whether the other collections followed Wharton’s success. This book is by far the best of them.

E.F. Benson, “Paying Guests”

E. F. Benson is familiar to most of us as the author of the immortal Lucia novels which have been brought to our TV screens every now and then, most memorably in a mid-1980s production starring Prunella Scales. Around the same time, a few of Benson’s other novels were re-issued, among them Paying Guests which has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since, surviving purge after purge. I had not re-read it until now but it lingered strangely in my memory — strangely for what is really a rather muted comedy. Unlike his contemporary Wodehouse, Benson isn’t a laugh-out-loud humorist, nor a florid stylist. This is the humor of understatement, dry as a bone. The omniscient narrator sees everything: actions, motivations, afterthoughts, few of which are especially creditable.

It’s a small world Benson portrays here. We are  at “Wentworth,” a guest house in the fictional town of Bolton Spa, which offers baths and nasty-smelling waters to a group of permanent invalids. Wentworth is terribly genteel, recognized not only for the comfort it offers but also for the social standing of its guests. Who — this being a Benson novel — are silly at best, stupendously annoying at worst. But then, look at Mapp and Lucia. What Benson seemed to recognize was that sometimes loathing a character is as satisfying as liking him. In this case the star of the show is the pompous, self-regarding Colonel Chase, a former Indian Army officer who lords it over the other guests at Wentworth, bragging incessantly about his excellent health and bullying them all at the bridge table. One plot development actually does deflate the Colonel’s conceit and this, clearly, is the imbalance in the novel that must be righted. Strangely, the Colonel is more appealing when insufferable.

Other characters: a pair of middle-aged spinsters who become a couple (about one of them Benson says, “Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so”) and a Mrs. Bliss who espouses Mental Science, a thin disguise for Christian Science. Probably funnier in 1929.

Alexander McCall Smith, “Corduroy Mansions”

I quite enjoyed the first two or three of Alexander McCall Smith’s sweet-tempered No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, but my interest flagged beyond that point. I read the initial book in another one of his series — the man is truly indefatigable — but wasn’t sufficiently intrigued to follow through. When a pre-publication galley of Corduroy Mansions fell into my hands a few months ago, I thought it looked somewhat more substantial than my last taste of his work so I read the whole thing… faintly wondering why I continued to turn the pages.

The dog character is charming

The title more or less says it all: Corduroy Mansions is the nickname of a slightly run-down but friendly apartment building in Pimlico, a prosperous area of London. On the top floor lives plump fifty-year-old wine merchant William French, who is tortured by the fact that his twenty-something son Eddie refuses to move out, pay rent, or even wash the dishes. This is pretty much the height of conflict in the book. Other characters undergo different trials, the most entertaining of which is Berthea Snark’s visit to her loopy brother Terence Moongrove. Terence, something of an innocent,engages in spiritual dance and almost inadvertently buys a Porsche after a serious misadventure with a previous car’s battery. Smith’s world in this book is a comfortable one of prosperous well-educated people who come to no greater harm than severe discomfort or embarrassment. In a way, Corduroy Mansions is like a more benevolent version of an E.F. Benson novel, in which Lucia turns out to have a heart of gold and Miss Mapp’s social scheming is prompted by an innocent misunderstanding of other people’s motives.

The whole book has the air of a story that a pleasant, kindly uncle tells you on a very long car trip. The narration moves from character to character, from one mild dilemma to another leaving many plot points hanging: will Martin ever get over Dee’s offer to give him a colonic irrigation treatment? Who is this Annette that James takes up with? Will Freddie de la Hay have to go back to live with the vile Manfred? (Freddie de la Hay is a dog, and probably the most sharply-delineated character in the novel.) The incidents are very loosely held together by the walls of Corduroy Mansions but the ensemble is quite shapeless. And while it’s appealing, the appeal is temperate. You might even say tepid. Maybe I’d like Smith better if he were just a little bit more malicious?

Helen Simonson, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand”

A stranger on a plane recommended Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I had previously passed on it, purely on the basis of the title: it sounded like one of those cutesy English novels that set my teeth on edge. It started like that, too — Major Pettigrew is one of those old-school ex-Army golf-playing types, embedded in his picturesque rural village that’s just crawling with terrifying middle-aged women. So far,  so E.F.Benson.  But Helen Simonson is clever. She manages to keep the novel almost entirely in the consciousness of Major P. while indicating his fallibilities in a way that doesn’t make you hate him. He loathes much about contemporary life, so there’s a lot of railing about that,  some of it quite funny:  of the lumpish waitresses at his golf club, he notices that many “…seemed to suffer from a disease of holes in the face and it had taken the Major some time to work out that club rules required the young women to remove all jewelry and that the holes were piercings bereft of decoration.”

What’s more, Simonson has something in mind beyond the mere village politics, entertaining though those are. The Major, a widower  in his seventies (sorry, I’m not skimming my Kindle version to find out exactly how old), has recently lost his brother. Grief ambushes him physically and he is helped by the woman who keeps the village shop, the Pakistani Mrs. Ali. Simonson gradually peels away the Major’s defenses, revealing his loneliness, as his friendship with Mrs. Ali grows. Of course this causes ripples in the village, especially as the golf club’s annual dance is planned around a theme of “Mughal Splendor.”

I’m not saying this is a searing indictment of covert British racism. Instead, it’s a gentle examination of many forms of cultural blindness. Mrs. Ali has a nephew who, on his most recent trip to Pakistan, has become somewhat radicalized. He and the Major are thrown together and forced to discuss their differences, despite their deep discomfort. The Vicar (of course there is a Vicar) feels obliged to protest the Major’s growing intimacy with Mrs. Ali, a conversation in which both men are allowed to appear well-meaning and awkward, and to part without having reached a conclusion.

Simonson is comfortable with ambiguity, and maybe that’s the best thing about this rather sly novel. Mrs. Ali talks about how her shop is  “a tiny free space in a world with many limits.” The author does not resolve the Major’s difficult relationship with his self-absorbed son. And she is really good on death and grief; there’s a passage where the Major’s wife, Nancy, on her deathbed, “gazed at him [Roger, the son] as if to burn his face into her fading mind.” Of course — the dying are being parted from loved ones as much as the departed.

Everything gets wrapped up rather cheerfully at the end — Simonson is clearly writing a comedy, which requires this resolution — but she leaves the reader with something to think about.

E.M. Forster, “A Room with a View”

Is it possible that I had never read A Room with a View? Maybe the glorious 1986 movie made the book seem unnecessary? Or maybe I read it many years ago and had simply forgotten what fun it is. Forster is really funny! Just look at the chapter titles: “In Santa Croce with No Baedeker,” “How Miss Bartlett’s Boiler Was so Tiresome,” and my favorite, “The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carrriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them.” Actually, that last title encapsulates a great deal of the charm Forster deploys here. The names, for one thing: Cuthbert Eager! Eleanor Lavish! Perfectly plausible yet ironically descriptive. And the meticulous identification of each English character contrasts with the collective identification of the “Italians” mocks the English point of view so elegantly.

Of course I did remember the plot, which is also the plot of Elizabeth von Arnim’s delightful The Enchanted April (another entertaining English movie): upper-middle class English people go to Italy and discover Life. In Forster’s hands, the tale is a little bit more complicated since young Lucy Honeychurch is caught between the stifling propriety espoused by her cousin Charlotte, and the liberating enthusiasm embodied by the socially suspect Emersons, father and son. Among the many clever features is the fact that Forster creates a much more detailed portrait of Lucy’s fiancé, the buttoned-up Cecil Vyse, than he does of the ultimate love interest George Emerson. George is more or less Life Force in a youthful male guise — not that far, actually, from the Italian characters in the Florence segment of the book. Yet it’s in keeping with the generally benign outlook of the book that Forster handles even his annoying characters with considerable sympathy. Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy’s cousin, is a born martyr. Sitting on the ground at a picnic (having insisted Lucy take the “mackintosh square”), she says, “The ground will do for me. Really I have not had rheumatism for years. If I do feel it coming on I shall stand. Imagine your mother’s feelings if I let you sit in the wet in your white linen.” Yet even Charlotte, in the end, turns out to have a kernel of heart. In fact, that may be what separates A Room with a View from, say, the Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, which cover much the same social territory. The difference may be that Forster was genuinely fond of his creations.

Angela Thirkell, “What Did It Mean?”

Published in 1954, What Did It Mean is Thirkell’s homage to the Coronation. It focuses on the Coronation festivities in Northbridge, and the comedy resides largely in observation of a group of volunteers mounting a theatrical production. Now that I think of it, E.F. Benson’s account in one of the Lucia novels provides the precedent though Benson is bitchier than Thirkell.  Pleasure in this one is diluted by Thirkell’s habit of repetition; if she tells us once she tells us six times about Noel Merton’s slight crush on Mrs. Brandon. Every time she brings two characters together she re-establishes their previous relationship. If you were talking to her, you’d say, “Yes, I remember that.” Tedious, but redeemed by the business in which young Lord Mellings performs with Aubrey Clover, Thirkell’s answer to Noel Coward.