Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. This discovery, that he did not know, had a little disconcerted Mrs Palfrey, for she did not know it either, and began to wonder what she was coming to.
A thoroughly charming and poignant read, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont concerns the loneliness and impotence of aging, and brave efforts to retain dignity and relevance as the brain and body fails. Released in 1971 and set in London, England, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor (how challenging to be the second most famous person of that name) captures the end days of the last of they who had known Britain as a true empire – Mrs Palfrey herself had been brought to Burma as a young bride, where she learned to deal with both natives and snakes, and now all around her she sees long-haired young people slinging Union Jack carrier bags as they attend their protest rallies – so while there is something (comfortingly) old-fashioned and proper about the setting, Taylor's insights into the human heart and mind feel as true today as they would have some fifty years gone. There are many wryly funny bits and bits to break one's heart; just a perfect little gem.
She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.Mrs Palfrey – recently widowed and pointedly not invited to come live with her only daughter in faraway Scotland – has decided to move into the Claremont Hotel; a respectable, if affordable, residence that houses a handful of other old folks and a small trickle of regular overnight guests. It's not exactly homey – the receptionist frowns at the permanent residents moving around the chairs in the lounge and the aging Italian waiter prissily corrects the French pronunciation of menu items – but Mrs Palfrey vows to make the best of it; what other choice does she have? It soon becomes clear to her that with the boring routine of endless days, and the petty jostling for social standing among this gaggle of aging old biddies (the only male resident keeps himself aloof from, but watchful of, the fray), prestige and admiration is afforded to those who have visitors; and visitors come so rarely. When she first arrived, Mrs Palfrey announced that she expected her only grandchild, Desmond, to be a frequent dinner guest of hers at the Claremont (as he was also resident in London), but as time went on without a visit and even her letters to him went unanswered, the lonely old woman was forced to acknowledge her embarrassment and her effective abandonment. But when she unexpectedly struck up a friendship with another young man, and when he was mistakenly taken for her grandson by the other residents, Mrs Palfrey embarked upon a course of deception that brought her much delight, and made for a tense reading experience: Just how devastating will it be if the ruse is discovered? The stakes literally felt like they couldn't be any higher (and especially as this young man was an aspiring novelist who was using their friendship to gather material, rushing home after each dinner to scribble notes about Mrs Palfrey's crepe-like skin and unpleasant violet-water scent).
It was hard work being old. 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. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.This narrative is bittersweet without being overly sentimental – if we should live so long, our minds and bodies will fail us, too – but Taylor keeps it entertaining with frequent humour and cutting observations; you might cringe but you oughtn't cry. And then it all ends just perfectly. Just what I needed.
This is the first time I've read Elizabeth Taylor, but as she seems to be a favourite (if obscure) author for some of my Goodreads friends, I thought I'd take the plunge - and as can been seen from my review, am glad I did. So, of further note: The introduction to my edition was written by Paul Bailey (another apparently respected author whose many books I have not read) and he tells the story of meeting Elizabeth Taylor at some literary cocktail party in the 60's. He had recently released (and been praised for) At the Jerusalem - a book about a bunch of old women at a nursing home - and it had gotten out that he had written the book while working at Harrods:
She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as a setting for a novel, and she had gone to Harrods to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not expected to see someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.So, how fascinating (to me and Bailey) that Taylor's next book was about old people, and also about a young man who worked at Harrods (like Bailey), who had also been an actor at one time (like Bailey), and who befriended the elderly in order to make a novel of what he learned from them (like Bailey). I looked up the Wikipedia page for this novel (I was trying to figure out just what Mr Palfrey did in Burma; couldn't find it), and under "Major Themes", it says:
A common theme in Taylor's work is the relation of an artist to others, which is often presented as exploitative. In this case the artist is Ludo, who uses his observations of Mrs. Palfrey to write his novel. (Kingsley) Amis describes Taylor's presentation of Ludo's motives as "scrupulously balanced" between affection, boredom, and delight in finding her "such marvellous material, and also unintentionally funny."All that to say: I'm intrigued by the idea that Taylor likes to write about artists having an exploitative relationship with others, and particularly in this book where she exploits another author's lived experience to write about an author exploiting another's lived experience. Interesting. I hope to read more from Taylor.
