The Blush and other stories (1958)

Finishing up my year of reading Elizabeth Taylor with two books of short stories, of which this, The Blush, is the first. It's an uneven collection, but several of the stories are stand-outs with echoes from Katherine Mansfield to Jane Bowles. As with many of Taylor's longer works, the theme is loneliness and powerlessness especially as experienced by a 'genteel' woman, struggling to maintain appearances, or a woman uncertain of her standing, socially in the group in which she finds herself. A young woman who has lost her fiancee is invited by the mother to his house, 'one more time', a young woman comes home to a situation in which her best friend has married her father, two unmarried sisters living together, on the edge of late middle age, have to decide on their summer holidays, (that is one of my favorites), a pair who have been exchanging letters for years, finally meet (my absolute favorite) which has a comical aspect, not as harsh as many of the other stories are. One story, "Poor Girl" echoes the James novella The Turn of the Screw but with its own twist, of course. It also seems to refer back to Palladian another early novel. They're quite excellent stories and I'm looking forward to The Devastating Boys the second book, published much later. It will be interesting to see how the stories have evolved.

A couple of choice quotes:

From "A True Primitive" "Lily had not considered culture - as a word or anything else - until she fell in love."

From "Summer Schools" "Melanie closed her eyes and thought how insufferable people became about what has cost them too much to possess - education, money, or even good health." ( )

(1988?)

The sticky-backed plastic covering and “Elizabeth”-era bookplate proclaim this to have been bought before I was 17 1/2 and off to University. One of the best collections of short stories I have ever read, each with a proper story, in that old-fashioned and infinitely (to me) preferable way, each deftly skewering the fears, cover-ups or pretensions inherent within the family and out in society. The first story, “The Ambush” is an amazing portrait of grief, while “The Rose, The Mauve, The White” and “You’ll Enjoy it When You Get There” both capture the agonies of youthful shyness (“‘Shyness is common,’ Rhoda’s mother insisted. ‘I was never allowed to be shy when I was a girl’”). One sentence in the latter story seems to capture the essence of Taylor (and why I love her):

“I’m afraid I don’t care for cats,” said the Mayor, in the voice of simple pride in which this remark is always made. ( )

I started reading these lovely stories the evening before I went to the Elizabeth Taylor day at Battle library in Reading. I had a lovely read of it going down on the train and finished it on the train coming home after a lovely day talking and listening to others talk, about Elizabeth Taylor. I will write another post about that though.

There are 12 stories in this collection – I enjoyed all the stories, they are beautiful, minutely observed and intuitively drawn. Her characters are so immediately recognisable, as Taylor was such a faithful chronicler of people, ordinary middle class people particularly - although she also observes servants and their like with absolute understanding and sympathy. I am not going to try and describe each story – but there are a few I wish to draw attention to, as particularly good examples of Elizabeth Taylor’s stories. In “The Letter Writers” we have a middle aged woman meeting the man to whom she has written to for years – as Taylor describes it…
“the crisis of meeting for the first time the person whom she knew best in the world.”
It is almost inevitably a meeting that is far from what it might have been. The whole is a wonderfully devastating snap shot of a sad lonely woman and the enormity of a meeting which could only ever be disappointing.
“The Ambush” is a touching examination of grief, as a young woman goes to stay with the woman who might have become her mother-in-law had her son not been killed in a car accident.
“Her irritation suddenly heeled over into grief and she dropped her brush, stunned, appalled, as the monstrous pain leapt upon her.”
In “Summer Schools” two middle aged sisters, who share their home, each take a holiday. One sister visits an old married school friend; the other attends a summer lecture course. They each find their experiences to be unsatisfactory, and they are forced to recognise the lives they are leading for what they are.
“Of recent years she had often tried to escape the memory of two maiden-ladies who lived near her home when she and Melanie were girls. So sharp-tongued and cross-looking, they had seemed to be as old as could be, yet may have been no more than in their fifties, she now thought.”
Other stories are darkly comic, such as The Blush – the title story – which is very short – Mrs Allen a sensible middle aged lady finds she become an unwitting alibi for her domestic’s extra marital carryings on. In “Perhaps a family Failing” a young woman marries a man who like his father is possibly a little too fond of the drink – and although it is blackly comic, it is at the same time subtly devastating. ( )