A View of the Harbour

A lovely novel depicting the lives of the inhabitants of a down-at-the-heels seaside resort in Britain just after World War II. Everything’s a bit shabby here, wrinkled and threadbare and going soft at the edges. But Taylor’s detailing of the everyday, of the misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and missing pieces of the puzzle, is razor sharp and illuminative. The writing is clear and beautiful:

”Seen from afar, the lighthouse merely struck deft blows at the darkness, but to anyone standing under the shelter of its white-washed walls a deeper sense of mystery was invoked: the light remained longer, it seemed, and spread wider, indicating greater ranges of darkness and deeper wonders hidden in that darkness.” (page 277)

A View show more of the Harbour is a finely observed novel of shifting and differing perspectives, a treat for anyone less concerned about plot and more interested in character and internal tension. show less

I think we need a word for books that work as a palate cleanser. I have read A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor before, along with all her other books and short stories. It is in many ways a small story. There is a street in a small coastal town that is slowly dying as the tourists no longer come to the wax museum and other attractions. There is Bertram, a retired seaman who has come to town to paint, fulfilling a lifetime ambition in practice if not in quality. There’s Tory, recently divorced and lonely. She is falling in love with her best friend’s husband and the feeling is reciprocal. Beth, the oblivious best friend and wife, is writing a book. And there are so many other intriguing and colorful characters.

Bertram’s show more arrival affects the community. He trifles thoughtlessly with the widowed owner of the wax museum. He declares himself in love with Tory. He spends hours at the deathbed of the village gossip. All these small things create an engrossing story that is rich in human detail and understanding.

So I should just start with A View of the Harbour is by one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Taylor. Around 2011, in honor of her 100th birthday, several of her books were published and I discovered her for the first time. For me, she seems like the Jane Austen of the post-war United Kingdom. She wrote with the compassion, humor, and venom of Austen. Her characters are complicated and we can alternately feel contempt and compassion for them. She writes beautifully of people and place and creates memorable people. It’s interesting, too, to read her writing about writing. In A View of the Harbour Beth struggles to balance taking care of the house and her children with writing and resents, ever-so-politely that her work is not really important. She snaps one night and it feels so good, not just for the reader, but for her, too.

A View of the Harbour at New York Review Books
Elizabeth Taylor on Wikipedia
“Rediscovering Elizabeth Taylor” at The Guardian
“The Other Elizabeth Taylor” at The Atlantic

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“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 the little boat, 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 cafe, pub with peeling plaster of apricot and sky blue; then as 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.”

Those show more words were penned by Elizabeth Taylor, and she could so easily have been writing about my own harbour-town, but I was swept away to another harbour-town in another age. To Newby, a small town on the south coast just after the war.

Bertram Hemingway, a retired naval man, was a newcomer to the town. He intended to spend his days painting views of the harbour. He enjoyed the company of women, he enoyed being involved in the life of the town, but he gave no thought to the possibility that some would read much more than he meant into the interest he showed.

That was what happened to Lily Wilson, a shy and lonely war widow, struggling to cope with her responsibilities as proprietor of the town’s waxworks museum. Of course the was going to read things into the attentions of a man who bought her drinks, walked her home, sympathised with her.

But Bertram was more interested in the rather more sophisticated Tory Foyle. She and her husband had moved into their holiday cottage during the war, and when they divorced Tory chose to stay when her former husband returned to their home in London.

Tory was flattered by the attention, but she was caught up in an affair with, Robert Casubon, the town doctor. They had known each other for years – they were neighbours, and Robert’s wife, Beth, was Tory’s best friend – but, quite unexpectedly, something had somehow changed between them.

Beth hadn’t noticed. She was caught up in the writing of her new novel, and rather more interested in the characters in her head than her husband and daughters. She loved her family, of course she did, and she did what she should, but she felt detached and guilty at the way her work called her away from them.

But Prudence, the elder of those two daughters, had noticed.

And maybe Mrs Bracey would notice too. She observed the comings and goings of her neighbours so carefully, she loved to gossip., and her failing health often gave occasion to call out the doctor.

These, and other lives, go on behind the closed doors of this faded seaside town. And they are painted so beautifully, with understanding, with wit, and with wonderful clearsightedness.

Elizabeth Taylor’s characters are not, in the main, sympathetic, but they are intriguing. Flawed human beings, each one utterly real, and each one a product of a history that is not entirely revealed and would maybe explain much.

And so I was fascinated as I read of their overlapping lives, set out so beautifully. Wonderful prose carried me along, and so often I was touched by moments of pure insight and moments of vivid emotion.

I felt Lily’s pain as she realised she was not going to be rescued from her lonely life. I understood Prudence’s resentment as she had to fetch her father from Tory’s drawing-room when a patient called. And I smiled at the wonderful letters Tory received from her son, away at boarding school.

What didn’t ring quite so true was the portrayal of the town. There is a camaraderie and spirit among seafaring folk that spreads through seaside towns. And there are many buildings and activities around harbour-towns that you don’t find in other towns by the sea. All of this was missed, and the view was that of a visitor, not a resident.

But maybe that was deliberate; because if there is a theme running through this novel it is that we so often see a less than complete picture, or a distorted view, of the world around us.

And as a study of human lives, in showing that, this novel works quite beautifully. show less

This novel is set in a run-down harbor town following WWII. Its residents, both permanent and temporary, are skillfully and compassionately created by Taylor. There is not much of a plot; however, beneath the surface, there is much observed by and of the citizens that make for a thought-provoking read.

There is a range of ages and relationships. Beth, married to the resident doctor, is immersed in writing about whatever her imagination creates, remaining oblivious to the romantic relationship that has developed between her husband and best friend, Tory, whose husband has divorced her. Beth's two daughters have their own lives, seemingly separate from their parents. Prudence, the older sister, is aware of the romance, and acts out show more accordingly. Down the street live the Bracey family. The mother is a bedridden harridan, who lives for town gossip and shows little gratitude for those who attend to her needs. Bertram Hemmingway is a temporary resident, who fancies himself an artist despite evidence to the contrary. When Tory becomes disenchanted with the doctor and life in a small, dreary town, she deigns to marry Bertram as a means of returning to London.

None of these characters is particularly likeable, but their common bond is loneliness, which is perfectly captured. Their interactions are superficial and no meaningful dialogue with each other exists other than in their minds. At the end of her life, Mrs. Bracey concludes that we are all alone in both life and death, a staggering account of her own life that could have been different. show less

Lovely descriptive writing, plenty of period charm, some great lines, and an interesting group of characters. There is a story of sorts, but it doesn't really matter much: this is all about the momentary interactions between the characters and the setting.

In her introduction to the Virago edition, Sarah Waters draws attention to how visual Taylor's imagery is, with a lot of references to shapes and colours. But it's not just visual: sounds and smells play a very important part too. And we keep coming back to the passage of time:

Children know, too, those long periods of watching light as it fans out across ceilings, descends the walls. The ghost against the door returns to dressing-gown, the chest-of-drawers stands forward at last, so show more prosaically, a piece of furniture merely. Then, somewhere in the house, a bed moves, a grating, a creaking, prelude to the day. (Ch.15)

It would be a mistake to write it off as quaint and charming. There's a lot more going on here than a sleepy season in a decayed seaside resort. Taylor wants us to reflect on life and death, on expectations about the role of women, on the limitations of art, and on the gap between reality and imagination, among other things.

Someone else here already pointed out that there is a flavour of Under Milk Wood about A view of the harbour. I suppose a lot of that is simply down to the setting: one small fishing port is much like another. We are always going to find priests, landlords, retired captains, washerwomen and the rest. But there is also a strong similarity in the way so many of the characters have not-quite-intersecting stories, and the sense that there is a huge, exciting imaginative world concealed behind their rather prosaic lives. The two overlap in time, so either could conceivably have influenced the other, even if there's no evidence that they did — Dylan Thomas first put together some of the ideas he would use in Under Milk Wood in a short story called "Quite early one morning", broadcast in 1945; A view of the harbour was published in 1947; Thomas completed his work on Under Milk Wood in May 1953, and it was first broadcast (after his death) in January 1954. show less

The seaport of Newby sits tucked around its harbour but its glory days have passed by, with its buildings best seen from far out in the harbour where distance turns them from dingy to quaint. We see it first through the eyes of an outsider, Bertram Hemingway, R.N., Retd., who has come to the seashore to stay in the harbour pub so that he could finally paint “those aspects of the sea which for thirty or more years he had felt awaited his recognition”. He is a lonely man and he has come to a lonely place. With Bertram’s eyes we see Tory Foyle walk to the pub and to the doctor’s house carrying jugs, observe the grey lace curtains of the closed Waxworks. The village in its turn watches Bertram.

We, with Bertram, are looking in. When show more we are permitted to begin to see the inhabitants some thirteen pages later, we do so with a sense that we have breached the insular atmosphere of this fishing town and will now be shown something very intimate and private. And so we will.

We meet Tory Foyle, a divorcee who has been left for another woman by her wealthy husband, despite her great beauty. We encounter her best friend, Beth Cazabon, a writer whose writing constitutes a reality more compelling for her than that of her husband and children. Beth is married to Robert Cazabon, the local doctor. They have two children: Prudence, an awkward and sickly young woman of 20, and Stevie, a strong-willed girl of 6.

We are introduced to the termagant a few doors along from the Foyles and Cazabons, Mrs. Bracey, who ran the secondhand clothing shop until she became paralysed. Now she runs her daughter Maisie ragged with her demands, criticisms and coarseness. Maisie’s life is tied to her mother’s, shopkeeper and general dogsbody. Iris, her other daughter, is able to escape to her job at the pub. And yet they love their mother, as we learn.

There is little Edward Foyle, Tory’s son, writing sad little letters from his boarding school and making the odd appearance in his home. Sad too is Lily Wilson, the widow who runs the Waxworks, and flits in and out of the story like a ghost, lost since the death of her husband. There are also folks like Mr. Ned Pallister, the publican, Mrs. Flitcroft , who is Beth’s daily help and the one who lays out the dead when necessary, Eddie Flitcroft, her nephew, a fisherman, Mr. Lidiard, the curate, and the salacious Librarian with his odd censorship of people’s reading and disturbing licking of his lips. And, of course, there is Bertram Hemingway, insinuating himself into all of their lives, to his eventual great peril.

It is when we learn a secret about two of the characters that Elizabeth Taylor moves us from that first distant perspective to one with a focus so sharp, so perfectly defined, that I was in awe of how deftly she managed it. The characters are wonderfully drawn: the characterization of Mrs. Bracey is one of the best I have read in a long time. What actually happens to these people, what they do and how they end up is for the author to tell you. I can say without a spoiler that an excellent sense of humour informs the whole, albeit a bit noir at times and that, always, the writing is beautiful. show less

I do not know why I was not exposed to reading Elizabeth Taylor in school. Her depictions of everyday life and how she makes these so special is phenomenal. Her writing is captivating. Her dialogue is realistic, and her descriptions are thorough. I would have gained so much more from reading her prose than that which I was forced to read. This author is definitely underrated. This is the second book I've read of Ms. Taylor's and it won't be the last.