Quiet Revolutions

After the vast barbarities of war we have the diminutive savageries of peace, that are almost too small to see. Luckily there is Elizabeth Taylor, a mistress of the subtle brutalities of ordinary living. Wherever she goes - to the butchers, the chemist, the haberdashers - she takes her microscope; then, after selecting each specimen, she focuses the lens…

Recently she’s made a new friend; a harsh, wild, dangerous woman: now listen to me, Patricia Highsmith says, then smiles, then taps Elizabeth on the knee, as they discuss A Wreath of Roses; what you need is a sexually violent young man…

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Frances is painting a wreath of roses reflected in a mirror. It feels wrong. This picture is a struggle. It will not cohere. She loses patience. The act too willed, it is lacking the grace of the unconscious flow of a hand that thinks, the mind its silent servant. It's…it's… Too thought-out to be natural. This is not the artist’s cleverness, which lives in a canvas that suggests, guides, dictates - we must listen to the works we are creating. Our work a friend, with whom we relax, letting the sensibility play without restraint or self-consciousness. That mirror is a giveaway. She doesn't like it! This painting merely some acquaintance we meet in the street, where we fight for words we do not feel (how is Margaret?) labour under their battered bodies (I think it's going to rain) as they crawl painfully up the throat (Dennis has been in hospital). The relief of that last goodbye! Her inspiration straggles out. She doesn't like it. The motif belongs to somebody else. Morland Beddoes wants her to stay true to her spirit - he is thinking of those earlier more decorative works - not wander off into these dark expressive canvases she has been doing of late. Succumbing to his influence - he is a man she respects - she paints against her current tendencies and the natural flow of her talent. She rejects the result. Do not listen to others! Follow your inner voice. Paint what you feel at this moment, do not cater for the aesthetic delights even of Morland, who knows you well. She has spent a lifetime listening to this voice. Why not now? This picture does not work. She discards it. And in a melodramatic gesture, typical of the artist, she says I will not paint again. Something has broken inside Frances Rutherford.

She is getting old. The attacks of rheumatism last longer and are more frequent; there are days she cannot work at all. Her body is in general decline, and with the loss of this physical power that tough independence is suddenly under threat: others - it is not just Morland - are starting to impose upon her. The autonomy she needs, so closely aligned to the truth of her art, is crumbling; there are feelings of loss, of failure, which she has incorporated in her new style, distasteful to those who desire her previous vigour, its colourful confidence. In a moment of weakness, in a desire to please, she had turned back to a style that - because now forced - is close to sentimentality. Will her distaste at such falsity foul her for good? We do not believe it. Frances Rutherford too much the artist to give up on a whim.

Alone, with the door locked, she felt safe to paint and to be herself. To her, work was a loosening of will, a throwing down of defences. Sitting back, utterly malleable, her personality discarded like a snake’s skin, she became receptive, and so creative. Unperceived lights now struck her, and her concentration could lift each leaf from its fellows, separate and halo every flower. To be interrupted was like having a foot tread down layers of ice in her breast, painful and humiliating, but destructive above all; for the vision, or the illusion, would hasten away.

As a child, beguiled, enchanted, she had drifted from one object to another - the little treasures of childhood, the veined pebbles, the raindrops lying like mercury on hairy leaves, shells, whorled fossils, waxen petals - holding them in her hands, not knowing yet what to make of them, but pained by her inadequacy.

Painting lessons did not teach her. She drew well, with pleasure. The pictures of apples and flowers and check dusters resembled the apples and flowers and check dusters; the resemblance was like one person dressing-up in another’s clothes, an outward, visible likeness was achieved, but the inward, invisible transference was not made.

Then, one day, when she was a young woman, she suddenly, and as if by chance, related her talent to her genius. She cast away the dressing-up clothes and willed herself into what she painted. She threw away her personality and it changed. The nervous effort was extreme, for the difference was the distance between charades at parties and Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre.

The teachers thought she had lost her talent.

But their verdict did not matter. She could go on looking at things, and now knew, not frustration, but precisely what she should do with what she saw. This happiness overrode the disadvantage of her gift.

She was robust physically and mentally. She worked for her living. Her life was sparse and lonely. In the middle of a party, silence would come down in her like a shutter, the need to be alone; so she gave up going into company. She saved her money and she bided her time, and painted.

Knowing her gift she yet tries to paint this wreath of roses. She must fail - when measured against her own standards - and does. The ghost of Ophelia wanders these country lanes, but she will not live again. The previous decorative sensibility has gone; the mad tragedies of existence - partially tamed by myth and corralled within a fine art tradition - can no longer be painted in the old pretty Pre-Raphaelite ways. Frances, living through her own starless night, cannot paint the dark passions in light colours; it is why this brush rebels against the brain.

Her creator is more robust. Mixing both with a virtuoso’s artistry, Elizabeth Taylor draws the evil passions inside a quiet domestic frame. The drama of a thriller, thrust into life’s social comedy, is blended with the tranquil tones of a typical Middle England town, to leave a mildly distracting scene. An automobile’s exhaust goes bang! in an empty market square disturbing the wood doves, who fluttering into the sky fall back onto other eaves and different trees. That’ll be old ‘enry’s chatabank, the one peep of protest, it pops out of a cottage’s tiny window. Silence then settling again. Hertfordshire. Bucks. Bedfordshire. Everyday innocence retains its hold here, as it should; this part of England is no war zone. Our author shows little interest in the gothic shocker (that’s your field, my dear Patricia, gently removing her hand from her knee). It is the small deaths - of feeling, of thought, of sensibility - that captivates this author’s attention. A Wreath of Roses speaking of quieter fatalities than rape, torture, and serial killings.

This month is supposed to be a holiday. Liz, for whom Frances used to nanny, and her friend Camilla stay every year; it is the one time Frances is close to people; having made of herself a kind of hermit, the only way she can create art. But for once the company isn’t congenial. All three characters having changed, causing frictions that make them all uncomfortable.

Frances has suddenly aged. Liz too is different. For the first time - and to her surprise - she feels she belongs to a family; she longs to be with Arthur, orientating her life and thoughts around him and Harry, her newborn son. What a change! Liz the flighty young woman no more. Camilla, feeling these changes, finds her own emotional and sexual needs springing alive. A suicide at the railway station has been the catalyst; it has left her unsettled, oddly febrile, unable to calm down. It’s that young man, who also witnessed the incident. Staying in town, he has become an obsession; his presence encouraging those sexual and emotional shoots to twist and tingle - they are growing so quickly! - prickling her body with unease and uncertainty. Oh how she feels it, that excruciating ecstasy! A bud becoming a bush starting to flower… Handsome and charming, with a touch of danger, Robert disturbs and excites Camilla, a virgin still in her late twenties. Almost a spinster - she stands uncomfortably on its threshold - Camilla is falling into her first sexual passion and feeling the horrible delight of losing control; which confuses; it electrifies. The gate opens, the beast stirs… She cannot move. The habits of captivity are holding her back. Restless. She gets up. Scratches herself. Still she cannot move. She shakes her head, shuffles her paws back and forth; that wide open space growing larger and larger… Then, suddenly, against her own instincts, that first tentative step….

Some local history is being killed off here. For years Frances, Liz and Camilla have followed the same comfortable routine; which neither Frances’ age nor Liz’s marriage has affected much; Frances having never lost her energy, Liz being detached from her husband; Camilla always remaining the same. This last a characteristic of the intelligent child who in growing up extremely quickly is then fixed into a permanent adolescence.1 (Only the shocking intrusion of the gothic can change this daughter of a don.) These differences have protected each from the other, allowing their relationships to settle into a fixed pattern; Liz opening Camilla up a little, Frances enjoying a companionship that doesn't intrude upon her independence. It is this history that is to die out over the course of this holiday. Frances, Liz, Camilla. Three islands that - the earth moves, the water retreats - are joined to land, over the course of a few days. Each is to become attached to somebody else. Liz needs to be close to Arthur. Frances, in a moment of weakness, lets Liz help her into bed. And although Liz, doing it badly, fails, and Frances again exerts herself, a radical shift has occurred in this relationship; Liz, knowing herself now the stronger, decides that she will take in and look after this formidable woman. And oh yes! We almost forgot Camilla. What a transformation! A lovesick teenager! Mad about sex her aloofness disappears, that superciliousness is melting away. Suddenly she’s very needy.

Robert Elton Esq. is either a murderer or a madman (who has convinced himself that he has murdered). We are never sure which; although the one example of his misanthropy - he once scared a young boy in his care by running far ahead - sounds too homely for a psychopath. Called to judge, we decide he is a fantasist who no longer knows the true from the false. He frightens Camilla. In the climatic scene, they are alone inside a ruined house, that most gothic of novelistic attractions - though Millais shares the rent with Charlotte Bronte - Robert tells Camilla of his crime. I need to cause pain, he says, his hands touching her neck. She wants to scream. Help me! Help me! But she is alone and any sign of fright will tighten those fingers. She keeps calm. Waits for those fingers to relax. Then chooses her moment to walk slowly out the house; only when at a distance running madly away…to fall into the arms of Morland as he rounds a corner. It is a ironically romantic end to the novel. A child runs to mummy, who saves her from scary spider. 

Only happenstance - aided by a recent emotional disturbance - can connect two such lonely people; Camilla’s wild emotions fusing with Morland’s newly acquired need to create this unexpected communion. And though the author keeps the ending open - they are left in that accidental embrace - these last moments suggest a pleasant denouement. Mother calms the child; then picks up an empty jar, to carefully collect the creepy-crawly, releasing him on the garden lawn. The child, rubbing one eye, and trying very hard to sob, watches intently from the kitchen window. Spiders are not so terrifying after all.

This author’s natural bent is for the light emotions and domestic melodies; the violence and passion of a thriller alien to her delicate talents. Did friends or the publisher suggest Robert Elton Esq., thinking a genre story would give her commercial success? Is this Frances Rutherford in a moment of weakness… Just like her heroine Taylor is too much of the artist to submit to another’s influence; though stimulated by the idea of a serial killer she has moulded him to her fictional environment; a violent maniac, hemmed in by the temperate natures of the civilised and the wise, has been absorbed into a placid provincial scene, which, in the end, defeats him. A killer has been transformed into a lunatic that can disturb but does not destroy the calm existence of these characters from the Home Counties. A car radio blasts through a quiet street. Later, when walking by the local pond, we hear a duck dive into water… 

Violence for this author has its own singular meaning. It signifies those little breaks that separate out each period of our lives; breaks that are so small we hardly see them, though in retrospect they seem obvious: when asked Camilla will say, oh yes, that week was a terrible wrenching. Such breaks dissolve the settled past to form a future that will have a completely different shape. This old maid is metamorphosing into a young wife.

The short 1940s are over. The long 1950s has already began.

In the picture framed by the mirror, Camilla’s bed primly awaited her, the sheet neatly turned back, and for once she thought without disgust of the great rumpled beds in Frances’s paintings  which she had always looked at with fastidious, cold appraisal, but now longed for with the thought inherent in squeamish people that the sordid must always be truer to life than the agreeable…

She crossed her arms and slid down the ribbons of her nightgown from her shoulders. The picture in the mirror exasperated her. She remembered herself as a girl. The sharp white shoulders, the high bosom had so imperceptibly, yet so soon, assumed this heavy golden ripeness, and how much more abruptly would exchange maturity for old age. Not only the candlelight made her beauty seem precarious. In her youth, discipline, over-niceness had isolated her. Shyness, perhaps, or pride, had started her off in life with a false step, on the wrong foot. The first little mistake initiated all the others. So life gathered momentum and bore her away; she became colder, prouder, more deeply committed; and, because she had one refused, no more was offered. Her habit now was negative. A great effort would be needed to break out of this isolation, which was her punishment from life for having been too exclusive; she must be humbled, be shamed in her own eyes, scheme and dissemble for what she wanted or it would be too late.

‘A hackneyed theme,’ she told herself, her stubborn daytime face suddenly reflected back.

That narrow, sarcastic creature, the pinched and repressed child, whom we first met at the railway station, has opened up into an emotional and sexual, a vulnerable woman. A suicide and a chance conversation with a handsome co-witness has removed her reserve, melting down those frigid barriers of intellect and self-regard. All her defences gone, she is wide open. Frances is right, Camilla is the most fragile of the three; a virgin of the feelings she is overwhelmed when they begin to flow. The bank breaks. The river floods. The village street fills to the bedroom windows with muck, mud and debris. Overwhelmed, she loses control and is at the mercy of an enchanter, who is too mad to collect on his good fortune. It was fated. Camilla was bound to fall for a bad man. Only the charm of the wicked - that wildest of all personalities - could unloosen such tightly locked emotions. The highly repressed need the shock of the extremely unstable; only an earthquake to knock their high walls and buttresses down. Or to be more precise. The iron fragility of the puritan resonates with the reckless instability of the madman until, like a suspension bridge caught within a wrong rhythm, they wobble in unison, shake violently, collapse.

There is also art. The writer’s metaphor: Robert has killed off an old maid. The uptight, clever, and slightly nasty young woman - her virginity has narrowed her soul - is turned into an open, foolish, pretty girl; delighted with that corny embrace at the novel’s end. Only now - after that horrible wrenching - is Camilla mature enough for a romance.

We are in a cosy living room playing with genre. Muffled by the deep windows a news-seller shouts out the latest headlines, the MP chats with the Lord Lieutenant by the front door, while a local union man sings out hallo! as he gets off the bus; the greengrocer coming out to see what’s going on. The outside world is a presence in this novel, though we feel it only as atmosphere. The symbols so diaphanous that we need a microscope to see them. Nevertheless, we sense an external pressure on these characters; they are held back, restricted, forced down; each locked into the prison that has become themselves. The social pattern is too fixed, a little tight… There has been an over-accommodation with the hardships of the post-war peace, creating a desire to break free from these tough years of austerity. And as with Rose Macauley’s The World My Wilderness there is same flirtation with criminality and sex - those once two terrible social taboos. This pressure is particularly acute with Camilla, but the others, each in their way, are breaking free from the regimen of the recent past; even Frances had succumbed for a short while, thus that brief surrender to Morland’s conventional taste. Albeit Frances is a complicated case that doesn't quite fit the theme. Connubial romance and domestic ease are the fashion now. The asceticism of the committed (artist, politician, bureaucrat) has had its day.2

Louder than the melodies of war, austerity and the coming consumer boom are the rhythms of class. Mrs Parsons is puzzled by the frugal amounts of food these characters pack for their picnics - they could be clergy, she thinks, so parsimonious are they with their entertainments; now I would be packing crates of beer… Our lot enjoy ourselves a great deal more, she concludes. There is incomprehension on both sides. Camilla is a daughter of the professional classes; and so suffers the fate of that caste: her emotions enervated she lacks the means, that sympathetic feeling, to understand those outside her milieu. Self-consciously aware of her own intellectual superiority she looks down on those different from herself; whom she conceives either as less intelligent3- therefore not to be taken seriously - or as problems to be fixed. Clever children are horrible snobs. They are also vexatious busy-bodies (mostly - thankfully! - in the privacy of their own minds). Frances sees it all:

She made the mistake always of thinking people would like what she herself liked; she put herself too much in other people’s places, instead of allowing them to stay there themselves.

Liz is the child of easy-going parents (they have a touch of the aristocracy). Smart, Liz is also lively, her feelings free and anarchic. Until this holiday she has been a creature of the moment and the changing scene. Harry has changed this, anchoring her to a place and a family. 

Frances dominates this novel. Actively resisting what she regards as the cheap superficialities of bohemia, she acts out the role of the uber-respectable matron; overly polite to her village acquaintances, she paints at set hours, as if she were in an office. This restraint in such an odd and powerful person of course highlights her eccentricity. Of this she is unaware. It endears her to the locals, who always like a “character” in the neighbourhood.4 Mrs Parsons is very protective towards this odd woman. And because Frances is different, almost a foreigner to this village life, she becomes the repository of Mrs Parsons’ problems; even though Frances has no grasp of either her cleaner’s psychology or the mores of her class. Not that Mrs Parsons has come to Frances for advice. She is letting off a bit of verbal steam. We like a good moan, a nice little chat over a pot of tea… Mrs Parsons mentions that the husband is in a rage against their pregnant daughter. Frances’ reply - oh, you’ll throw her out - shocks her interlocutor, who had never thought of something so horrible. Throw her out! No no, we don’t do things like that. The violence of the language is weaker than the feelings behind it; these feelings a glue and a bind. Not that it matters that this strange woman doesn’t understand Mrs Parsons. It only increases the interest. These posh ‘uns, you know, you know what, they’re out of touch; don’t know a thin’ about anythin’; throw you out, she said. Throw you out! They’ve got metal hearts that lot; all rusty, I bet, on the inside. This won’t stop Mrs Parsons going back next week: oh, she’s a wonderful woman in her way. Oddness creates a distance that allows for a curious intimacy. Here is the value of the artist. Do you know what Miss Rutherford said… Always good for a confab. We enjoy a titter!

(Review: A Wreath of Roses)

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 1. Astutely portrayed in Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter.

2.  Compare with Angus Wilson’s short story Such Darling Dodos.

3.  The brilliant analysis of this social state is David Foster Wallace’s Authority and America Usage in Consider the Lobster; and Other Essays.

4.  Compare with the homosexual Dr Fadigati in Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.