rowland manthorpe dot com

The resurrection of Elizabeth Taylor proclaimed by the reviewers of Nicola Beauman’s new biography is greatly to be welcomed. Anything that persuades more people to read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is officially a Good Thing. But let’s not get carried away. Taylor is not an unqualified genius. And Angel, which I have just finished reading, is not a classic.

The Angel of Angel is Angelica Deverell, a graceless, sensationalist writer whose career begins suddenly, with a novel dreamed out of nowhere and written a trance while skiving off school. Her teacher finds her literary efforts bewildering, although not without merit: suspecting plagiarism, she searches through Ruskin and Wilde, because “before she would say the piece was vulgarly over-written she hoped to find out who had written it”. Publishers laugh at the impossible content, potboiled characters and overblown style. Yet they send it out, to huge success. Angel is a commercial triumph.

And that’s it. Yes, there’s a love affair, although certainly not a romance; the decline and fall of Angel’s commercial prowess; the interruptions of outside events, including two wars. But this is a book about one person only; and that person cannot sustain a novel. For all the strength of Taylor’s initial insight, this is a book two hundred pages too long.

What fascination there is in Angel derives from her self-delusion, her absolute refusal to see the world on anything but her own terms. Taylor sets this up brilliantly in the opening scenes: it is no exaggeration to call each one a small comic masterpiece. But from there on she has nowhere to go. With her absolute self-confidence and total lack of introspection, Angel resembles a Jason Bourne or a James Bond. But this is a character-driven, literary novel, not a plot-based blockbuster.

Novels about self-delusion always face this challenge. Does the author sustain the delusion, leaving himself with a character who cannot change, or learn from the world? Or does he rip the mask off, risking a trite reconciliation with reality and denying the character dignity or heroism? How does Taylor succeed? Put it this way: Angel is no Don Quixote.

Hilary Mantel makes an interesting point in her Introduction:

One could argue that the author is showing us Angel as an awful warning; that she is telling us “this is how bad art is made”. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems to m that what Elizabeth Taylor is doing is to de-romanticise the process of writing and show it to us close up … whatever the impulse to art, however great or little the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it.

Taylor could be ruthless, as Beauman’s biography shows. Commenting on the end of her forty-year affair with columnist Ray Russell, Peter Parker writes:

She ended the affair at the insistence of her husband, and if she seemed ruthless in doing so, it was the necessary ruthlessness of the artist who made her choice not simply for the sake of convention and her children but because she needed the stability marriage provided in order to do her work.

But Angel isn’t a book about this sort of ruthlessness, because Angel isn’t self-reflective, or even caring. It’s rather a book about someone with complete self-confidence: cast-iron vanity, Mantel calls it. It makes me wonder: is it possible to write character-driven novels about people without doubt? What would Taylor make of Max Clifford? Or Barack Obama?

One of the arguments in my book is that it is not only artists that need cast-iron vanity nowadays; it is all of us, at least if we want to be successful. Celebrities, bankers, journalists: who doesn’t benefit from an unhealthy dose of confidence? Taylor is often – with some justice – compared to Jane Austen. But can that sort of literary style capture the madness of contemporary confidence games, their grotesque grandiosity? So far as books on self-delusion go, this is a much better starting-point.

But back to Taylor, now in what must be her fifth or sixth coming. Angel was first published in 1957 and first resurrected (by Virago) in 1984. Its latest attempt at revitalisation comes with this smart new edition, and the Introduction by old Mental. It’s a valiant effort. But this is a minor work. Sometimes – it has to be said – books die for a reason.