Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor – #1976Club

Blaming was Elizabeth Taylor’s final novel, written while she knew she was dying – and death and mourning are very much at the heart of the book. It opens with Amy and Nick on a cruise. It is to celebrate Nick’s recovery after months of illness, and the first chapter or so is what you might expect of a Taylor novel set at sea – acute observations, gentle interactions, characters reflecting on their own lives as they go about the minutiae of each day.

And then… Nick dies, and it becomes a very different sort of book.

The reader hasn’t spent much time with Nick, so we do not really mourn him – meaning that we can observe Amy’s grief almost impartially. We grow to know her as a widow, and it is through this lens that we truly begin our readerly relationship with her, even though it is the newest and briefest period of her life. Back home, she already begins to feel an awkwardness with her son and daughter-in-law. Taylor describes the surprising, unsettling qualities of grief well, and carefully avoids any passages of exposition which lay bear emotions. It is gradual and beautiful.

One of the people Amy and Nick met on the cruise was an American novelist called Martha. The relationship was a little imbalanced even at the beginning – Martha seemed to want to give more and take more than they did. As ever, Taylor is subtle: Martha is not an imposition they sardonically mock. She is welcomed as a friend – but perhaps not to the extent she wants to be.

And, of all the people in Amy’s life, it is Martha who becomes central after Nick has gone. She arrives, clearly intending to stay for a while. And the novel then becomes about two people, slowly and often ungraciously getting to know each other. There is a sort of dependence that is only limitedly related to friendship. And it is certainly still Martha who wants the relationship to be maintained, even while – to the outside – she seems to be offering more. Taylor is wonderful at dialogue, and particularly good at the prose between dialogue – even more impressively, she can go from the mind of one speaker to the other, and make it feel natural in the narrative. It’s difficult to do without feeling disorienting. I loved the ‘surprisingly to Amy’ at the end of this section:

‘What happened to the domestic help? Who used to come in, what was it, two mornings?’

‘Mrs Carpenter?’

‘Whoever.’ Martha shrugged.

Amy, suddenly fed up with it all, leaned back and smiled, pretended to look as if Martha’s yawning were catching, and she might drowse off any minute.

‘Ernie saw to Mrs Carpenter,’ she said.

Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or for you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed that sort of tenacity as coming from having no choice.

‘What was the war like?’ she now – surprisingly to Amy – asked.

And what sort of novels does Martha write? Taylor describes them in perhaps my favourite section of the novel – what a wonderful satire of the sort of novel that proliferated in the ’70s:

Sometimes she thought about Martha and wondered what she was doing, and from curiosity borrowed one of her novels from the library. It was very short, but all the same she skipped through it – and thought what a stifling little world it was, of a love affair gone wrong, of sleeping-pills and contraceptives, tears, immolation; a woman on her own. Objects took the place of characters – the cracked plate, a dripping tap, a bunch of water-sprinkled violets minutely described, a tin of sardines, a broken comb: and the lone woman moved among them as if in a dream. The writing was spare, as if translated from the French.

What doesn’t feel very of its period, on the other hand, is the presence of ‘Ernie’ mentioned in the earlier quote. He is a live-in servant with his own variety of a servants’ hall – albeit it is just him in there, cooking for Amy and then eating uninspiring snacks himself. I loved how Taylor wrote his discomfort at the effrontery of Martha coming down to his quarters – and his growing dependence on her interruptions. But how many households had live-in domestic staff in the mid-70s, particularly one which seems well-off but not upper-class? Ernie’s presence is often both amusing and poignant, but didn’t feel quite of the novel’s time.

I should say, Blaming is often quite funny – particularly where Amy’s grandchildren are concerned. It’s certainly not a comic novel, but Taylor knows how to weave together the comic and tragic in a way that is recognisable from reality. Actually, a small criticism: Taylor is so good at small observations, and so I was surprised at a couple of moments – both connected with sounds – that leapt out at me as not working. See what you think…

Already she wore so many [bracelets] that when she raised her arms to smooth her hair, there was a rippling, chiming sound as they softly clashed down to her elbows.

and

An old magnolia grandiflora was dropping leaves with quite a clatter onto the pathway.

I found ‘clashed’ and ‘clatter’ such odd choices in these passages, which are quite far apart in the novel. Perhaps they are meant to be discordant, but these moments didn’t work for me. They jarred in an author who is usually so good at precision.

Overall, Blaming is a very good novel and a worthy closing to Taylor’s brilliant career. I haven’t even touched on the cleverness of the title, and the different meanings it has. Is it a quintessential 1976 novel? No, probably not. But every year sees the end of eras as well as the beginning of new ones, and this novel is really a farewell to the decades that preceded it.