A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Up at her window, Mrs. Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might have expected to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

Newby is one of those coastal resort towns that dies out in the winter. A "New Town" some distance inland boasts a more stable population, but down at the harbor only a few remain, locked in their unchanging lives: biding their time in the closed shops, the same old crew at the local pub. Lily Wilson lingers idly in the apartment above the Waxworks, wishing someone would come to whisk her off her feet. Beth Cazabon goes on writing her novels, oblivious to the troubles of her daughters, teenage Prudence and young Stevie. But some things do change: Beth's husband, the town doctor Robert, strikes up a tempestuous affair with their neighbor, and Beth's friend, the beautiful divorcee Tory Foyle. Until now, the two have detested each other, but strong passions transform into other strong passions. Mrs. Bracey, the elderly gossip, is dying, but she wants to be lifted to the upper room of her house by her twin daughters before she goes, to see better what's going on. And into this turmoil, which has the outward look of stasis, even paralysis, walks in Bertram Foyle, an elderly but charismatic man determined to capture the harbor in a painting.

The affair between Tory and Robert might be described as the novel's "A-story." The bitter, resentful Prudence picks up on it immediately, as does Mrs. Bracey in her tower, but Robert's wife Beth remains oblivious, perhaps because she lives too much in her books. It may be, too, that she is simply a kinder person than her cynical husband or her desperate friend, that she sees what she wants or needs to see and no more. A View of the Harbour is, at heart, about what is visible to whom, and why. Only Bertram seems to really see all the way through the people of Newby, perhaps with the clarity of a stranger. But he's strangely unable to put what he sees on the canvas: his paintings turn out muddy, unsatisfactory. On another level, A View of the Harbour is about the artist's relationship to the world around them. How perceptive do you need to be? Is art a kind of noticing--or is it more accurately, like Beth's novels, a way of ignoring the world?

The life of Newby, as described by Elizabeth Taylor--not that one--is rich, subtle and comic, with intense emotions that lie under the surface and are never really, as in a pulpier novel, let boil up and over. The expected showdown, for example, between Beth and Tory never comes. But the novel suffers, I think, in comparison to the other book of Taylor's I read, Angel. There's no one as supremely weird here as Angel, the vain but talentless writer. Instead, the human qualities are all doled out piece by piece, into several characters. As a result, A View of the Harbour seems more true to life, less grotesque, but also less interesting.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

He would be glad to get away--from the cats, the fleas, the damp, and these three eccentric women.  He had always been glad to get away from Angel; she tired and exasperated him; but he had never been able to replace his first impression of her with any other.  At that first meeting, long ago in London, she had seemed to need his protection while warning him not to offer it; arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth would not pierce it.  At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.

Fifteen-year old Angel Deverill is what you might call "a handful": overly sensitive and proud, too arrogant for friends, snobbish toward her mother's position as a shopkeeper, unable to see things from anyone else's point-of-view than her own.  She decides one day to write a novel, and does, a flowery and melodramatic romance titled The Lady Irania.  Her prose and her plot are both overwrought; she doesn't read any other books herself so she doesn't know what they sound like, a habit she'll maintain for the rest of her life as a semi-successful author.  And her books are successful, from The Lady Irania; the publishers imagine that she's a little old lady sequestered in a cottage with a hundred cats.  Eventually, Angel comes to occupy that role perfectly, but at the first they are surprised when a fifteen-year old girl shows up at their door.

Though she'd never admit it, Angel's books are trashy.  Her publishers know that they're perfect for the pulp market, dominated by lower- and middle-class readers looking for escapism.  Angel, of course, never stops believing her work to be evidence of her genius, which, judging from the reviews, is unappreciated by a philistine world.  Author Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one) never gives us any of her prose directly, but we get to hear the publisher's parody of it at a cocktail party:

Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury.

I love that; I recognize that in the work of some of my students, who need to develop discernment and restraint along with talent and imagination.  But Angel never grows up.  Taylor follows Angel over the whole of a life, from fifteen-year old prodigy to eccentric old woman.  Part of Angel's motivation lies in the stories she's told as a child about an estate called Paradise House, from her aunt who is a servant there.  Paradise House becomes, in Angel's imagination, an avatar of the medieval fantasies that haunt her books, a life she might have lived, and which she deserved more.  Eventually, she buys it, but Paradise House with Angel in it is never quite sufficient to her dreams.  She fills it with dogs and cats and peacocks and lets it go to filthy ruin, until it really is like something out of her novels.  And if the life is squalid, she'll never acknowledge it.

Angel is a terrific character novel.  I was truly impressed by the way that Taylor is able to make Angel seem so terribly consistent from teenagerhood to old age.  The changes are subtle and thoughtful, but that consistency is one of the flaws in Angel's character.  She's awful, really.  She has a grotesquely inflated sense of self-importance; she has no sense of irony or humor about herself or anything else.  But still Taylor makes her seems vulnerable; perspective and humor are traits that keep us safe and balanced, and missing them, Angel lives in a world that always seems on the dangerous edge of being blindsided by reality.  Somehow those traits also make her impervious.  They also make the book also very funny, in the way that people who have no idea of their own abilities or personality can be grimly funny.  Mostly, they make Angel seem breathtakingly, tragically, human.

Crash by J.G. Ballard

Crash is not the source of the 2005 Best Picture film; it is, however, the source of a movie made by David Cronenberg of Naked Lunch fame. The plot is simple: a man (identified as James Ballard, ostensibly the author) is involved in a car crash in which the other driver is killed and the driver's wife seriously injured. Ensuing events lead Ballard, as well as the driver's widow, to meet Vaughan, a shady once-semi-famous television star now obsessed with car crashes. Ballard, the widow, Vaughan, and others form a casual group of car crash fetishists, who drive around visiting crashes they discover on a police scanner, and designing gruesome and erotic crashes for actresses and famous figures. In turn, Ballard has crazy automobile sex with every (yes, every) character in the novel, and Vaughan finally dies in a car crash meant also to kill Elizabeth Taylor.

Understandably, this book caused a bit of controversy when it was published, controversy that was fomented on a larger stage by the release of Cronenberg's film (which puzzlingly stars James Spader and Holly Hunter). I have some sympathy for those who object to this novel, as I'll explain later, but my larger objection is this:

Crash is boring. Its conceit sounds promising, I think, but instead of dealing with any of the deeper issues that exist at the nexus of sex and violence, Ballard provides a litany of gross-out images and blankly pansexual and unreflecting characters. He has nothing to say about, say, the way that looking into our own death molds our understanding of what is exciting, or the parallels between the sexual act and violence (it has been suggested by feminist scholars that the sexual act itself resembles and symbolizes violence), or the conflation of sex, power, and technology in the modern era. This book is so unconcerned with deeper issues and unexplanatory of the origin of the character's fetishes that it approaches the level of pornography, not only for its graphicness but because it seems to lack insight as a stylistic choice. The sex is mildly disturbing, but also banal. For a book about thrills, it is unexplicably thrill-less.

As for the controversy, in most cases I'm suspicious of such claims. Usually they're ill-informed, prudish, or artless. In this case, I think, there is one serious objection to the content of Crash: Instead of creating an actress to be the focus of Vaughan's insane fantasies, Ballard uses Elizabeth Taylor, who would have been in her early forties at the time of this publication (and whom I thought was dead until looking it up on Wikipedia). The fantasies are at times disturbingly graphic, referencing not only the most intimate parts of Taylor's anatomy but alluding to various imaginary wounds to those parts of her body. It seems to me that while most content is permissible in a novel, books that deal so frankly with sexual and violent fantasies concerning real people ought to be condemned. In Crash's case, Taylor is presented as a cipher for fame with no real qualities as a character; why couldn't Ballard have used a fictional person if their character doesn't matter?

But Crash isn't really concerned with thought processes like that; it's more of a dull fever dream that you float through unawares. If you want to read a book like this, read Palahniuk instead, whose third-rate hackery is much more interesting.

P.S.: Here's an angle I forgot to cover: What is the point of Ballard using his own name for the main character? To suggest that this mirrors his own life? I tried to think of all the books I've read where the author includes themself as a character (Money, Everything is Illuminated, Absurdistan), and I can't think of any as unabashedly unnecessary and egotistical as this one.

P.S.S. check out that stickshift-penis in the picture.