Elizabeth and Ivy by Robert Liddell – on Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett

I can’t quite remember how I first came across this book or who recommended it to me, but it must have been during a conversation about Elizabeth Taylor, a writer whose work I adore. Anyway, whoever it was, I’m very grateful for the tip!

The British writer and literary critic Robert Lidell describes Elizabeth and Ivy as an attempt to ‘give some account of my friendship with two distinguished writers, and of their friendship with each other’ – namely, Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett. (The title is a nod to Kay Dick’s book Ivy and Stevie about Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith.) It’s a short, engaging book, unfolding as a series of reflections augmented with snippets from letters Robert received from Elizabeth Taylor describing her interactions with Ivy C-B. Moreover, there are also some interesting musings on Elizabeth’s and Ivy’s books here, which are fascinating to read.

Robert’s friendship with Elizabeth started in the autumn of 1948 when the latter wrote to Robert, complementing him on his novel, The Last Enchantments. Also enclosed was a copy of Elizabeth’s most recently published book, A View of the Harbour, an affectionate gesture from one writer to another. Robert duly read and enjoyed Harbour – in fact, he had already admired Elizabeth’s first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, which had been passed on to him by his aunt, a woman of great taste, who thought the book ‘remarkably intelligent’.  Thus began a long sequence of correspondence between Elizabeth and Robert, although it was several years before they were able to meet in person.

While many of the letters Robert received from Elizabeth were destroyed at the latter’s request (mostly because she didn’t want anything to remain that might hurt her friends), some of the more literary-focused letters survived; and it is these documents that Robert references in the book. (I should mention here that Robert also knew Ivy personally, but when he moved abroad in 1947 following his brother’s death, their meetings came to an end. Hence, Robert’s primary source of news about Ivy from the late ‘40s onwards seems to have been Elizabeth’s letters.)

I’ve yet to read anything by Ivy Compton-Burnett – A House and Its Head is sitting in my TBR. Nevertheless, I understand she is something of an acquired taste – brilliant, cutting and highly individualistic, someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. In some respects, this impression is reinforced here, particularly through Elizabeth’s observations on being invited to Ivy’s house for lunch.

The same food of course – the boiled bacon and parsley sauce and the white pudding. She [Ivy] carved up Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch at the same time as the bacon. Marriage and religion were discussed and deplored. I felt guilty to be married and to have stayed married so long, and was all almost thankful not to be religious. Rose Macaulay has never been forgiven. (p. 93)

And here is Ivy on Olivia Manning’s latest book, probably The Doves of Venus as the passage comes from a letter dated 1955.

In the drawing-room was Olivia Manning’s book…[Ivy:] ‘It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don’t know if you care for descriptions. I don’t.’ A little later, she glanced again at the book and said: ‘A side of life I know nothing about. And I can’t think how she [Olivia Manning] does either.’ (p. 57)

Of particular interest to me are Robert’s thoughts on writing; how Elizabeth can take a small incident or occurrence and weave it into her fiction. She thinks and writes in scenes, creating and shaping characters to allow these scenarios to evolve.

From time to time, between the novels, Elizabeth’s stories began to appear. They did not express or reveal but played with her own experience, or she wove fancies from tiny fragments of fact – at least this I sometimes thought I recognized. Like Henry James, she found the tiny ‘germ’ in a happening, and then had to create people to bring it about; unlike Turgenev, who began with creating people, and then watched and listened for what they would do or say. (p. 67)

I also love Robert’s observations on some of the themes in Elizabeth’s novels, principally loneliness, which seems central to much of her work.

Elizabeth wrote somewhere: ‘I think loneliness is a theme running through many of my novels and short stories, the different ways in which individuals can be isolated from others – by poverty, old age, eccentricity, living in a foreign country – even by having committed murder, as in A Wreath of Roses (there are several kinds of loneliness in that novel).’ (p. 103)

One could argue that this also applies to another of Taylor’s best novels, The Soul of Kindness. Here we have Flora’s mother, Mrs. Secretan, living alone and haunted by a fear of cancer; the housekeeper, Miss Folley, who fills her empty life by writing elaborate love letters to herself; and the gay novelist Patrick Barlow, who waits, sometimes in vain, for his unreliable lover to turn up. Then there’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, a beautiful, bittersweet portrayal of the difficulties of ageing, a novel infused with loneliness in various forms.

As Elizabeth and Ivy is a short book, I’ll leave it there in terms of my description, but what emerges is a picture of a close and valuable friendship between Robert Liddell and Elizabeth Taylor – a candid, platonic relationship built on mutual trust and respect. Naturally, Ivy looms large throughout, but mostly filtered through Elizabeth’s preceptive lens in the letters she sends to Robert.

Robert and Elizabeth continued to correspond for more than twenty-five years; and while Robert never returned to England after 1947, Elizabeth travelled to Greece to see him five or six times, mostly in the 1960s and ‘70s. I’ll finish with a passage that seems to capture something of this fascinating book – a must-read for Elizabeth Taylor fans/completists and anyone interested in women’s writing from this period.

These two wonderful friends had in a measure made up to me [Robert] for being sans famille. To Ivy I almost felt as a nephew (and like E. M. Forster I descend from ‘a long line of maiden aunts’, a proud pedigree). To Elizabeth I felt almost as a brother, the more so that we had Ivy in common as an aunt… (pp. 122–123)

Elizabeth and Ivy is published by Peter Owen; personal copy.