Today we’re reading Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, originally published in 1957, and republished by New York Review Books in 2012.
“It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticize the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware that if ten percent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and the fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us, how else would you be reading this book?”
— Hilary Mantel’s introduction to Angel
If I weren’t a writer, I’d be a compulsive liar.
I wrote this off-handedly somewhere in my notes app a few year ago. But before you assume that I am an inherently unreliable narrator, allow me to elucidate.
What I mean to say is: My imagination is vast. Reality is malleable. Sometimes fiction is more interesting, more exact, more honest. Writing is my outlet for things that aren’t exactly true, but aren’t exactly untrue. Without writing and books and fiction, I might resort to making things up and pretending they’re real, for the sake of my own sanity.
I am a day dreamer. I have been since I was little. I used to struggle to remember which things really happened and which things were made up in my head—everything seemed equally real. Did my 5th grade classmate’s eyeball really pop out of her head, totally bloodless, in the middle of the school day? Not likely, but there’s still a part of me that wonders if it happened.
I sometimes wonder if daydreaming is meant to be only for children—does it become something else when you’re an adult, something suddenly diagnosable? (Please don’t psychoanalyze me.)
I imagine that most writers become writers, professionally or not, because what exists in their heads is so consuming that it simply needs somewhere to go. Or maybe we write because the mind itself needs somewhere to go, and reality is not enough to hold its interest. Whichever way we spin it, truth, lies, fiction, and reality all intermingle within our brains, and we create stories to cope, contain, control, or create.
Angel
Sixteen year-old Angel Deverell, the character at the center of Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, is a liar, in the way that many kids are. Every afternoon, on the walk home from school, she tells two schoolmates about life at Paradise House—where peacocks roam the terraces, and grand balls are a regular occurrence—as if it were true.
The thing is, in her deep bouts of daydreaming while her mother runs the shop downstairs, her life at Paradise House is real to her. It’s the life she’s meant to have, instead of the one she does have. It’s the life she creates in order to escape the boredom of reality.
“she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day—with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps…” (p. 15)
After she gets in trouble for lying, she’s too embarrassed to return to school. So she feigns illness, decides to start writing (though she hates reading), then adamantly announces that she will not return to her education. She is to be a famous novelist instead.
“She had never much cared for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself.” (p. 28)
Her juvenile declaration and unfounded dedication are laughable. She furiously scribbles out her book from bed, and mails it off to publishers. Her belief that she will become a famous author simply because she said so is, as any would-be writer knows, delusional.
“My book is a success and so will all the others be that I am going to write.” (p. 69)
And yet…
Critical reception
It doesn’t take long for her novel to be published, and she quickly shoots to some form of authorial success.
Readers love her over-written romance novels—aspirational stories that are ultimately her own fantasy fulfillment. She writes popular fiction, which means she’s not taken seriously by the literary critics.
“Her vanity has been stunned by the way in which her book had been received. No trumpets had come thrusting out from behind clouds, proclaiming ‘genius’ and ‘masterpiece’. For a long time nothing at all happened, and then, slowly, the abuse and sarcasm had begun. The very passages of which she had been most proud, had been printed as if they were richly humorous; her dialogue, her syntax, her view of life, her descriptions of society were all seen to be part of some new and quite delicious joke.” (p. 69)
So while she initially obtains wealth and success as a writer, she is also a laughingstock.
“The book was selling well, but she had expected fame and praise as well as money.” (p. 70)
Not only is her writing disparaged, but everyone who meets her finds her, as a person, totally off-putting. She’s described as humorless, selfish, stubborn, and generally unpleasant to be around. Her poor treatment of her mother and others around her shows her lack empathy, her self-centeredness, her callousness.
Delusions of grandeur
So Angel is not likable in the least, but some can’t help but indulge her. Theo, her publisher, feels a protectiveness over her from the start, to the wild astonishment of everyone around him. As a reader, it’s hard not to feel the same mix of pity, derision, and endearment for this character.
“‘Success hasn’t gone to her head,’ Theo argued with his wife. ‘I remember the first time she came to the office. It was a hot day and she was tired and dusty and bewildered; but, all the same, vain and indomitable. She was born like it, I swear. I can see herself howling herself rigid in her cradle. They are never happy, these sports which ordinary, humble people throw off; they belong nowhere and are insatiable.’” (p. 76-77)
Maybe I shouldn’t type this out loud, but: Angel’s is the level of delusion I aspire to. I admire her dedication to writing stories and leaving reality behind. To be so sure of your own talent, and your ability to get the things you want, is astounding.
“When I was a child, I used to make up stories about living in this house. People called them lies, because I sometimes forgot what was real and said things aloud which I would have done better to have kept in my dreams; but I was only willing myself towards the truth. All the same, it seems miraculous to me now that it is going to happen. Nothing shall stop me.” (p. 148)
Her wild imagination and disconnection from reality became her own form of manifestation.
Though of course, selling books does not equal personal happiness…
Over the course of Angel’s lifetime, her fanciful novels become briefly popular, she amasses the wealth she desired as a child and buys the house of her dreams; and yet she lives a drab, mostly-isolated existence, surrounded only by a handful of people who are willing to prop up her lies and egotism.
“Then even grander notions followed and contradicted the first, and Nora, with her heart full of love and understanding, saw the lies as a pathetic necessity, an ingredient of genius, a part of the make-believe world form which novels came.” (p. 121-122)
The only people who stay close to Angel are the ones who go along with her version of reality, which seeps out of her novels and into her everyday life. Theo feels protective over her, Nora idolizes her, and Esme uses her adoration for money. They all, ultimately, are profiting off of her and depending on her for survival, so they have no interest in correcting her delusions or saying ‘no’.
The plight of the popular novelist
Though this novel is primarily a deep character study, it’s also a meta commentary on the literary world, authors and critics, popular fiction, and the denigration of mass market readers (aka the poor, the uneducated, and the womenfolk).
It’s easy to imagine a number of best-selling authors—both past and present—of popular and genre fiction who received the same criticisms as Angel: poor writing, unrealistic storylines, low-brow trash. And yet these books sell, because a hell of a lot of people like them.
As Hilary Mantel says in the introduction, Taylor “de-romanticizes” the author and the act of writing fiction by showing us a lackluster and lonely woman, who stubbornly dedicated her life to creating stories, and yet had little in the way of prestige or happiness for herself.
“Her sternness, the rigorousness of her working days, her pursuit of fame, had made her inflexible: she was eccentric, implacable, self-absorbed. Love, which calls for compliance, resilience, lavishness, would be a shock to her spirit, an upset to the rhythm of her days. She would never achieve it, he was sure. For all the love in her books, it would be beyond her in her life.” (p. 93)
But Angel knew at 16, that living in her imagination was happiness—and so she created a version of the world in which she could do just that. Even as fame and fortune left her, she kept her illusions alive in Paradise House—the very place she imagined was hers all those years ago—right until it all whimpered out.
“At Paradise House, the neglect had started long-ago. With Nora gone, no one would come to take on the prodigious burden of its decay. It would be engulfed in the valley, closed over and smothered by the encroaching branches; out-of-doors would creep indoors; first, ivy thrusting into crevices, feeling its way through broken windows and crumbling stone: bats would fly in through the empty fanlight and hang themselves from cornices in the hall; fungus branch from the walls in fantastic brackets; soft cobwebs drape the shutters. The tenacious vegetation of that lush valley would have its way there in the end.” (p. 252)
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