2 - The Writing of the 1940s

Summary

A Wreath of Roses, full of uneasy confrontations with trauma and wartime residue, was the culmination of a burst of creativity on Taylor's part. Between 1944 and 1949 she wrote four novels and more than a dozen short stories, which together constitute one of the most striking imaginative explorations we have of that period. Her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945), written during the war, is interested in forms of resistance to the coercive element of life on the Home Front, the struggle to keep sensibility alive in inimical conditions. Palladian (1946), set in a remote country mansion, is unusual among her novels in its lack of clear historical anchoring - the only specific contemporary reference is to the 1940 film of Pride and Prejudice - but is nonetheless intriguingly shadowed by the war that is nowhere mentioned. A View of the Harbour (1947) examines the disparate inhabitants of a seaside resort in the early post-war years, the transitional period when barbed wire still litters the beaches, posters in pubs still declare that ‘We Do Not Recognize The Possibility Of Defeat', and the shape of peacetime existence has yet to be clarified. Transition is the common element; the novels all convey a sense of old securities lost, or old illusions of security exposed, old explanations no longer serving - and emerging from this, the challenge to resourcefulness, of making what life one can in the cracks that loss and exposure create. Dwellings are almost all temporary. Houses are borrowed, rooms rented; characters drift uncertainly from place to place, or are made to see old places through new eyes; home loses its homeliness. The key moments in A Wreath of Roses were those when the home, the fundamental reference-point, seemed suddenly betrayed, or betraying, when the protective or the suffocating support-structures, outside and inside the self, began to collapse. Such moments had been central to Taylor's work from its wartime beginnings. The unhappy husband in ‘It Makes A Change’ (1945), for example, trudging home each evening from his dreary office, pauses to gaze at

the beauty of bomb-wreckage … the torn side of a house, the pastel colouring of wall-papers and plaster, peach and lavender, grey and duck's-egg-blue, broken brickwork gilded in the evening light. A pigeon flew out of a bedroom-grate, high, perched at the top of ruin.