‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont’: Elizabeth Taylor’s oddly becalmed plot

Spoiler alert: This posting contains spoilers for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor.

My first impression on finishing Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was that the novel I had just greatly enjoyed reading was the literary equivalent of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday: a series of whimsical events that take place in a relatively closed social setting, strung along a flimsy thread that ultimately leads nowhere. I enjoyed the work’s wit, the sense of a dispassionate eye looking anguish coolly in the face — but was there really much of a story?

And yet there is a plot line, clearly, running through the novel: Mrs Palfrey, a friendless but humane and stoic old woman, finds herself in a farcical predicament after she moves into a residential hotel and fails to correct her fellow residents’ fallacious impression that the young man who joins her for dinner on Saturday night is her filially affectionate grandson Desmond. As Mrs Palfrey well knows, the young man is, in fact, a penniless young writer called Ludo. What Mrs Palfrey doesn’t know is that Ludo is making a study of her for the novel he is writing. In a sense, the novel is a comic study in gently bad faith.

In an effort to understand better why the novel’s plot struck me as rather thin, I re-read the text, this time focusing only the ‘grandson plot’, in order to sketch out how this unfolds.

The following is my chapter-by-chapter outline of this plot, ignoring all the other, rather briefer, subplots that Taylor develops around other characters who live at the Claremont, plus Ludo and his mother and girlfriend.

Outline of grandson plot

Chapter 1. Mrs Palfrey comes to live at the Claremont Hotel in London. She tells a fellow resident she has a grandson who lives nearby. The resident remarks “Oh then, you will be seeing a great deal of him, I expect.”

Chapter 2: A resident asks Mrs Palfrey “What have you done with that grandson of yours? … If we don’t see him soon, we shall begin to think he doesn’t exist.”

Chapter 3: Mrs Palfrey’s grandson Desmond has not responded to Mrs Palfrey’s letters asking him to visit. She is knitting Desmond a jumper. Mrs Palfrey is beginning to feel pitied by other residents for Desmond’s non-attendance. Out walking, Mrs Palfrey has a fall. Impoverished young writer Ludo picks her up, cleans her wound and makes her a cup of tea. Mrs Palfrey invites Ludo to dine with her one Saturday evening. After Mrs Palfrey has left, Ludo writes up notes describing her.

Chapter 4: Mrs Palfrey fails to correct a Claremont resident who jumps to the conclusion that Mrs Palfrey’s Saturday night dinner guest will be her grandson Desmond. Mrs Palfrey contacts Ludo and lets him know that he will have to ‘be’ Desmond on Saturday night. Their actual dinner goes off well. When Ludo gets home, he finds Mrs Palfrey has given him five pounds.

Chapter 5: Ludo courts the brusque and offhand Rosie, using Mrs Palfrey’s five pounds to buy her dinner. He tells Rosie about Mrs Palfrey. Mrs Palfrey watches TV coverage of political demonstrations, confident Ludo is unlikely to be involved.

Chapter 6: Mrs Palfrey often thinks of Ludo. She fends off enquiries from Claremont residents who hope to meet her grandson at the British Museum (where Desmond really does work) by saying he’s tucked away out of sight “in archives”.

Chapter 7: Mrs Palfrey leaves the jumper she knitted for Desmond at Ludo’s doorway. Ludo finds the jumper when he gets home from visiting his mother.

Chapter 8: Ludo visits the Claremont to thank Mrs Palfrey for the jumper. He and Mrs Palfrey have drinks and dinner at the Claremont. Ludo is quite playful with Mrs Palfrey.

Chapter 9: Mrs Palfrey finds Ludo at Harrods (where he is writing his novel) and gives him a pie. He invites her to dinner at his place. That evening Mrs Palfrey dines at Ludo’s on the pie and cheap wine. Ludo asks Mrs Palfrey questions about herself from a newspaper quiz. Mrs Palfrey discusses her lack of friends and privately contemplates leaving Ludo money in her will. Ludo walks Mrs Palfrey back to the Claremont, then hurries home to write up his notes about her.

Chapter 10: Out walking, Mrs Palfrey sees Rosie through Ludo’s window, wearing the jumper she has given Ludo. Later, Rosie and Ludo discuss Mrs Palfrey’s appearance at Ludo’s window.

Chapter 11: Mrs Palfrey’s real grandson, Desmond, arrives at the Claremont out of a sense of begrudging duty. Mrs Palfrey tells him he can’t come in.

Chapter 12: Mrs Palfrey and Desmond walk in the rain. Mrs Palfrey tries to warn him off visiting the Claremont. Desmond writes to his mother (ie, Mrs Palfrey’s daughter) about odd way his grandmother has treated him.

Chapter 13: Ludo visits Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. He explains his mother’s lover has abandoned her, leaving his mother responsible for the rent. Mrs Palfrey is shocked to realise Ludo is indirectly requesting money. She rushes to escape, but at the last moment promises to send Ludo fifty pounds, and neglects to mention this is a loan. After her departure, Ludo thinks of how much his novel will displease Mrs Palfrey if she lives to see it. Mrs Palfrey worries she has broken her rule never to draw on capital.

Chapter 14: No grandson plot.

Chapter 15: Ludo has disappeared from Mrs Palfrey’s life — probably, she thinks, because she lent him money. Mrs Palfrey continues to make excuses for the non-appearance of her grandson at the Claremont. We learn (but Mrs Palfrey doesn’t) that Ludo has taken a waiting job and intends to pay her back.

Chapter 16: No grandson plot.

Chapter 17: Writing to her daughter, Mrs Palfrey mentions a marriage proposal she has received from one of the hotel guests. She writes to Ludo telling him the fifty pounds was a gift, not a loan.

Chapter 18: Some time has passed. Ludo has not answered Mrs Palfrey’s letter. Mrs Palfrey believes she has lost him and feels helplessly exposed. She falls over in the hotel doorway. Desmond shows up at the hotel, concerned over his grandmother’s marriage proposal, and no-one will believe he is Mrs Palfrey’s grandson.

Chapter 19: Ludo attends Mrs Palfrey in hospital. She is very frail, welcoming his company. We learn her daughter won’t come immediately, preferring to host a weekend shooting party. Ludo gives her fifty pounds in an envelope and arranges to have her moved to a private room. Desmond also visits his grandmother. Mrs Palfrey confuses Desmond and Ludo in her memory. Ludo completes his novel, whose title (“They Weren’t Allowed To Die There”) stems from a remark Mrs Palfrey made about the Claremont. Mrs Palfrey dies before her daughter reaches London. Her daughter does not consider her mother’s passing to warrant a death notice in the paper.

Grandson plot employs three-act structure

Summarising the grandson plot like this, it is immediately apparent that this plot has a distinct beginning, middle and end, and thus can be viewed as an example of a three-act structure. The first act curtain clearly falls in Chapter 4, probably at the point where Mrs Palfrey explains to Ludo that he is going to have to pretend to be her grandson when he comes to have dinner with her at the Claremont, and Ludo agrees to do this. Similarly, there is a clear sense that matters must come to a head between Mrs Palfrey and Ludo when, in Chapter 13, Mrs Palfrey decides, against all her better judgement, to give Ludo the fifty pounds he needs to rescue his mother. This moment clearly marks the conclusion of the middle part of the grandson plot, and makes some final resolution seem both imminent and inevitable.

Given the novel’s main plot is set up this strongly, why am I still left feeling, as a reader, that Taylor has underplayed this plot in some way — that she has tried, as it were, to direct my eyes elsewhere?

Oblique chapter endings

One clue, I think, lies in the way Taylor concludes her chapters, often drawing attention to characters and concerns that have no obvious connection to Mrs Palfrey and the grandson plot.

Chapter 4, for example, is highly significant in the grandson plot, because it is here the Ludo-for-Desmond switch gets set up and enacted for the first time. The ending of the chapter, however, points in quite a different direction, towards the anxious thoughts of Mrs Arbuthnot, one of the other Claremont residents, as she lies in bed contemplating life in a geriatric ward, and reluctant to get up and go down the hallway to the toilet (a reluctance subtly foreshadowing her later removal from the Claremont on account of her incontinence).

Insofar as Chapter 5 touches on the grandson plot at all, it does so mostly indirectly, alluding to the ways in which Mrs Palfrey and Ludo are thinking about each other, but this chapter too concludes on a note that points in an altogether different direction as Ludo, conversing with Rose, a girl he has picked up in laundromat, tells Rosie “If you don’t praise people just sometimes a little early on they die of despair, and turn into Hitlers, you know.” Rosie replies “Do they?”

The chapter in which Mrs Palfrey’s real grandson Desmond finally speaks with his grandmother for the first time (Chapter 12) concludes with a hilarious description of the dipsomaniac Mrs Burton retiring to bed, kicking off a shoe, singing and glaring at her wardrobe:

With a last effort she snatched at her other shoe, threw it across the room and, saying ‘Bugger it’, fell back upon the bed and closed her eyes.

Chapter 13, in which Mrs Palfrey promises to give Ludo fifty pounds against her better judgement, is the second major turning point in the grandson plot, yet this chapter, too, ends on a seemingly irrelevant ‘look over here’ moment as two American visitors, not seen before in the Claremont, stand in the vestibule trying to decide whether or not to have a drink before they go up to their rooms.

Rosie

As well as pointing our attention away from the grandson plot with some of her chapter endings (including the endings of the two chapters that contain the major turning points for this plot), Taylor introduces and follows a character who, while a figure in Ludo’s life, has no connection at all to Mrs Palfrey or the other residents at the Claremont. Here I am thinking of Rosie, the girl Ludo picks up in a laundromat and pursues romantically over the course of a few months — although the same comments apply also to Ludo’s mother. Plot wise, Ludo’s mother does at least serve some useful purpose, in that she is the cause of his needing to get fifty pounds from Mrs Palfrey. Rosie’s existence or non-existence, though, seems to have no bearing whatsoever on Mrs Palfrey’s story or the story of any of the other Claremont residents, and I really am a little puzzled as to what Rosie is doing in the novel at all.

Stand-alone set pieces

The outline of the grandson plot that I have provided above is far from being a summary of the novel as a whole, omitting, as it does, any substantial reference to the other residents at the Claremont in whose presence Mrs Palfrey feels it necessary to maintain the myth of her attentive grandson. In fact, quite a few of these get their moments in the novel’s sun.

Three outstanding set pieces in the novel stand entirely on their own, quite unconnected with the grandson plot, and our delight in these, and in two cases their timing, does somewhat have the effect of setting the grandson plot in the shade.

Here I am thinking first of the annual visit to the Claremont of Lady Swayne, whose most bigoted and self-congratulatory comments she prefaces with “I’m afraid”:

I’m afraid I don’t smoke… I’m afraid I’d like to see the Prime Minister hanged, drawn and quartered. I’m afraid I think the fox revels in it. I’m afraid I don’t think that’s awfully funny.

On top of this, we have the excruciating drinks party with “Plonk for all who come” that Mrs de Santis hosts for her erstwhile fellow residents after leaving the Claremont, and the dreadful Masonic Ladies Night that Mrs Palfrey attends with fellow resident Mr Osmond, in the course of which Mr Osmond proposes marriage — primarily “so that he can have a cheese-and-wine party”, Mrs Palfrey tiredly concludes.

Tellingly, two of these set-pieces (the drinks party and the Masonic Ladies Night) follow hard on the heels of the grandson plot’s second act curtain and occupy precisely the space in the novel that would normally be filled with a nail-biting will-she-or-won’t-she type climactic sequence in a conventional three act story. More than any other single factor, it is the absence of such a climax to the grandson plot that left me slightly puzzled and confused about the role of this plot in the novel as a whole, I think. It’s rather as if the grandson plot reaches a crisis (with Mrs Palfrey’s loan of fifty pounds to Ludo) but then heads straight to the denouement (Mrs Palfrey’s fall, and subsequent hospitalisation and death) without passing Go.

Does any of this matter? I’ve not done any reading about this novel’s critical reception beyond noting that it appears on The Guardian’s 2015 listing of the best 100 novels written in English. I’ve heard, too, commentators on the Backlisted podcast suggest that Elizabeth Taylor is a frequently underrated writer. I personally enjoyed this novel greatly, for all my sense that Taylor has subverted her own main plot for reasons that are not clear to me. I suspect if I was to write a novel that deviated from the expected norms in a similar way in the current publishing environment, my deviation would count as just one more reason for rejecting my manuscript. Taylor, though, in another era, seems to have got away with it — doubtless because her other subplots and her treatment of her overall theme are so strong.

What do you think?

Have you read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont?

If so, did you have any qualms about Taylor’s handling of what I’ve called the “grandson plot?, or were you content to read the novel as an ensemble piece about the various ways we try to preserve a level of dignify in the face of our inevitable ends? Does it matter at all that there is no further building up of narrative tension in the third act for the grandson plot?