Have What Is Beautiful

The last time I saw Elisabeth Russell Taylor, I’d emerged from the tube to find myself transported to Jerusalem. Shabby streets were filled with Hasidic men in drape coats and high-crowned black hoiche hats with long side-curls; women were wearing a variety of wig styles. Over the phone a nurse advised me that if I wanted to bring Elisabeth anything edible I should purchase it on Golders Green Road in a supermarket called Kosher Kingdom.

I was buzzed in through the care home’s outer door but as I was about to open an inner glass door an administrator with her wig slightly awry shouted at me to stay put. A resident was trying to escape. ‘Let me out!’ she screamed, wrestling with the door handle as staff tried to restrain her. ‘Let me out!’ I was trapped between this patient and her freedom. Elisabeth would probably have flung open both doors. She was prone to flitting herself, famously leaving her first husband in the Ritz in Paris, having met a dashing French composer and whizzed out of her first marriage on the back of his motorbike. Elisabeth lay calmly in bed, white hair brushed, elegant as always in her ninetieth year. She was grateful for the care, but an Orthodox Jewish establishment was an unlikely setting for a secular socialist, who’d been delighted to learn from a DNA test that her Ashkenazi heritage was tempered with a percentage of Igbo. But perhaps Elisabeth’s Jewish identity was more significant to her than she claimed. We’d once plotted an expedition to find her East European roots, an adventure that was clearly never going to happen now. Maybe her final months in Golders Green were her equivalent to this, a reckoning or reclaiming, or a sort of homecoming. In her poignant novella Tomorrow (1991) Elisabeth says of her protagonist Miss Danziger, a Holocaust survivor: ‘All that she could identify as remaining of herself was the Jew; she would never leave unpaid or transfer her spiritual account, if for no other reason than that payment safeguarded what little survived of her identity. Her psychic solvency depended upon it.’ It’s always tempting to read the author in the work, although novelists generally resist this because it implies they lack the imagination to make things up. But in Elisabeth’s case it’s justified because she mined her past in several novels. In Mother Country she explored her childhood and hated mother, while in Pillion Riders she thinly disguised her romantic adventures in 1950s Paris. In Tomorrow connections with her personal experiences are less obvious, but Elisabeth gives Tomorrow’s heroine her own name and a similar European sensibility and interests. They both love gardens, music and landscape, and they share an eye for beauty. ‘Miss Danziger had the habit of culture. Her taste in all things artistic was polished.’ This could be a self-portrait of Elisabeth. She is also present in her protagonist’s pleasure in sensuous details: a sandwich on which are arranged slices of rare beef in a fan pattern garnished with grated horseradish and remoulade sauce; a white tray with a border of cerulean blue. I’m reminded of tea with Elisabeth under the eaves of her Belsize Park flat, where the finest Lapsang and home-baked delicacies would emerge from her tiny galley kitchen (see SF no.36 for Elisabeth’s article on cooking, ‘Attics with Attitude’). Although she lived in fairly straitened circumstances and liked to give possessions away, everything she wore expressed elegance. When Elisabeth Danziger stares disgustedly at her nasty peach M&S underwear and remembers her mother admonishing her: ‘Liebchen, have what is beautiful!’, I recall that Elisabeth was once an underwear designer though she surely never designed anything ugly. Tomorrow is her best-known book. The story takes place in 1960 on the Danish island of Mon, where Elisabeth makes an annual pilgrimage to The Tamarisks, a guest house that until 1939 was the idyllic Lutyens-designed holiday home for her wealthy secular German-Jewish family. Nearby lies the Tuscan-style villa that once belonged to her uncle and aunt and beloved cousin Daniel. It opens with Elisabeth’s unmourned death, the promise of the title a terrible irony, before flashing back over both her single week’s stay and the story of a life lived before Nazi invasion swept everything away. Elisabeth’s solitary ritual never alters as she revisits old haunts where she and Daniel carved their initials, made their lovers’ marks. Elisabeth is both comforted and harrowed by this annual pilgrimage. A few residents recognize her, but The Tamarisks’s summer guests have no idea of her connection to the house. The set-up is reminiscent of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and also Elizabeth Taylor’s short story ‘In the Sun’: it shares their anxious middle-aged heroines and their cast of eccentric hotel guests, portrayed in witty and sometimes astringent detail. However, while Brookner’s Edith is escaping from an amusingly told marital transgression, Elisabeth’s eponymous protagonist is hiding a mix of grief, rage and pain which is slowly, inexorably revealed. We get only a glimpse of the Holocaust itself – she is too discreet to do more than open a window on one scene of almost literally indescribable horror, before quickly closing it again. This and Elisabeth’s relationship with Daniel are buried in the heart of the book, as they are buried at the core of Elisabeth Danziger. The ensuing sense of repression and good manners makes the revelations and final twist all the more devastating. Nevertheless, Elisabeth’s self-control is always about to crack. This is mirrored in the author’s descriptions of nature, which she sometimes subverts unexpectedly. At one point Elisabeth is at the hotel window admiring the view. Everything is pleasant: draughts of sea air waft on a light breeze and are caught in billowing muslin curtains, bringing with them the scent of seaweed and the summer sounds of a lawn-mower and the ‘ping’ of tennis balls. Then suddenly we’re told: ‘The blood-red geraniums rolled their heads against the sides of their tumbrels.’ By associating geraniums with the guillotine she interjects something horrifying, disrupting the prose before it gets too tasteful and hinting at cruelties below the surface. This sense of threat creates an almost unbearable tension throughout the book. As the week progresses the weather turns melancholy, echoing Elisabeth’s state of mind:

The stony-hearted shore upon which she had been washed up was always in sight of a fretting, dull, menacing sea: potentially dangerous, urged on by the tide, looking for a killing. And the vigorous, life-enhancing breakers that plunged inland, that might have deposited her on soft, rich, regenerative soil, were involved in a never-consummated effort, frustrated by the moon.

The overriding feeling of Tomorrow is of loss, but it is also a story characterized by compassion. This is highlighted in the Prologue, which reminds us that although the Danes capitulated to the Nazis in six hours, they nevertheless saved the majority of Danish Jews. Rereading Tomorrow, I hear Elisabeth’s voice, reminding me of my own loss of her. She wanted to escape in a more existential way than the raging care home inmate. Our final meeting was in February 2020, the last time most people saw anyone for months. Several months later she phoned each of her friends in turn to tell them precisely why she liked them and to say goodbye. As she says of her own character Elisabeth, she sensed she had outlived her welcome in the world. I hope that Tomorrow, an underrated classic, will live on.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Helena Drysdale 2025