Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.

There is a scene in Angel where she is ill in bed. Her mother brings her some food; Angel denies any inclination to eat, pretending not to be interested although she is ravenously hungry. She eats it all when her mother leaves the room but lies, saying that the cat ate most of it. It is true that she wants people to think that illness has caused her to lose her appetite, but her surface indifference that hides a very strong subterranean interest reminds me of the scene in Lucy M. Boston’s An Enemy at Green Knowe, where the witch Dr. Melanie Powers pretends she doesn’t want any cakes but draws one to her when she thinks no one is looking.

Nicholas Stuart Gray’s witch Mother Gothel:

“… is so interested in herself, that she has little time to spare for anyone else’s feelings or well-being. She considers the world against her, and beneath her.” 

This is a perfect description of Angel!

Mother Gothel too has “little or no sense of humour”.

Both Angel and Mother Gothel are delusional. Both see themselves as much better and more beautiful than they really are, and as having attributes that they just don’t possess.

Mother Gothel says, “What’s the matter with them all? I’m loveable – and clever - and witty...” Angel considers herself to be a great writer, so why all the criticism?  She believes that she is beautiful and wonderfully attractive to men, so why does nothing come of it? Why is no one there for her?

Revenge is witches’ business. Just like Sheri S. Tepper’s Madame Delubovoska, who viciously punishes a man who is slow to remove a fallen tree from the path of her car by sending him to another world, Gwendolen and Angel think that even a minor offence deserves a major retaliation. Jadis too: she turns people to dust, ‘blasting’ them out of existence.

Diana Wynne Jones’s Biddy Iremonger puts a huge curse on the man she wanted to marry, just because he chose someone else.  Angel hates the publisher who rejected her first book and a man who is one of her worst critics. She takes revenge in her imagination and in her writing. Mother Gothel too is very vindictive and determined to seek vengeance on anyone who disobeys her.

Being full of unexpressed rage is another witchy characteristic:

“Marianne …senses that Madame (Delubovska) is full of some obscure fury.” 

Elizabeth Taylor writes about an old lady being afraid to pass close to Angel because “she could feel the power of so much suppressed fury threatening her.” The old lady has offended Angel by making it clear that her visits of mercy to ‘the poor’, which she thinks make her a lady bountiful, are not welcome.

Angel and some creative writers

Angel is described as being always too busy writing about nature to go out and look at her garden. She doesn’t even know the names of her plants.

This reminds me of what I read about Enid Blyton, who wrote about her children and dog, ignoring the reality and presenting a fictional idyll. Such people believe that they and their lives are what they imagine them to be, not what they really are.

Most people seem unreal to Angel; she waits for them to go away.

According to her daughter Imogen, Blyton only wanted a relationship with children through her books: “Those were her best friends. Real children were an intrusion. I found her very cold and saw little of her. She didn’t mean to be cold. The world she was living in was too important to her to embrace those who intruded on her.”

There is a scene in Angel where her publisher congratulates her for describing the sensations of drunkenness well for someone who has never tasted wine; Charlotte Brontë described the sensation of taking opium very convincingly, without, she assured an enquirer, ever having taken so much as a grain.

This is how a very strong imagination can be used to advantage: creative people can imagine what something is like without ever having had the experience. John Buchan did this when he described places in Virginia that he had never seen. When he eventually visited the place, rather than feel very disappointed the way Angel did when she visited Greece, he was amazed to find how accurate his guesses had been.

Charlotte Brontë  felt let down by many of the people she met when she became famous: her idols had feet of clay and the superior people whose company she had always longed for were very different from what she had expected. Angel was very disappointed in the furnishings when she visited her publisher’s house: she had expected something much grander.

People who let their imaginations and wishful thinking run away with them are setting themselves up for disappointment.

In her autobiographical work Growing Up Tough, Taylor Caldwell regrets attracting only spongers and leeches. Angel too marries someone who sponges off her. As all such people do, he says that he hates to ask her for money but still takes it.

What sort of women attract such men?

When the first ever acceptance letter comes, Angel feels a delightful sensation of being lifted up, of rising towards the ceiling, her body becoming lighter than air, a blissful sensation flowing through her veins.

I remember reading how Stella Gibbons felt that her feet didn’t touch the ground when she got a good new job – with Reuters maybe, or the Evening Standard. This feeling is a mixture of relief and euphoria. It seems that because we have got what we wanted very much, all troubles are at an end, everything is going to come right and compensation for all past suffering is on the way.  We don’t escape that easily.

Angel is described by her companion as never being ill; she is strong and free from any health problems until the end of her life, when she dies from a cough that turns to pneumonia. The only exception is when she very conveniently comes down with a bad rash just after her lies are discovered. This saves her from having to return to school and face the other girls.

Although the circumstances are different, this immediately reminds me of Sylvia Plath, as described by her flatmate in the memoir A Closer Look at Ariel. Sylvia falls ill from time to time, forcing her flatmate to stay home and care for her. By chance, this often happens on days when the flatmate has an important exam.

What sort of people can become ill almost on demand, sabotaging other people’s lives or getting themselves off the hook?

Angel is returning home from the post office after sending the manuscript of her first book to yet another publisher, exhausted by the efforts she has made to find the address and the money for the postage, when she encounters a strange gaunt woman, one of the dreaded neighbourhood characters. This woman has covered most of her face with a scarf, from behind which she can be heard muttering curses on the world and complaints about her existence. She moves like a sleep-walker.

Kathleen Raine describes a similar encounter in The Land Unknown, when, after leaving her family behind, she travels to London in the faint hope of meeting again some man she is obsessed with. She meets a caricature of herself on the train, a dirty, dishevelled, penniless woman who is also travelling to London to look for some man. She is in desperate need, and living on a crumb of a crumb of hope of finding him.

This is uncanny.  These disturbed women seem like grotesque caricatures, distorting mirrors, a reflection of the current inner states or inner selves of the two creative women.  The first one seems symbolic of the way Angel goes through life.

What sort of people do such encounters happen to, and what was their inner state at the time?

Still more to come

All these connections and coincidences are enough to convince me that similar programs, scripts and scenarios are running in the lives of people who are born with certain, rare, personality types.

I thought at first that one article would be enough to cover everything I wanted to say about Angel, but this little book, which is not too well known these days, is inspiring more and more ideas.

One final article should cover the remaining aspects.