Sad, sweet, beautifully written.

A naturalistic, often funny account of the lives of old folks at a London residential hotel in the 1960s.

This book has been sitting on my shelves for so many years, I'd reached the point where I didn't think I would enjoy it very much. I'm happy to be wrong! I can't remember the last time a book amused me so much yet also made me sad.

They Weren't Allowed to Die There
Review of the Virago Modern Classics paperback (1982) of the Chatto & Windus hardcover original (1971)

Ludo leaned back easily, but his eyes were darting to and fro, noting everything, noting Mrs Arbuthnot noting him, and Mrs Post, in her sad pot-pourri colours, fussing over her knitting.
‘Over there is Mrs Arbuthnot,’ Mrs Palfrey said, in a low voice to Ludo. ‘With the sticks.’
‘I thought so. I shouldn’t be afraid of her, you know. Although you seem very much the new girl around here.’
‘Of course. Mrs Arbuthnot has been at the Claremont for years.’
‘It has entered her soul.’
‘But we aren’t allowed to die here.’
He threw back his head and laughed.
‘But isn’t that sad?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘I don’t see anything sad about you,’ he said. He thought, I mayn’t write it down; but please God may I remember it. We Aren’t Allowed to Die Here. By Ludovic Myers. - Excerpt from "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont."

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a moving and sympathetic portrayal of seniors who are at the edge of moving into nursing homes, but who are still physically independent enough to manage at a residential hotel or senior residence. The lead character Mrs. Palfrey is widowed and somewhat distanced from her daughter and son-in-law, who live in Scotland, and her grandson Desmond who lives in London and works in the British Museum. She moves into the Claremont Hotel which caters to both tourists and to its senior residents. Few of the residents have visitors and although Mrs. Palfrey talks up future visits by her grandson to the others, it becomes apparent that Desmond has no interest in dropping in.


Cover image of the original hardcover of "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" (1971). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

A symbiotic relationship transpires when Mrs. Palfrey has a falling accident on her way back to the Claremont from the library. The accident occurs in front of the basement apartment of Ludo, a penniless young aspiring writer who rushes out to assist her. To return the favour she invites Ludo to dinner at the Claremont and when she mentions a future guest, the other residents immediately assume that it is the grandson making an appearance at last. Embarrassed, Mrs Palfrey neglects to correct them in their assumption and goes back to Ludo to ask him to agree to the impersonation. Ludo happily agrees and also realises that this entre to the world of the elderly can become source material for a future novel.

This setup makes for various comic turns as Mrs Palfrey and Ludo continue their friendship to the envy of the rest of the Claremont. There is of course further confusion as the reluctant Desmond finally does make an appearance and the other residents refuse to believe he is an actual true relation. There are also the bittersweet and insightful portraits of the extended cast of characters who are each dealing with their aging and accompanying health and family issues in their own way.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont was a delightful and empathetic story which captures both the insight of the sometimes parasitic nature of an artist/writer drawing on their real-life experiences for fiction but also a symbiotic view of the elderly and youth being together for each other's benefit. My warm thanks to friend Tony Souza for the loan of this charming book!

Trivia and Links
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont was adapted as a television film in 1973 and as a theatrical film in 2005.

The 1973 television film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starred Joseph Blatchley as Ludo Myers and Celia Johnson as Mrs. Palfrey. I could not find an online posting of a trailer or of the film itself.

The 2005 theatrical film was directed by Dan Ireland and starred Rupert Friend as Ludo and Joan Plowright as Mrs. Palfrey. You can watch a trailer for the film on YouTube here and see the entire film on YouTube here.

What a charmer and hilarious and heart wrenching all at the same time.

A quiet novelist, wth a quiet reputation. Although I have known of her for close to 40 years, this is the first time I have read one of her novels. "Claremont" is the last of the 11 novels she published in her lifetime (1971). Another was published a year after her death in 1975.
This is the new reprint by the NYRofBks Press, with an Introduction by Michael Hofmann. There has been another pb edition available for years (decades?) by Virago Press, with an Introduction by Paul Bailey. Neither Intro adds much to the reading of the novel, and it is a shame we do not have a woman author writing an Intro for her.
The day to day existence of a recently widowed woman who moves into a London hotel, where 4-5 elderly residents eake through their days. Near parks and museums, but they never seem to get there. Families merely tolerate, and often ignore, these elderly cast-offs.
The ending is sad, and again, rather quietly sad. The worst part, where the 50 pound loan goes to!
Nothing much exciting happens here - a stumble, an offsite cocktail party, a Masonic dinner, a nasty fellow resident, a faux grandson. But with little stabs here and there, and perfectly structured sentences, Taylor writes a story that holds our attention and enlightens us on the life of the Brit elderly, those with a little money and standing, circa 1970.

It's okay, but I didn't find it very special.
Some nice lines and observations, e.g.:

Mrs Post put her small hair combings out of the window – London birds, she had read, were short of nest-building materials.

Some dialogues that are hilarious in their inanity:

'I thought the chicken wasn't half bad,' said Mr Osmond.
'There is so much chicken nowadays,' Mrs Palfrey complained. 'Once it was a treat.'
'Oh, I agree there.'
'Variety becomes more and more important as one gets older. There don't seem to be enough animals and birds.'
'Yes, lamb on Sunday, and it's round again in three. I agree with you. Only three animals, really.'
'Of course, there's veal, but...'

But the book takes a rather glum view of old age, and of the human condition in general, it seems to me &ndash and has little to offer beyond a rather generic grin-and-bear-it acceptance of the inevitable:

As she waited for prunes, Mrs Palfrey considered the day ahead. The morning was to be filled in quite nicely; but the afternoon and evening made a long stretch. I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be. When she was young, it had always been later.

This isn't relieved by anything like the black humour with which Kinsley Amis spiced up his Ending Up, written about the same time. Nor is it taken to its bleakest extreme: there's a rather soft storyline about the elderly Mrs Palfrey meeting up with a young aspiring novelist who does his writing in Harrods – possibly inspired by the author's catching a glimpse of the young Paul Bailey working in Harrods, as Bailey explains in his introduction he sometimes privately fancied. This (very plausible) fancy gives it some literary-historical value.

This storyline might also be seen as turning this slight novella into a variation on Henry James' famous story The Middle Years, where a dying author meets a young admirer who relieves his final days with the comfort of his admiration. (Okay, it's a little far-fetched. But there are some similarities.)

This text has received lamentable copy editing, if any. Vintage should be ashamed of releasing a book literally riddled with typos (most of them clearly OCR-based) like this:

Mrs Burton felt as if she were swimming along the corridor towards her bedroom, glancing off the wails (sic) like a balloon, gliding past pairs of shoes put out to be cleaned.

Elizabeth Taylor skewering human nature again. How perfectly she balances humour, cruelty and pathos! You can think these old people finishing their lives in a run-down hotel pitiful, but then she suddenly offers you a glimpse of the previous Mrs Palfrey:

After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life, that retirement -- the furnished house in Rottingdean, had, simply, been bliss. They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art. People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.

Even the ghastly Mr Osmond is moved almost to tears at the thought of his wife. Terrible loneliness is reflected in the barbed comments the residents make to each other. Mr Osmond's air of superiority is punctured at the Masonic dinner:

... he did not seem to have many friends: the few people whom he introduced Mrs Palfrey had not the sort of bonhomie to match his own; in fact their eyes almost at once began to range the room for some escape. Rather like a small boy, he had shown off, overdone the familiarity, button-holed men he hardly knew. He was not snubbed; but he was not encouraged.

A Jane Austen-like acuity of observation, but also empathy with these people forgotten or ignored by their children.