This week I drew the 5 of Hearts, which corresponds to the impressionistic short story, “The Idea of Age” by Elizabeth Taylor. The unnamed narrator is a ten year old girl who clearly has a lot of anxiety about getting older. She has a great fear of her mother’s death which she expresses obliquely: she likes to read books about children who have dead mothers provided that the woulds are healed.
She carefully guards her mother along with a “mother-figure” in the form of a dramatic Mrs. Vivaldi who summers in the same place that the girl and her family go. Mrs. Vivaldi is a larger-than-life dramatic woman, who recites Shakespeare and plays with her long pearls. Mrs. Vivaldi also speaks a lot about being old.
Our narrator resolves no mysteries here, but she does give us a compelling portrait of the anxieties of a pre-adolescent girl who is worried about the concept of age, of growing old, and of the potential segue into death.
“When I was a child, people’s aged did not matter; but age mattered. Against the serious idea of age I did not match the grown-ups I knew—who had all an ageless quality—though time unspun itself from year to year, Christmases lay far apart from one another, birthdays ever further; but that time was running on was shown in many ways. I ‘shot out’ of my frocks, as my mother put it. By the time I was ten, I had begun to discard things form my heart and to fasten my attention on certain people whose personalities affected me in a heady and delicious way” begins the story.
And me too. For some strange reason, certain “celebrities” of all types grabbed my imagination which clung to them. For some, it was a name: C. Douglas Dillon–secretary of the treasury. What could the C. stand for? There was Liz and Eddie and Debbie. JFK and Jackie. I started reading newspapers and I lavished as much attention on The New York Times as I did on Photoplay. T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost were alive. At that age I could not and did not sort out the relative importance of Pat Boone and Nikita Krushchev; Edward Villella and Shirley Jones; Katherine Anne Porter and Princess Margaret Rose. They were all, in sundry ways, Mrs. Vivaldis for me.
Larger-than-life are everywhere in fiction, non-fiction and real life. I will have to look more carefully in the books I read for this ‘archetype’ ! Your list of people from the past does bring back memories. I wanted to add one more…Burton and Taylor (Dick and Liz).
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Yes, I know. I only mentioned Liz and Debbie and Eddie because they prefigured Dick and Liz. Sybil Burton did not have as much of the public sympathy factor as Debbie did.
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I love that playing card! Seeing all these cool ‘novely’ decks of cards is another entertaining aspect of Deal Me In for me. 🙂
I find it interesting when author can successfully re-animate the feelings we once had when we were younger and looking at life through a different lens, which it seems Taylor did in this story.
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Yes, she really did do that for me. Thank you for your comment. I am loving the “Deal Me In” challenge. Thank you again.
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I have not read Elizabeth Taylor but I would like to.
That is a great quote that you posted. As you allude to, there is much truth in it.
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Thank you. I have not read many of her short stories but I think some of her novels are really remarkable and very well-worth reading.
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This sounds like a great story. The themes of death, mother figures, and the attractions of the larger-than-life characters around us really resonates with me. The people you mention still have such powerful cultural weight as well as evoking a particular era. It’s fascinating.
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Thank you for your comment. Yes, the mother figures are an evergreen topic in literature. I’m also reading Proust for a year-long challenge and his longing for his mother’s goodnight kiss is so evocative and provocative.
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Oddly enough I’m reading ET’s stories at the moment – a Christmas present. Little gems, most of them, especially this one, so poignant
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I am glad that you are enjoying them. I have read many–maybe all–of her novels but had never read her short stories before. Thank you for the comments.
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