Poll

I loved A Wreath of Roses. Recommend it to all.

I also love The Great Gatsby. It's been a part of my literary make-up. I think it's tremendous, and I get sick of teacher's presenting Gatsby looking at that cursed green light as a writing cue for "what is your American dream?" It's a mirage! It's not worthy of him and he isn't worthy of it!

I am going with Wreath of Roses, here, though. I'm also bitter that women writers formed NO PART of my formal literary education until college. Finding writers like Elizabeth Taylor was incredibly important for me. And, if I take away all of the cultural baggage of The Great Gatsby, I think A Wreath of Roses is the better book.

Never read either of these...

Trevor, you're right that Gatsby has had a huge influence, but each time I've read it, I've thought, really, that's it? (I had the same experience of To Kill a Mockingbird, actually, which seems a very mediocre novel that has had an important dialogue about race and justice built up around it despite its fundamental meh-ness).

Elizabeth Taylor, by contrast, seems one of the great underrated writers. This title is not, imho, her best one, but it still leaves Gatsy in the dust.

Oh boy, another tight one by the looks of it.

I'll just try to say some things about Gatsby and then A Wreath of Roses.

Gatsby pulled me in the first and umpteenth time with this particular image:

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

It's fresh and refreshing. The sense of buoyancy and pleasant dreams, both of which Gatsby will quickly quash. I still remember where I was the first time I read that when I was 16 years old.

I love that Nick Carraway works in bonds in New York City in the 1920s. I worked on Wall Street for several years, and I hated it. At the same time, I am always thrilled to see it come up in books as a natural part of life for someone else. I'm thrilled that Carraway wasn't an author!

I love how the book ends. It's a beautiful image taking us back to pre-Revolution Manhattan:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

It's so great that I really don't mind if the books beats A Wreath of Roses, as much as I love it and want Elizabeth Taylor to trounce F. Scott Fitzgerald in a real life brawl.

Now, for some nice things about A Wreath of Roses, from a review I wrote a couple of years ago.

A Wreath of Roses (1949) is Taylor’s fourth novel (the other three coming in 1945, 1946, and 1947!). The novel is set in its contemporary time, the first years following World War II, and the horror still pervades even the most mundane or idyllic of settings. In this case, we go to an English village for a summer holiday, but this holiday is going to begin with an impersonal tragedy.

Camilla Hill is waiting for the train that will take her to meet her friend Liz and Liz’s governess Frances. These three know each other well, as this is an annual summer holiday, but each are one year older this time. That’s obvious, I know, but this year the passage of time seems to strike them all the harder as it has also seemed to spread them further apart: Liz has married a clergyman no one likes and has even had a baby; Frances is, well, simply getting old, and the turmoil she feels is manifest in her increasingly dark landscape paintings (boy, I’d love to see these).

As she sits at the railway platform, Camilla ruminates on this. Though we readers do not yet know the specifics, Taylor’s mood it perfect. We feel Camilla’s feelings. A man, a complete stranger, is standing some distance from Camilla on the platform, and he intrigues Camilla. For his part, the man, named Richard Elton, sees Camilla and essentially dismisses her: “the little beauty she possessed could be in the eyes of only a few beholders, so much was it left to fend for itself.” Meanwhile, the other people on the platform also go about their day while another man slowly walks across the footbridge. Though Camilla and Richard should never come together, though this chance encounter should be the same as many we have on the streets every day, something happens that links them together.

The station-master came out of his office and stood in the doorway. The three of them were quite still in the shimmering heat, the plume of smoke nodding towards them, the noise of the train suddenly coming as it rounded a bend, suddenly sucking them up in its confusion and panic. All at once, the man on the footbridge swung himself up on the parapet and, just as Camilla was putting out her arms in a ridiculous gesture as if to stop him, he clumsily jumped, a sprawling jump, an ill-devised death, since he fell wide of the express train.

It’s a pathetic death, and in its description we get a sense of Taylor’s dark sense of humor. The man doesn’t die right away. He’s broken his back, and dies while the ambulance is en route.

Throughout this description of this violent tragedy, Taylor allows us to feel the physical presence of time. Time sat still while we waited for the train, but then the suicide:

This happening broke the afternoon in two. The feeling of eternity had vanished. What had been timeless and silent became chaotic and disorganized, with feet running along the echoing boards, voices staccato, and the afternoon darkening with the vultures of disaster, who felt the presence of death and arrived from the village to savour it and to explain the happening to one another.

When Camilla finally boards the train, she senses that “the afternoon had taken one step towards evening.” Into this tunnel of time walks Richard Elton, and each of them find someone who has shared the recent trauma. Each of them, also, find someone who is sharing their current, more pervasive, sense of wandering through time, destined to reach the end without having done anything.

The book proceeds to introduce us to many fascinating individuals. Liz and Frances are central characters, fully realized and dealing with their own struggles in this year that has so emphatically changed everything from years before. The biggest concern is just what will each of them do to respond.

Of all of them, Liz is the most firmly ensconced in the present. She is tending to an infant and negotiating her somewhat strained relationship with her husband, but she recognizes how all of this is affecting her two friends. With the suicide that opened the book, we also worry about aging Frances and just what she’ll do if she feels the time that is coming is not worth the effort. But most concerning of all is what Camilla will do, she who feels she’s been languishing for years and who still feels she can benefit her future with further drastic changes, something that blinds her to the threat of Richard Elton, a veteran and a liar who gives off signals of his danger which Camilla willfully disregards. Though we’re right to mistrust Richard just from his interactions with Camilla (something the other characters do), Taylor gives us even more to grapple with. Richard’s past is dangerous indeed, and he’s working making the future different as well. Here’s something he writes in the privacy of his hotel room:

And because she is the last thing that will ever happen to me, it shall be different from all that went before. More important. I shall make it different and perfect. And I shall never touch her or harm her or lay hands upon her.

I’ve said a lot about the passage of time, and of course it’s interesting to see how the characters respond to that. But what they’re really responding to, and gearing up to face, is the world around them, which time continually changes. They hope to enact a modicum of their own will on all of this, which is necessary and foolhardy at the same time.

Though this is an intriguing plot, filled with scandal, murder, suicide, and the constant potential for each of those to happen again at any moment, A Wreath of Roses remains focused on its exploration of more mundane qualities such as regret, disappointment, hopelessness.

Would love to see A Wreath of Roses edge this - the only Great Gatsby defender above makes a stronger case for A Wreath of Roses.

Like Hugh I haven't read either.

Anyone want to switch vote? Or make a stronger case for A Great Gatsby?

I'm with you, Paul. I would love to see Taylor's book move on . . . and I'd love to see more readers of Taylor's book!

Tweet you Beautiful Friend to add their vote, and then the coin of doom can break your heart once more.

I thought My Beautiful Friend had voted here for Taylor, but I don't see it!

I'm thrilled to see a close match on this last day of Round 1!

Go Elizabeth!

Was it Your Beautiful Friend that drew her level, or is his/her vote still to come.

Otherwise you know the coin is only going to come down the wrong way for you again.

No, it wasn't, but I did just DM him...

I'm really not sure how he feels about The Great Gatsby, so this could backfire, but I think not.

If he votes, that is!

I'll just whistle a quiet tune while I walk away.

Nothing to see here folks . . .

You deserve a winner. I just hope that Paul chap doesn't muck things up by switching his vote or by launching into completely ill-founded diatribes against your favourite author as he has a habit of doing.

I said nothing to see here, Paul! :-)

Hmm - my daughter has just mentioned that she feels Barbara Pym and Ivy Compton-Burnett were unfairly overlooked in choosing Elizabeth Taylor, so is wondering whether to let the coin of doom decide...

Those two will show up when we do something like this with overlooked and underappreciated writers. They definitely deserve the attention.

That - and the fact that it is 1030pm in the Uk and she actually went to bed 2 hours ago - may have saved Taylor for this round.

It is quite striking how many underappreciated UK writers there are of the female gender from that period, right up to Penelope Fitzgerald. I guess the same in the US as well. And must admit to having read very few of them myself - reading Fitzgerald was a revelation when I did even if I voted for Marias over her.