A Game of Hide and Seek
by Elizabeth Taylor (1951)
NYRB Classics (2012)
328 pp
Thanks to #NYRBWomen24 I have now read my fifth Elizabeth Taylor novel, A Game of Hide and Seek. My first was A Wreath of Roses, back in — gulps — 2015, and when I finished it I immediately put Taylor on my Pantheon, the list of authors whose books so struck me that I wanted to read everything they’ve written. It was potentially risky, particularly since I didn’t love the second one I read, her second novel, Palladian. But I then loved Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and A View of the Harbour. And now I can put A Game of Hide and Seek in the “love” column as well. That’s now a sufficiently good ratio to feel justified in my quick elevation of Taylor in my personal rankings!
I loved A Game of Hide and Seek from the first few sentences where we meet Harriet and Vesey, both eighteen years old, the two characters we will follow over the course of the novel and, as it turns out, over the course of a few decades in their lives. Here is that wonderful opening:
Sometimes in the long summer’s evenings, which are so marked a part of youth, Harriet and Vesey played hide-and-seek with the younger children, running across the tufted meadows, their shoes yellow with the pollen of buttercups. They could not run fast across those uneven fields; nor did they wish to, since to find the hiding children was to lose their time together, to run faster was to run away from one another.
It seems like we are about to read an idyllic love story. That is, unless you’ve read Elizabeth Taylor. Then you know that it will be much more complicated, more cynical — though without ever becoming nihilistic — than that. Soon we realize that while Harriet and Vesey may have these momentary moments where one or the other thinks there may be the potential for romance, they don’t necessarily think the other feels the same way. And even they go back and forth a bit. Vesey, we come to see, is not such a find. He’s a bit selfish and unreliable. Harriet finds the uncertainty of her own young love agonizing rather than pleasurable. It’s set up as an idyll in those first few lines, but it lacks that sense that things are just right, even if they are passing.
Still, time does pass. Vesey doesn’t stick around, and Harriet, though she yearns for him, also moves on and eventually marries someone else. Why wouldn’t she? Nothing really ever happened between her and Vesey. Certainly he was sometimes dismissive; sometimes he was even cruel. How could that be love?
And yet over the next fifteen to twenty years, Harriet and Vesey run into each other now and then. It turns out the attraction — even this dangerous and uncertain and painful one — didn’t go away. Both of them still feel drawn to each other, though of course things have changed a lot.
Harriet and Vesey are the main characters of this novel, but Taylor introduces several others — friends, neighbors, family members — who often take center stage. We often see Harriet and Vesey’s relationship through others’ eyes. This is introduced on the second page, when ten-year-old Deirdre recognizes that Harriet and Vesey use the game of hide and seek to abscond to the loft. Nothing happens in the loft — nothing other than a sense of attraction — but Deirdre, who cannot picture what could be happening still “imagined a guilty but simple intimacy up there.”
Later in the novel, Harriet’s husband, Charles, has a particularly fearful imagination. Not that it’s unfounded, even if nothing ever really happens between Harriet and Vesey. Their attraction to each other warps everything else. I think Taylor’s central theme is expressed in this line from later in the book:
She found, though, that love was a disorganizing element. Dropped into their midst, it had the power of upsetting other relationships, so that she felt emphasis shifted all about her, as if her world had slipped; as if a general subsidence had taken place.
And so we watch Harriet and Vesey, often unhappy — indeed, unhappiest when together — go in and out of each other’s lives, while those around them orbit in strange ways. Harriet’s daughter, Betsy . . . wow. Taylor so delicately lets us see how she thinks all of this affects her.
It’s an amazing, nuanced, complicated book. I know Elizabeth Taylor has her readers, but I think she needs more! I certainly look forward to my next one.
I have loved all the Elizabeth Taylor books I have read. I read this one a few years ago. I haven’t read Palladian yet- maybe, I’ll wait for that one. I read Blaming this year and can highly recommend that one for sure. I finished all her short stories last year! I think you two should do an author spotlight on her. Glad to know you are a fan, Trevor. She’s on my list of authors who I want to be a completist of! Thanks for your great review!
Thanks so much for the comment, Antoinette! I’m excited to hear that Blaming is wonderful. I’ve been tempted to go back and read her debut, At Mrs. Lippincote’s and then reading them in order of publication (skipping the ones I’ve already read), which would mean Blaming would be last. Maybe that’s a good thing — but also, I don’t want to wait! Also, I’m glad to hear that about her stories as I’ve read only a few of them.
I agree that we need to do a highlight on her. She is on our shortlist!
I juts read this recently as I’ve been reading her novels in order this year and entirely agree with your praise. She is also wonderful at bringing her secondary characters to life, and at times telling the story from their point of view.
I can hardly believe I haven’t posted here already!
Inspired by Trevor’s review of Elizabeth Taylor,
I ordered … and have now received her _Complete Short Stories_ !
65 stories in 626 pages of quite dense print, plus introduction by her daughter, Joanna Kingham.
From what I’ve read she is regarded as unjustly neglected for both her novels and short stories. I’m looking forward to getting started on this, probably alternating with other reading. Of course, I’m already into various volumes of short stories. Just before receiving this volume I picked up (at a library sale) a modest little collection called _The Mistress, and Other Stories_ (1965) by Gina Berriault (1926-99). Never heard of her. Now I’ve read 8 of the 15 stories: Wonderfully written, insightful, and deliver important messages.
Among those I read is “The Stone Boy”, which was much later the basis of a film in 1984. Outstanding story. I can understand why it was chosen.
Interesting to me:
She published a second collection, _The Infinite Passion of Expectation_ (1982), which mixed in *all but one* from the previous volume, with 11 new ones. She published a third and final volume, _Women in Their Beds_ (1996), which mixed in all the previous stories (but one) with 10 more new ones. It is subtitled “New and Selected Stories”. So she ultimately “selected” all-but-one of her total 36 stories. Why?
The ommission of that story calls my attention to it, and places a little worm hole that I fill with fantasy, such as that it was too autobiographical and could *be, or be *taken to be, about living individuals. Or not. But if *so, I’m betting none of the players are living today, unless there’s maybe someone around 100 who was a young kid in the 1920s. (I knew a lot of people like that!). Etc..
It’s called “All Attempts Will End in Failure”. I’ve read it twice and parts again, and found it an effective *and affective (in the meaningful sense) first person account (recalled later) of being a sixteen year old girl observing her parents in public and experiencing troubling, and potentially life-changing moments of discovery. Am I starting to sound like a book sleeve writer? Worth spotlighting on a flap!
Gotta hold on to this first volume just for the ommitted story! But I like having and separately reading the 1st collection, anyway, being written largely (so it seems) in her 20s and 30s. This would be a period from before I was born through my single digit ages, and prior to the dramatic political, sociological, artistic, etc., changes which were already emerging in our world by 1965, inevitably influencing my personal evolution. So prior to that, and in my mother’s adult life (she was born in between Taylor and Berriault), is for me a dim and greatly limited memory and recognition of the 1950s world, and impressions of prior decades through knowing family and homes of others of the older generations, some leaving writings, some in my memory who were born as much as 150+ years ago. So, yeah, I enjoy reading that period of writing..
Or I could have just said that it’s cool to read these early stories together, the writer having lived in those decades (out of which I emerged), while oblivious to the coming world of the nearly 60 years since. So I can compare them with the later stories up to the mid-90s, by which time those “old” times had become history, part of the collective consciousness to oldsters, and wholly second-hand to the youngsters. So’z anyway, that should be fun.
_Women in Their Beds_ won the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story, and the 1997 Rea Award for the Short Story. How bad can it be ? I’ve ordered it, of course.
She also wrote four novels. We’ll see how desperate I am after I’ve read all the short stories. That applies to both Taylor and Berriault, and a *lot of others who *also wrote novels.
So, wow, this is while I’m starting to see how finite be the supply of unread stories by Elizabeth McCracken, and pondering which novel I’ll need to resort to? If she puts out a fourth collection at a similar interval in the future, as between previous ones, will I live to read it? Quite reasonably uncertain, at best. So I have saved a portion of her stories unread, postponing the end, ‘though the fact that they beg rereading is another safety feature! I have numerous such relationships with authors’ complete, collected, selected, new, or.., and/or.., etc., short fiction collections.
Look at me, reading *all by women! I’m also into the two volumes of the “..Stories We Tell”, stories by women.., and some other stuff, not *only women, so…
All I’ve really succeeded in doing is ensuring that there’s no end in sight to the great literature of short stories yet for me to read.