When, 15 years ago, Nicola Beauman embarked on this life of ‘the other Elizabeth Taylor’, the novelist and not the film star, she had been deprived of documents that would certainly have been of tremendous use to her. These were the letters that, over a period of some three decades, Taylor wrote regularly and at length to the novelist Robert Liddell, living in self-exile in Greece. Aware that she was terminally ill, she asked him to burn her side of their correspondence, and no less regrettably then destroyed his. Was he right to obey this injunction from a woman whom he himself described as the best letter-writer of the 20th century? I myself, as I told him at the time, thought not; but others, perhaps morally more scrupulous, approved.
The reason usually given for Taylor’s demand is that, intensely private and discreet, she did not wish revelations about her life or the lives of her neighbours to gain general currency. I have an additional explanation. Writers have a way of embellishing reality in order to make it more arresting and amusing; and from the little that Liddell preserved of the letters in his book Elizabeth and Ivy, I suspect that this is what had happened in this case. May not Taylor have not wanted her embellishments eventually to be shown up as fakes and have therefore decided on the holocaust?
The curious thing is that this friendship was, until its final few years, an entirely epistolary one. On holidays in Greece, Taylor could easily have called on Liddell but decided not to do so. When she eventually paid a visit, he has recorded her extreme nervousness as she first stepped over his threshold. ‘She might have been entering a hospital theatre for a life-or-death operation’ was how he described it to me. I regard Taylor’s ’s regular penning of confidences to a man whom she had never met as similar to the way in which an ignored child chats to a doll or a lonely OAP to a cat or a dog. In effect, she was conversing less with him than with herself.
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