Beryl Bainbridge
Page 33
This combination of circumstances, the dramatic irony inherent in benign intentions leading to tragic consequences, all unfolding within the self-contained setting of the idyllically rustic Coed Nant Gain, appealed to Beryl’s sensibility. Initially, she was pleased about the way the new novel was shaping up: ‘The next one is good, about Wales,’ she told Judith, ‘not subjective or obscure or self-pitying like the last one, but a story. I will send you bits as I finish it. There is noone else I want to read it, or tell me what they think.’22
Despite the drama of Alan’s last appearance, Beryl wrote to Judith shortly after he’d gone and told her that ‘next month I may go to Germany with him’.23 After everything that had happened, the idea of going away with him must have seemed wilfully bizarre to her friends. There was, however, a kind of logic to the decision: Alan was going to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the foremost publishing market in Europe, so it made sense, given the recent acceptance of her book by Hutchinson, to go too. But in reality her motive for the trip, aside from a faint lingering hope of a reconciliation with Alan, was to visit the sites of the concentration camps (‘I want to go to Belsen . . .’).24
Alan’s time at the Book Fair seems to have been productive, and Italian, French and Spanish editions of A Green Tree in Gedde appeared over the next year or so. Foreign publishers had no doubt been encouraged by the succès de scandale provoked on publication in April, and the book’s frank treatment of sex had ensured sales and a healthy helping of outrage: ‘Mustard should not be served without beef,’ wrote one contemporary reviewer, ‘but that is precisely what Mr Sharp has done . . . A Green Tree in Gedde is spread so thick with sex that it is hard to find the “meat”.’25
For Beryl, the trip was less successful. Although her flight and accommodation had been arranged by Alan’s German publishers – she was travelling as his ‘wife’26 – she doesn’t seem to have attended the Book Fair itself.27 Nor did she get to see the camps. This was in part due to her lack of geographical awareness, in that Bergen-Belsen was too far north of Frankfurt and Auschwitz was in Poland: ‘I cannot find the camps,’ she complained to Judith. ‘Noone knows, not here, never heard of them, not anywhere, 360 miles already and still noone knows. Tomorrow I go to Munich, to Dachau, they must know there.’28
Judith disapproved of Beryl’s decision to go to Germany, feeling that she was complicit in Alan’s abusive treatment of her and was being corrupted by his money. Beryl sensed this and in her letters tried to forestall criticism by acknowledging it and taking the blame on herself:
I am somewhere in the Black Forest, but as usual I do not see the trees for the tears. Mainly of self pity – but mixed with self disgust. I have been bought up. A £100 worth of clothes, flying here there and everywhere, rich hotels, everything around me as corrupt as I am myself. This much I know to be true. He does not love me and I know it, and yet I am here and I indulge in the most dreadful suffering . . . This man is my devil and all I do is submitt. If in some few days I do not fight I shall really go under.
Wherever we stop he writes his bloody letters – to Liz – to Sal – to Margaret. If I had the guts or enough madness I would kill him, God help me I mean it. I am in an intense subjective world, the exit I know about, but he seems stronger than me. I have decided to go home, I mean back to Liverpool. I will die otherwise, and then what about the children?29
In some ways Germany was the last straw, a final proof, if further proof were needed, that she and Alan were bad for one another. Whether it was that reason prevailed, that Alan had broken her spirit, or that she’d simply had enough, when she got back she tried to get him out of her system, writing to tell Judith that with his departure she already felt a weight off her mind:
O dear I do feel such a fool because I am not in such chaos really, not to deserve such kindness and love in your letter, both written and between the lines. I mean I do deserve it, but I mean I’m not so miserable. The reason for the quick change of attitude is that maybe, barely breathing, I have seen the last, positively the last of Alan and because of this I am enormously much better and less sorry for myself and whatnot. Germany was dreadful, awful, like Greece only not so hot and so much more covered and oiled and besmirched with money and all that. We came back a few days ago and parted in the night, him to Liz I presume and me to Austin seated in the brass bed in his red satin underpants, twitching his head and making faces at the baby.30
Of course it was not quite as simple as that. A few days after writing that she had seen ‘positively the last’ of Alan, he was back, breaking into Arkwright Road again: ‘I really wanted to kill him. My head starts to thump or is it my heart?’31
Two years before, Beryl had felt so overwhelmed by these emotional dramas she had considered writing to Cyril Taylor to ask him ‘to put me in some rest home for a time. There was one he thought about once before, and I can’t go on like this.’32 She ultimately abandoned the idea, feeling that with the children to look after it wasn’t practical. Nevertheless, she was aware that her emotional instability was something she had to deal with sooner or later: ‘At this rate it can only get worse. Everything is sliding away. Useless to tell anyone what it feels like, because unless you feel like this, you can easily dismiss it as sheer hysteria. I feel so ashamed, and the strain of being normally chatty and everything is awful.’33
A month before Rudi was born Beryl told Judith she was still haunted by thoughts of suicide, and that she felt there was something psychologically wrong with her: ‘Sometimes I believe I am sick. I write down unbelievable filth, fantasys of sexual torture done to me by elderly and balding buisness men. My head gets hot and I throw the pages in the fire, and want to vomit and wonder what is wrong with me. Somewhere I went badly astray.’34
Things didn’t improve after the birth and she reached a point where she felt she needed professional help. Her doctor referred her to Charles Rycroft, then a consultant psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and an influential figure in British psychiatry who had been R. D. Laing’s training analyst. Rycroft diagnosed her as a ‘hysteric with psychopathic tendencies’,35 but as she refused group therapy he put her on a waiting list for one-to-one psychotherapy. Eventually her first appointment with Dr Lawrence Kotkas, a member of the South Place Ethical Society, was arranged for 18 January 1966.
Kotkas picked up on her fascination with Jews, seeing it as a form of identification, and that their presumed passivity during the Holocaust was a metaphor for her own acquiescence in suffering. ‘All my life I’ve been wanting to be persecuted,’ she told Judith by way of explanation, ‘asking to be punished because I feel unworthy of something or other. So I turn very easily to the Jew thing not because they were persecuted but more because they were so willing to be slaughted. They went so meekly to die . . . He said I should study the reasons why the Jews so easily marched to their deaths and perhaps find out why I insist on being hurt.’36
After about six months the sessions ended as Dr Kotkas had to return to Canada. Whether it had anything to do with her therapy or not, the early months of 1966 marked a change in Beryl’s attitude to Alan, and she no longer felt quite so in thrall to her feelings about him. Alan, who was now living in Greenock, having moved out of the flat he shared with Sally in London, sensed this shift in power between them: ‘You are on the edge of freedom from me and my tearing into your life,’ he wrote to her, ‘the only thing you want is certainty and you are sure that it doesn’t lie in Greenock with me. All of this I see and accept. It can’t be denied.’37
His last attempt at a reconciliation between them took place in May, after he sent her air tickets to spend the weekend with him in Greenock. She came, but it was not a success. The relationship was past the point where it could be retrieved. In an undated letter to her, Alan summed up the emotional balance sheet of their mutual incompatibility:
We may argue about who is most to blame, but that doesn’t matter. What matters now is that it stops. You are destroying me as much as I am you, and I want so muc
h to be free of you and the reproaches you plant into me, the relentless tears and the way you cut Ruth off like she was a tap. We each have our own versions now of what it was all about and nothing will bring them together. I had hoped of this time we were together that we might not play the same cruel games, but we have and once more we’re strangers in a foreign country and have nothing to say.
You are not for me Beryl. You are too much of too many things. I will never be able to name my list because in the end I always shrink from the truth. So I hover around the soft lie, the would-be kindly lie. I am in my nature an evader of reality and so I need someone who will not ask the same questions or who will leaven the asking with some compassion for my failings. That at least is something no one can accuse you of suffering from.
In your eyes I will always be what I am now, and I will always see myself through your eyes as long as I have you in my heart. I do have you there and sometimes I fear I wont get you out. But I will. I thought for a little time that you were going to look at me differently, and while I loved you I would be able to look at myself differently. But that is not your way, you are just as incapable of letting me off as I have been until now of tearing myself free. Now we are hooked into each other and nothing results but pain. We are terrible people, consuming so much of life in order to be unhappy.38
In August, Beryl went to stay again at the Simeys’ place in Coed Nant Gain. As she had the previous year, she returned to more bad news. Not only had the television play she had written failed to be selected for production (there was small comfort in the fact that it was the runner-up), Graham Nicol had put back the publication date of her novel to the following March. More pressing, however, was her dire financial situation: ‘Came back to 3 court summonses and one baliff order.’39
Fortunately, a round of letters asking for help produced results: Judith sent her some money, as did Harry and Ken Ratcliffe, Austin gave her £15 and Alan sent £10 (which Beryl disdainfully dismissed as ‘sweetie money’). She had also written to her agent in desperation (‘I was near to crying,’ she told Judith) to see whether there was any way he could hurry an advance. He couldn’t. Although the catastrophe was averted and the bailiffs placated, it nevertheless left her in low spirits: ‘I carn’t say I feel cheerful – its not the money or the Alan thing or anything concrete – it’s a steady rising lump of mess.’40
She was, however, still writing, though her initial enthusiasm for Another Part of the Wood had now settled into the less joyous task of actually writing it, with all the doubts, difficulties and hesitations this involved. Despite her mood, the book progressed steadily: she had mapped out the characters, and by November she had worked out the dynamics of the book’s tragic final scene:
At the very end Kidney takes Roland up mountain. Balfour falls for Dotty. Doris tells Lionel how she hates him. Coming down mountain Roland takes pills to make himself as fat as Kidney. Dies in coma. Everyone goes in to see him during final game of monopoly. Balfour enters. Last sentances –
Joseph: How is he?
Balfour: D–dead.41
It was, as she put it, ‘All phychological stuff.’
By the beginning of 1967 things had picked up on a number of fronts. Panther had agreed to bring out A Weekend with Claud in paperback, offering a £300 advance. As her agent explained, this was ‘very good indeed for a first novel’,42 even if it was split with the hardback publisher. The novel was now finally and officially scheduled to come out in June and had even aroused interest in America.
Beryl had also finished Another Part of the Wood. Her agent had ‘enjoyed it very much’, despite feeling that the end ‘was very abrupt’.43 However, it would not actually be published for another year and a half due to the delayed publication date of A Weekend with Claud.
In a new, positive frame of mind, Beryl could even regard Alan’s periodic reappearances with a certain equanimity. His life had not become any less complicated since their definitive parting the previous year and, as Beryl told Judith, Liz now seemed to be suffering a fate similar to that which she had endured: ‘Lizzie had a boy last month and has gone back home and Alan now has a 17 year old debutante type in her place. He chases me and Ru along Finchley Road most days begging to see her and she says “Hallo man”, and I laff. Not nastily, I don’t mind anymore and he does look funny, with that funny phoney expression and all his ex-demented wives and mistresses in ruins all over points South and North.’44
Despite the awkward position Liz was in, Beryl felt none of the schadenfreude she thought she might: ‘I feel very sorry now – its not much fun having an illigitimate baby at the best of times, but certainly not the first time – and she must be unhappy if she’s at all normal after being with Mr Sharp.’45
There was more good news in April: Austin had completed the purchase of a house in Albert Street, Camden Town, and his long-held hopes of providing a home for Beryl and the children were at last a reality. His plan was to convert the basement into a self-contained flat, which he could live in while doing the work himself. Then, once Beryl and the children were installed and the work on the house was finished, the flat could either be rented for income or sold to release enough capital for himself.
The timing was perfect: Austin would move in on 1 May and Beryl would follow three weeks later, just in time for the launch of her novel on 21 June. The scale of the building work required may not have been what she had in mind, but for the moment the disruption and the lack of money paled into insignificance. As if the fates were conspiring to engineer a fresh start in life, by the summer of 1967 Beryl not only had a new place to live, she also had a new occupation: writer.
TWENTY-ONE
Albert Street
I am alright now. A bit miserable but beginning to bounce again. I miss you. You are a fool rushing away. Think of the glories of wet and storm tossed Albert St.1
The house at no. 42 was one of a short line of terraced houses at the lower end of Albert Street, built for railway workers in the mid-nineteenth century. It would be Beryl’s home until she died, and came to be seen as an expression of her personality, its eccentricities of decor a reflection of her own.
When Beryl first moved in, many of the street’s terraced houses had been divided up into flats or bedsits. ‘It was a very run-down area,’ remembered Penny Jones, Beryl’s next-door neighbour who had lived there since 1962, ‘multi-occupational, mainly Irish and Greek-Cypriot immigrants; there were rooming houses, with people in every room and sinks on the landing.’2
But the process of gentrification had already started. A number of houses that were previously multi-family occupiers were being converted back to single-occupier properties, and an increasing number of middle-class families or those in upper-income professions were moving in. By the time Beryl arrived, there was already a solid core of middle-class incomers: the barrister Barbara Mills (later Director of Public Prosecutions) lived up the road, as did the architect Beeban Morris, while the innovative designer and engineer Sigur Max Fordham moved in two doors down in 1963.
In the short term the conversion of No. 42 meant a drain on the finances, not to mention disruption, inconvenience, dust and delays:
Last week we might have moved in quite reasonably but this week it is uninhabitable by virtue of Aussie and his mania for posh doing overs and taking out all the wires and the pipes and all the fireplaces, so we now have a litter of bricks and debris. After 3 days of this he collapsed and I threw a hard boiled egg at him. We finished up with £1,987 on the Friday and -£15 on the Sat. During the hours from riches to rags he hired a lorry, a plumber, and an architect, as the basement wall he had started to remove was holding up the rest of the house. I reckon we will be in debt for another 25 years . . . I sometimes think he does it just to have something to worry about. Whereas all I want to do is put up me pictures, arrange the plants, and write me next book. Still, it will be alright. For one thing me suite – me middle floor – is beautiful, long windows, an iron balconey and double doors à l
a Noel Coward flourishing into the bedroom.3
Short of money, and with the bailiff incident still on her mind, Beryl wrote again to her agent John Smith, asking whether he could speed up payment of the second half of her advance. He couldn’t, but instead he offered to advance her the money himself, ‘just to keep the wolf from the door’.4 This may have been intended as an act of kindness, but it established something of a bad precedent: before her first book was published she was already in debt to her agent.
The actual publication of A Weekend with Claud was something of an anticlimax. It had been so long in production that anything short of an overwhelming success would have seemed like a poor reward for so much time and effort. In the lead-up to publication, things looked promising. Beryl was featured in two profiles, the first of which appeared in The Sun alongside what the paper called the ‘most unusual literary photograph of the year’, a picture of Beryl and the children posing in front of some of her paintings:
Her startling first novel, one of the most personal I have ever read, is not only a novel. For this Liverpool-born writer it was also a piece of emotional therapy. Miss Bainbridge who is divorced and lives with her three children in Hampstead, told me this week: ‘Almost from the moment of writing the thing down, the relief was tremendous. It’s rather like my diary, as though I crammed in what actually happened. It was therapy – I was writing something out. The thing that does worry me now is that in a few years it could seem a neurotic carry-on, it could look too self-pitying. It was meant to be comedy.’5