by Brendan King
In February Beryl had given her play ‘I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering’ to John Smith to see whether he could place it, and he had sought the opinion of the famous theatrical agent, Peggy Ramsay. In something of a bad omen, a month before A Weekend with Claud was published, Beryl received news that the play had been turned down again. Ramsay had sent Smith a blunt analysis of its failings, which was all very well, but his decision to copy out a passage of this damning assessment and send it to Beryl wasn’t very diplomatic. ‘I honestly don’t know what to say about the play,’ Ramsay began, before demolishing it, ‘Miss Bainbridge is obviously not without talent, but this is not a TV play one could show to anyone, because Miss Bainbridge hasn’t grasped TV technique. She seems to organise a series of film shots all over the place, and then sits down to interminable duologues which wouldn’t hold on TV.’6
Shortly after this setback, the initial reviews of the novel started appearing, and they weren’t overly complimentary either. They picked up on the book’s complicated literary structure, its dense writing style, and what they saw as its concentration on a group of characters who were too self-obsessed and self-absorbed to be interesting to anyone else. The Observer was harsh in its criticism: ‘Perhaps the prose intermittently has something, but generally this novel spectacularly fails to convince that there is hard imaginative currency supporting its considerable literary pretension. Interior monologue is one thing: character another.’7 If anything, the Sunday Telegraph was even harsher: ‘No amount of mannered writing – and there is quite a lot of it – can conceal that Miss Bainbridge hasn’t much to say.’8
It wasn’t very encouraging. As she told the Hampstead and Highgate Express twelve days later: ‘I’ve got some really terrible reviews, so I’ve just given up reading them.’9 Despite these initial setbacks, the novel did attract some positive attention. There was a very enthusiastic profile-cum-review in Books & Bookmen written by the assistant editor of the magazine, Alex Hamilton, another writer from the New Authors stable: ‘I am a plot person, thinking that self-indulgence is the reader’s rather than the writer’s prerogative, but reading this book I felt for once ‘The hell with the plot’, in the pleasure of seeing a brilliant writer emerging. It seems to me likely that in the books which follow this one we may see Beryl Bainbridge writing rings round many established names.’10
But it wasn’t just critical assessments in newspapers, whether positive or negative, that Beryl had to deal with. There was also the response of her friends. A Weekend with Claud was openly autobiographical – perhaps the most truly autobiographical book she would write – and it featured portraits that were both indiscreet and not particularly flattering. Many of those closest to her appeared in only the very thinnest of disguises: Harry was ‘Victorian Norman’, Ken was Edward, Mick was Billie, Ronnie was Claud, Austin was Joseph, and Leah was Shebah. When the book first arrived from the publisher, Beryl immediately realized that the standard legal disclaimer was missing, technically leaving her open to claims of libel: ‘To my horror there is no mention in the front of the book of “All characters are fictitious etc.” That scares me, but its too late now.’11
But no legal disclaimer could prevent individuals from being hurt or offended by what she had written. The reactions of those depicted in the book varied: Ronnie seemed to be unperturbed, actually even flattered by his inclusion, despite his portrayal as a somewhat seedy character, while Austin passed the book over in silence, by now taking it for granted that Beryl’s view of things was a distorted one. However, Leah and Harry don’t seem to have been so forbearing. Initially, Leah wrote to wish Beryl ‘All the MITZVAH (Good luck!) in the world in your new home & your “creation”’. She enthusiastically looked forward to reading the book, a copy of which she had seen at a mutual friend’s house. Leah hoped that its publication would mark a new beginning for Beryl: ‘Perhaps it will all change now & things will turn out well for you. You, too, have suffered so much. And also, I think, martyred (like me) here.’12 What Leah thought after she read it is less clear. There are no further letters from her and Beryl doesn’t mention her again in any of her letters or diaries. There was a similarly abrupt silence from Harry, hinting that he too may have felt she’d overstepped the mark and betrayed their friendship by revealing things he’d talked to her about in confidence.
As if moving house and the publication of her first book weren’t enough to keep Beryl occupied during the summer of 1967, she also fell in love. And as was often the case, things weren’t entirely straightforward.
Harold Retler was an American computer programmer on a three-month visit to the UK. He had come over in pursuit of Judith Gleeson, an ex-work colleague who had been persuaded to take up a computing job in London by Beryl’s former neighbour, Philip Hughes, an IT consultant who had met her in the United States the previous year. But Harold’s somewhat extravagant romantic gesture – he had given up his job in Washington and sold his house and car before coming over – was in vain. By the time he arrived in the spring of 1967, Judith’s affections were elsewhere and she was already engaged.
At one of the Hughes’ dinner parties, Philip’s wife Psiche introduced Judith Gleeson to Beryl, with the view to getting her to commission a painting, and the two women had become friends. Consequently, when she heard that Beryl was about to move from Arkwright Road to Albert Street, Judith roped in Harold to lend a hand carrying the numerous boxes of ‘junk’ – Beryl’s own word for her assemblage of Victoriana, stuffed animals, paintings, books and furniture.
After this hands-on introduction they began to see each other. On one level, they made an unlikely couple, and not just because Harold, bearded and balding, stood a head taller. They were completely different personality types: Harold, two years younger than Beryl, was an only child and more emotionally reserved. Nor, on the surface, did they seem to share the same interests – after studying mathematics at Lawrence University, Harold had gone into computer programming, still a relatively new field, first at Westinghouse Electric, then at Rand Corp. This led to a job in Washington, where he bought a house in the historic Georgetown district. As if to emphasize the cerebral nature of his interests, he gained admission to the Washington chapter of Mensa, which demands an IQ score of 130 or above. It was this connection to the US capital that inspired the nickname by which Beryl would always refer to him: ‘Washington Harold’.
But underneath the surface they had a number of passions and enthusiasms in common. One was literature, Beryl urging Harold to read D. H. Lawrence and he pressing her to read Thomas Wolfe. Another was music, especially old 78s, such as Al Bowlly’s touchingly sentimental rendition of ‘There’s Something in Your Eyes’, and the comical ‘Cicely Courtneidge Plonks her Guitar’.
They also shared an interest in art. As she had with Judith, Psiche prompted Harold to commission a painting, and impressed by the portraits Beryl had done of Judith and her sons he followed suit. Consequently he sat for his portrait, posed in the large rocking chair in her bedroom, which served as her studio at the time. When the picture was finished she didn’t want to charge him and gave it to him as a gift. To ensure she wouldn’t lose out financially he bought another painting – the double portrait of Claud and Shebah that happened to be propped up on the sofa in the publicity shot taken for the book – and a self-portrait she had done in pen.
Beryl had initially been drawn to Harold by empathy, wanting to console him over Judith’s recent engagement, but her feelings quickly – and as usual too quickly – developed into something more serious. At the start of July she wrote to Judith Shackleton, ostensibly to tell her about her daughter Chloë’s visit, and admitted she was ‘in love with Washington Harold’.13
But Harold’s time in England was already coming to an end. Shortly before he returned to the States he took Beryl to Ronnie Scott’s to hear Blossom Dearie, the American jazz singer and pianist. Aware of the impracticalities of continuing the affair, and perhaps uncertain of Beryl’s commitment, he tried
to rationalize the situation and explain why things wouldn’t work between them. He listed the drawbacks – she had too many children, she was too closely connected to Austin, he didn’t want to hurt her. But of course he already had. In an attempt to alleviate her feelings of rejection, Beryl proceeded to get drunk and almost passed out. Harold had to take her out of the club to revive her.14 She had the feeling of history repeating itself and in a letter to Judith she resigned herself to events: ‘I shall no doubt survive . . . I just wish Washington Harold would like me.’15
On the eve of Harold’s departure for America, Beryl wrote him a letter, trying to put into words some of the things she felt but which she hadn’t been able to say to him in person. Just before he left, she handed it to him:
Dear Washington Harold. I am not tight so I can do this without too many mistakes and seeing I won’t see your face and you won’t turn away or look trapped as is your wont, I can tell you that I love you and wish you could have felt the same. Howevere this is an ego building letter for you maybe to look at when the wounds Judith inflicted get too much to bear again, and though its never quite the same, it should make you a bit happy, whatever that is. I think you are the goodest person and the most beautiful because you are not slick or climbing or any of the usual things. It might have been better more for me had you been a bit more inclined to believe in emotions. I wanted to talk to you so many times but I feared you thinking I was being a drag on you, you are lovely out of bed and lovely in bed, which in a way is more important, though maybe I don’t mean what you think. I just mean its easier to get closer in bed and the way you are then makes it not matter how distant you are in the day. Lots of people appear to be close night and day, but its phony. Anyway take care and be happy and miss me a little.16
Along with the letter she also enclosed a token: the First World War medal belonging to George Ripon Towers, the husband of her Aunt Sarah, which Harold had worn while she was painting her portrait of him: ‘I really do cherish it and its the most deaerest thing I had to give you. You can wish on it or pray or cry all over it. The name on the back is my Uncle’s who died from gassing in the war. One day when we are very old you could send a telegram from G. R. Towers saying you were coming to England and I’d know it was you. I love you.’
Harold was deeply moved by the letter’s contents, though his doubts remained and he reiterated his reasons for breaking things off while it was still possible to do so without causing too much distress on either side:
Dearest Beryl
It is a long way from Miami Beach to the house in Albert St and the big brass bed, a long way no matter how you measure it – I just read your letter five minutes ago, the first time since I read it many times the night you gave it to me, and I cried as I did that night and I haven’t read it again til now, because I’m hardly ever alone and I didn’t want anyone to see me cry because they would never understand, never – and if I pick it up again the tears will flow, because it is so beautiful, so very beautiful, the most beautiful letter I’ve ever received, and because I’ve hurt you, as I knew I would, but I needed you and you have meant as much to me as any person ever has. You said ‘I love you and wish you could have felt the same’ and you were right that I did not feel the same, but I did, do, will, love you, but not with the intensity you felt for me and maybe this was the reason I had to run, because I knew I could never make you happy (or me?) and maybe I was afraid of this intense love.
Someone once said if life could be summed up in one word it would have to be goodbye – so goodbye Beryl, please write if you want to, goodbye, love Harold.17
In her reply Beryl tried to take up the role of friend-not-lover:
All this is a good chatty letter to a casual friend, dear heart Washington, as I have not been drinking, only staring at your empty bottles in the bookcase. It is just as well because I might say too much and make life like fiction which it undoubtedly is, and regret my impulses. I will say some things about your letter. It was a beautiful letter. I have read it over and over. One, you did not hurt me, I hurt myself – only because I wanted you to stay, whilst you were here you made me happy, caused me no hurt . . . I love you. I don’t know what else to say to you. There is something I could say but the distance is too great and your complexity too vast and my own duplicity too monumental.18
Now that Harold had gone she found it hard to picture him, not having been to America or seen where he lived. ‘I visualise nothing,’ she told him, ‘save you with your eyes sliding about and getting your glass of water at night. I put the photogarpah on the wall above my desk. I am looking at it now. I am looking at you now. Ru is in my bed, Aussie is asleep in the basement, the children are above. The lamps shine in the street. I hate goodbye’s, O parting, always parting, whoever invented you.’19
Three weeks later she again wrote to him, this time on a potentially more serious issue – her period was late. She had tried calling him, but had only managed to get through to the friend he was staying with, Senter Stuart. As she was worried Senter might have told Harold and that he would be anxious about it, she wrote to tell him it had turned out to be a false alarm: ‘Harold flower: This is not a proper letter . . . I thought I was pregnant but its all alright now. I am very relieved but also rather sad, because I love children and it would have been a nice baby. I didn’t really want you to know, as maybe you would have felt I was asking for money or something, but beyond that I think maybe you would have felt badly guilty and there was no need to.’20
In a hasty postscript she added: ‘I was going to call the baby Thomas Wolfe Davies. Pity.’
Somewhat belatedly, in mid-July The Sunday Times had published a glowing review by Julian Symons of A Weekend with Claud. Symons appreciated the book’s formal complexity and praised the author’s subtle handling of the material before concluding: ‘There is no doubt that the book is the product of a lively, wayward, constantly enlivening and amusing mind, or that Miss Bainbridge writes with delicacy, wit and an assurance remarkable in a first novelist.’21
The favourable notice produced immediate results. Beryl received a letter the next day from Jilly Cooper, then fiction editor of Intro, a newly founded magazine aimed at ‘teenagers and young twenties’. Cooper asked her to contribute a short story, saying that she was anxious to ‘break away from the normal woman’s magazine routine’ and publish things that were really well written. Her brief was a broad one: ‘they can be sexy, zany, romantic, realistic, suspense, etc’, the only proviso being that ‘they relate in some way to young people today’.22
As it happened, the commission coincided with a visit by Judith Shackleton’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Chloë, who had come down to London to see her brother. As she certainly classified as a ‘young person’, Beryl took the opportunity to turn the visit into the subject of her story, setting it against the backdrop of her recent fling with Washington Harold.
The finished story, published in the September issue of Intro under the title ‘You Could Talk to Someone’, featured a character called Moona, roughly based on Beryl, giving advice on romantic matters to her friend’s daughter, Katie, the story’s narrator. Harold appeared anonymously as Moona’s current love interest, being described simply as an ‘odd man’. Beryl took a number of liberties in order to turn actual events into a more dramatic narrative: when Moona’s ‘odd man’ calls round, she sends Katie to the basement where the lodger, Bernard, sexually assaults her in a vaguely indeterminate way. Although Chloë recognized herself in the basic outline of the story, even at the time she was aware there was a certain amount of fictional embellishment going on. She wasn’t anywhere near ‘as sophisticated or cynical’23 as Beryl had made Katie and the lodger’s predatory assault was entirely invented. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the affinities between Beryl and her fictional alter ego in this early short story. Certainly Judith would have immediately recognized Beryl in Katie’s description of Moona, and Moona’s words are an echo of Beryl’s own:
Every t
ime I’ve ever seen her she’s been in a crisis. Always about men, yet she keeps laughing when she’s telling you how awful it is, and then she almost cries, but not quite. She’s fantastically naive.
‘I just don’t know what to do,’ she told me, ‘I’ve fallen in love with this odd man. I mean I am mad about him, but he is odd.’ All her men have been odd.24
Despite the relatively high sum she had been paid – £40 – Beryl wasn’t happy with the result. When the published copy of Intro arrived she discovered that the story had been cut. She sent a copy of it to Harold, along with a note: ‘Dearest Flower: After all I send the crappy magazine. The story is altered and changed in places, phrases etc, not to make space but I think they thought I had made genuine grammatical errors. Peasants!!’25
Nevertheless, published stories paid well and Beryl was encouraged to try again. She began a story called ‘A Walk in the Park’, about a young married woman called Ann. Unlike the story for Intro, it wasn’t based on a contemporary real-life incident, but drew on Beryl’s early married life with Austin. Ann is presented as having an ideal relationship with her husband, but after a chance meeting with an older woman, whose disillusion about her married life seems to mirror that of Winnie’s, Ann begins to feel a deep ‘sense of depression’,26 and as she walks away, she realizes ‘that this first depression in marriage would re-occur again and again’.