Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  If Beryl had imagined that writing short stories would be a quick and easy way to earn a living – the story for Intro had been ‘money for old rope’,27 as she told Harold – it was not so simple in practice. She submitted the story to Woman’s Own, but on 21 November, Beryl’s thirty-fifth birthday, Jean Bowden the assistant fiction editor wrote to turn it down. Bowden gilded her criticism with a little praise: ‘You write very well,’ she told her, but the story was more of a ‘mood piece’ and she knew ‘from bitter experience’ that the magazine’s readers ‘don’t much like mood pieces; they prefer something with more plot, more progression’.28 Two weeks later, Camilla Shaw at Woman also rejected it. ‘It is not our sort of thing,’ she explained, ‘it is rather too downbeat and inconclusive for us, and the idea that the two alternatives now are total domesticity or running away from it all gives the story a slightly old-fashioned air.’29

  It would be nearly ten years before Beryl had another short story published.

  With all the ‘comings and going’s . . . and the house still in chaos’,30 as Beryl put it, it was surprising she could write at all. She might have been referring to the purely physical chaos created by Austin’s alterations to the house, but the description was equally applicable to her day-to-day life. A case in point was the arrival of one of Robert Shackleton’s former students, Ian Pringle, otherwise known as Sherpa, an account of which Beryl recounted to Judith with characteristic relish:

  Oh yes – what about Sherpa! Came at midnight with a man called Ivan the Terrible and persued me relentlessly till dawn. Quite unabashed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I just wanted to be left alone and he just kept coming at me. And then Ru slept walked and him running round in a blanket. It was absurd . . . I think he must have been deranged. He’s always seemed so quiet. I never fail to be surprised by men – I always pick the wrong ones. Sherpa’s normal I think, whereas Washington Harold just runs away and weeps in corners and buys me paintings as a substitute. I can’t go on. I’m so tired. I love you. Boozey me!31

  Over the next few months the state of the house hardly improved, and despite the onset of winter the heating arrangements still hadn’t been sorted:

  Harold Flower: It is three in the morning. I am very dirty and covered in paint and life is hazadous. You would not know the house now – the central heating is half in – there are floor boards up and ladders (thats not unusual) and pipes everywhere and I am so god damned tired and grey, spattered with peach coral paint, my teeth under a fine coating of nicotine, my nails all broken, my-self in ruins. Until – next Wednesday, when God and the gas-board being good the heat will be on, the hot water going, the new bath working etc etc. Then – oh then.32

  Freezing up in the top bedroom Beryl stared moodily at Harold’s photo and mulled over his last letter, which she had received weeks ago but still hadn’t answered. He had suspected she was unhappy. ‘I can more than understand you’re feeling low & depressed,’ he wrote. Although he was sorry for any ‘actions (or inactions) on my part that were contributory to blame’, the distance between them meant there was ‘very little that I can do or say in a positive vein, except that you mean very much to me and always will’.33 In her reply Beryl sought to reassure Harold that his effect on her had been a positive one: ‘No I’m not unhappy. I feel fit again and the book is going well and despite the little upset you did restore me to life, my flower. Its always a blessing to know that one is still capable of feeling intensely. Also you did another thing. I am at last, after 15 or more years of immaturity, able to say no if I really don’t want to. I never wanted to seem impolite if I was pushed, you know – a refusal always offends – but now I feel more safe, more me.’34

  Christmas passed uneventfully despite the presence of Beryl’s mother and her mother-in-law, Nora, who kept ‘asking if the children had their bowels moved regularly’. There was a ‘flaming pudding and a huge turkey and the stockings filled and everything organised’. In the evening there was a party: songs were sung at the piano and Beryl played ‘There’s Something in Your Eyes’ on the gramophone and thought of Harold. He had sent some books over as Christmas presents, including a deluxe copy of Alice in Wonderland for Jo, and The Essential Lenny Bruce and a work of philosophy for Beryl. In his accompanying card he had raised the possibility of her coming over to America at some point in the future, and so in the New Year she wrote to him, nostalgically reflecting on the short time they’d spent together and thinking it had represented a missed opportunity: ‘I wish so many times you were here. I think you were so much more relaxed toward your departure, and I now am so less obcessed that had we come together at the right momento I would have made you laugh.’35

  It was in this positive mood, tempted by the idea of a visit to America, that she closed her letter to him with a tentative agreement: ‘Dear heart, have a good new year and year. Yes, one day I will come to America, I have an impulsive idea to save up the fare and come for a weekend. Its the thing to do. It sounds so extravagant and swinging.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  America

  Have you ever had a book written about you? Or for you? Or to you?1

  The notion that Beryl could find the time or the money to go off on a trip to America sounded far-fetched. She was, after all, a single mother with three children to look after and a source of income that was precarious at best. But at the end of January 1968 she returned to the idea: ‘It is only half one in the afternoon but I am half seas over owing to an unaccustomed amount of people calling as if it was a birthday or the like, all with booze. I want to come to San Fransico, I don’t know how to arrange it . . . I can’t leave the kids for very long, but I have a desire to run, to sling me beads in Hate Ashford or whatever it is and to make love with you. I think the latter is more important than the beads but still.’2

  After giving Harold some advice about a short story he had sent her – ‘I think you write beautifully . . . you should experiment more and let go. Get drunk a bit’ – she closed her letter with an account of a dinner party she had just attended. She had found it amusing – so much gin had been consumed that the ageing hostess, who was usually inhibited, became ‘more and more indiscreet about the dirty soldiers during the war trying to get her to handle their tools’. All in all, it had been a boozy, convivial day – ‘I have not had a day and an evening of such drinking for a long time’ – all it lacked was someone to share it with: ‘The logical ending would be for you to be here like in a dream of sweetness, and then it would all be alright. But you are not. Can I really come and see you? I will try to work something out, but it will take time to think about. To you in Baltimore which is exotic to me, from me in Alberto strasser . . . I do miss you, I send you real love flower.’3

  The New Year had seen changes at New Authors, with Graham Nicol giving way to ‘a young whizz-kid editor’,4 Michael Dempsey. Dempsey, a brilliant, impulsive, hard-drinking Irishman, was an editor with attitude: ‘He wanted to put out books that upset people and was a natural magnet for trouble.’5 He would become legendary in publishing circles for his various whisky-fuelled excesses over the next decade or so, until he died in 1981 after falling down the stairs in his flat, trying to change a lightbulb while drunk.

  Dempsey was keen to speak to his authors, so at the end of January he wrote to arrange a meeting with Beryl in order to discuss publication plans for Another Part of the Wood,6 now scheduled for October. If he was looking for unconventional authors, he can hardly have been disappointed, though Beryl herself felt somewhat embarrassed by the day’s turn of events:

  The new editor came to lunch, barely 24 years old and I thought, just once Bainbridge be your age, don’t mention Ru, your ex, your past etc, be adult, formal, retiring. All went well for one hour and then the rat man came and behind him Alan, the first face-to-face encounter for a year or more and Ru saying ‘Oh my other daddy, come and meet Ethel’ (her doll). Upstairs they went and me like jelly, out comes the whisky for the cup of tea, and the editor tells his d
readful secret life and I tell mine and we cuddle in the kitchen and Ru and Alan romp up and down. Alan goes and then the editor – who pauses on the step, breathes deeply and cries ‘This is what its all about’ and goes off unsteadidly to the tube. So again I have failed.7

  But the chaotic, drink-fuelled introduction appeared to do the trick. Shortly after the meeting Beryl’s agent John Smith wrote to her, noting that ‘Michael Dempsey seems to be a lively wire’ and adding that ‘he is very keen on your work, so things may from now on speed full steam ahead; anyway let us hope so.’8 But even though everyone at Hutchinson seemed pleased, a sense of ominous dejection was creeping into Beryl’s mind about the book: ‘the long months from acceptance to publication leave me very distant and hardly bothered,’9 she told Judith.

  Part of this was probably a feeling of disappointment that writing was not producing the kind of financial rewards she might have hoped. Just the opposite. Not for the last time, Beryl got into an enormously complicated situation over the monies she had received from her publisher. She hadn’t entirely taken on board the somewhat two-edged nature of an advance – that it is in fact a loan from the publisher to be paid back out of future earnings. Constantly short of money and spending it when she had it, Beryl was now in the invidious position of being nearly £160 in debt to her agent, six months before the publication of her second novel. The convoluted mathematical paths by which these sums were arrived at left her head reeling: ‘We sent you the full Panther advance on Weekend with Claud,’ her agent tried to explain, ‘though in fact we have so far only received £75 of that from the publisher (that is we have received half of the half of the advance that is due to you) this means that we are still owed £67.10.0d on that and we also of course paid you £90 which was £100 less our commission on the first part of the advance on Another Part of the Wood.’10 It is little wonder that when Beryl came to making financial arrangements with her future publisher, Duckworth, she had an inbuilt aversion to advances.

  More bad news came from Anglia Television, who had turned down ‘I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering’, as it ‘did not appeal to the Drama Committee’.11 Beryl’s frustrations at these various setbacks to her writing career were reflected in her reading of a book Harold had sent her, Editor to Author, a series of letters Maxwell Perkins had written to authors he edited at Scribner’s, including Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. She was struck by Perkins’ frequent laudatory references to female novelists and the fact that their names ‘might be in Chinese for all we know, so unsung, unremembered the writers are’. She couldn’t help but see a similar fate for herself: ‘I stamp the floor at night with rage at being neither talented enough or the right sex or single-minded enough to do what I really want to do, and so much of my energy goes into the children and washing the dishes and washing the clothes. And what about Wolfe travelling round like a demented being and Graham Green in Tahiti or whatever and me firmly in the soot of Albert Street?’12

  This feeling of being trapped in her domestic environment fuelled a corresponding desire to escape. One suitably literal expression of this was an attempt to learn to drive, with Judith Gleeson giving her lessons in Austin’s car: ‘She is very brave and the brake does not work, the licence is out of date and the tyres are flat,’ Beryl told Harold. ‘I have had three lessons and drove to Hampstead and that hotel you lived in and back and felt like a jelly.’13 Another was the increasing seriousness with which she treated the idea of going to America, and in this she was encouraged by Judith, who was herself going out to the States the following month. By April what was once a nebulous, somewhat fanciful notion was turning into a practical reality and a date was set: ‘Washington Harold, flower: I want to come. May 27th – without Ru, Austin being aggreeable. But it depends on my Ma and fixing things up here for the kids. I do so want to come. I’ve been with the kids now for 11 years. I’m a bit frightened. It seems such a huge mountain to shift to get to you for a month. But I’ve begun.’14

  Harold sent her a letter full of practical details and travel advice, but then he mentioned the possibility that in the autumn he might come to London again to enrol at an art college. Beryl was completely thrown. Was this an indirect way of saying he was coming over to be with her? After having rejected her the year before, was he backtracking and thinking the relationship would start up again where it had left off? The notion that he might now be seeing the visit in romantic terms sent her into a panic. Taking a swig of whisky, she started writing Harold a letter, attempting to explain her state of mind and questioning him as to his:

  It is such a long time ago since I saw you. What do you expect? Am I chatty, will I amuse, can I give you something beyond the American dream? I feel inadiquate at this distance and scared to commit myself . . . When I asked you to stay when you were last here, I repeated an old old formula I have performed on many occasions. I wanted you to stay . . . I needed you, and you went away. I missed you for a long long time. But then I breathed again and I came up alive and resilient, as I always do and life goes on, and then you write and ask me to come and . . . after I come to you, you will come back here to England. This frightens me, in so many ways. I am committed to Austin. He has given me a home and taken Ru as his and he is so very good and lovely, and are you saying can you come here to live with me perhaps . . . because Austin would not like it. Or am I being presumptious and do you mean simply what you put . . . we will be good good friends and if there is time and aptitude for love then that too? Or are you saying nothing of this . . . I want to come to America . . . but you must tell me what you want. If you have changed your mind that is o.k. too, but I would like to be free just for once after all these years and look at things and laugh and drink and not worry about the washing or the children needing me. And I could make you laugh, as well as make you feel that something was happening inside you.

  Tje ball as you sso tennisingly said is now in your lap or court or appartment. Do you want me to come? It is very sudden, is it not? Blessings, B.15

  The conflicted tone of her letter didn’t bode well for the trip, but there were other, more practical hurdles that had to be crossed before it could begin. Ten days before she was due to fly out, Harold received a desperate telegram: ‘Visa refused stop require urgent letter from your bank sponsoring me for one month stop contact direct visa unit american embassy london love Beryl’.16

  Harold immediately got in touch with the visa section at the American Embassy and told them he was ‘able & willing’ to provide the financial guarantees they were looking for. But as if the fates were reluctant to let her go, even this wasn’t the end of the legal wrangling. With three days to go, Beryl sent him a hastily scribbled note:

  Dearest W. Harold: They withdrew my visa and asked me all sorts of funny questions about who was I leaving the children with and why (4 times this). Why did you want to pay for me to go to the States. So in the end I rang Hutchinsons, the publishers and they threatened all sorts of press and TV action and they came with me to the Embassy and they apologized etc etc. My smallpox has made me delirious. I fall about and my arm has gone septic, also I went on the pill and that has blown me up. I feel so awful about all the money involved. One day I will pay it all back to you . . .

  I will cable you exact time of plane etc. I can’t do this till the last minuet because of my arm and the children. Sometime either 27th, 28th or 29th, but not later, probably 28th. Dear Harold when I arrive with my new knickers I will be the spotty (smallpox) fat (pill) one with the frightened face. I really am a bit frightened. Not of you, just all the moving. I am bringing £2. 4½ sterling in pocket money. Not quite, but almost.17

  Finally, on 28 May, she flew out from Heathrow, landing at Baltimore airport seven hours later where Washington Harold was waiting for her.

  There had been something else that had prompted Beryl’s panicked letter to Harold a month before she landed on American soil. He had no way of knowing, but her passing reference to ‘a friend’ who was h
elping Austin to put in the bathroom was less innocuous than it sounded. The friend was Don McKinlay, who in April had arrived back in England from India, where he had spent a two-semester sabbatical lecturing at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad. The last time Beryl had seen him was almost a year before in July, when, as if marking out his future territory, he had ‘peed in the next doors garden on route to India’.18

  Having stopped off to see Austin, Don decided to stay for a couple of weeks and help him with the conversion work. He already had experience of renovating property. A few years before, he had bought and restored an old, derelict farmhouse, Eaves Farm near Ramsbottom, where he had lived with his wife and young daughter prior to his trip to India. Together, Don and Austin had put in a bathroom on the ground floor so that the existing stairs to the basement could be sealed off and the lower floor turned into a self-contained flat.

  Beryl and Don had known each other as friends for many years, but this time things were different. As Beryl would later tell him: ‘I fell in love with you one afternoon in the kitchen in Albert Street when you were very brown and wore white Indian trousers. To be honest I have an ability to fall in love. I have a need to. But you talked so much about India and about animals and I thought you so beautiful.’19 Don, too, could recall the precise moment that things changed: ‘We were drinking a bottle of vodka together. We felt exactly the same about each other. I thought she was a beautiful woman.’20 A photograph taken on the front steps of Albert Street at the time captures the moment perfectly: Beryl, her arms slung round Don’s neck, stares straight into the camera in proud possession, while Don, bearded and glowing with ruddy health, his shirt casually open, stands in his denim jacket and white trousers, supporting her against his body, his right arm nonchalantly round her waist. They look like a model couple, made for each other.