Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  But the timing could not have been worse. Beryl was due to go to America and spend three weeks with a man who gave every sign of expecting to restart their relationship of the previous year. Moreover, Harold was hardly to be blamed given that Beryl had been telling him she loved him for the last nine months. All the arrangements had been made, so there was no backing out of it now. With a feeling of anxiety about how she would cope over the next three weeks, Beryl left Albert Street, her children and Don behind.

  Since his return to America the previous year, Harold had been at something of a loose end. After spending some time in Florida with his parents, he purchased a VW Beetle and headed back to Washington. His plan was to pass the autumn and winter in Baltimore with friends, and then head out to San Francisco in the spring of 1968 to meet up with his former Westinghouse colleague and flatmate, Don Wilson. In the meantime he found an inexpensive furnished room near Johns Hopkins University and moved in, not even bothering to install a phone as he’d only be there a few months. When he left Baltimore, it would be for good.

  As the idea of Beryl coming to America took shape, the notion of combining her visit with his intended move to San Francisco seemed a logical step, and Harold continued his preparations. In the early spring of 1968 he saw an advertisement for a grey 1965 VW Microbus, factory outfitted as a camper (‘wood panelling, ice box, sink, fold-down table, & seats that unfolded into beds . . .’),21 and made a straight trade for it with his Beetle. With its modern combination of living space, affordability and manoeuvrability, the VW camper was the vehicle which, more than any other, would come to symbolize the counterculture, the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s. In slightly different circumstances, this freewheeling, communal mode of travelling across America would have seemed idyllic, but the first thing that struck Beryl when she saw the camper was the cramped sleeping arrangements, and she immediately felt uneasy about what this implied.

  The itinerary Harold had planned was an intensive one, covering over 5,000 miles, from Maryland on the East Coast to Los Angeles on the West. When he’d offered to show Beryl America he meant it literally. The trip would take in some of the country’s most iconic sights – the White House, Manhattan Island, Yellowstone National Park, Haight-Ashbury, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz – but it also included a mini-tour of Harold’s own life, his birthplace in White Plains, his university campus at St Lawrence, and where he had worked in Washington.

  After picking Beryl up from Baltimore airport, they went back to his apartment, driving down to Washington DC the following day so Harold could say goodbye to friends. The next day the trip began in earnest, and they drove up through Philadelphia to New York and Manhattan, where they stopped to have dinner with a computer programmer Harold knew, Larry Levine, in his Greenwich Village apartment. As they listened to a Fran Landesman and Bob Dorough LP, Beryl was so struck by the nostalgia-infused lyrics of a song about lost love – ‘When Love Disappears’ sung by Blossom Dearie – she copied them out in her journal: ‘The memories will fade/Just like your tears/But where do you go/When love disappears?’22

  Heading north from Manhattan, they drove up New York state, through Harold’s home town of White Plains, and joined the State Thruway: ‘Torrential rain, 8 lines of traffic. Radio playing “You’ll never know just how much I love you”. Spumes of water. Pontiacs, Cheverlot’s, Buic’s, Oldsmobile, Porches, Ford, Cadillac, Mustang, Lincoln, Mercury, Plymouth, Dodge.’ Then it was on to Poughkeepsie, where they followed the line of the Hudson River up through Saratoga Falls and Albany until they reached Wanakena, a small hamlet in the Adirondacks twenty miles from the Canadian border, where Judith Gleeson and her sons were currently holidaying.

  While there, Judith took a photograph of Beryl standing next to Harold, which makes a pointed contrast to the one of her and Don. Here the body language tells a completely different story. Beryl’s arm rests on Harold’s shoulders, but her head is hanging down, her eyes averted as if slightly embarrassed by the presence of the camera, while he leans slightly away from her and seems unsure what to do with his hands: one is stuffed into his trouser pocket, the other hovers at her shoulder, as if he is uncertain whether to touch her.

  Unaware as he was of the change in Beryl’s affections, Harold put her reserve down to shyness or embarrassment. In a letter written shortly after they left Wanakena, Judith told Psiche she thought Harold was enjoying the trip, so on the surface at least there didn’t seem to be any obvious tension between them. But Beryl had also written to Psiche, telling her how uncomfortable she was finding it, how anxious the situation was making her feel. Guilty at having encouraged Beryl to go in the first place, Psiche apologized, saying she’d thought it would be a distraction from the complicated state of affairs with Don. She tried to console Beryl with the thought that even if it wasn’t pleasant it would be ‘an interesting experience’23 from a literary point of view.

  Knowing that Wanakena was a stop on Beryl’s itinerary, Don had sent a letter to coincide with her arrival. The fact that it was delivered successfully, despite being addressed simply ‘c/o Judith Gleeson, Wanakena’, gives an indication of how small the town was: ‘I love you and we must do something about it. The kids are fine, Austin working hard, and I love you. See you in 2 weeks.’24 Uncertain as to whether this would arrive and wanting to make sure Beryl got the message, he also sent a telegram: ‘I love you see you soon, Don.’25

  The journal Beryl kept throughout the trip enabled her to deal with her conflicting emotions – and help pass the time. As well as reflections on what she was feeling that day, Beryl noted down her impressions of the landscape, snatches of conversation, names of towns they passed through, snippets of facts, and anything else that might be useful for a later writing project. She thus captured one of the most significant events of that troubled year just a few hours after it occurred – the assassination of Robert Kennedy:

  June 5th. 2.20 Just crossed into Canada. News comes over car radio that they’ve shot Robert Kennedy, right thru the brain. Condition critical. Feel sick. Hearty bluff man in tourist information centre – ‘What? Oh yes they shot Bobby. Now where did you want to go, Sir?’

  On the next page she hurriedly scribbled down the words of the news reporter who had been broadcasting at the moment the shots were fired, and whose running commentary of the unfolding tragedy was no doubt replayed constantly over the radio:

  Newscast. ‘My God, my God they can’t have. They’ve shot Senator Kennedy. Get him, get him. The assasin is standing right in front of me at this moment, He’s still pointing the gun. Get that gun. Get that gun. His hand’s frozen. Break his thumb if you have to. Get that gun. Get that gun. This is terrible, Senator Kennedy is on the floor, shot in the head. Someone else is shot too. Now they’ve got the gun. Keep back. Keep back. Hold him. Don’t lets have another Oswald for God’s sake – not another Oswald. Hold him.’

  Pressing on into Canada – the aim was to skirt Lake Huron and then cut back into America between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan – they camped by the shore of Lake Nipissing. With the sound of the water lapping, and the sun going down across the lake behind the ridge of mountains, they seemed a world away from the political turmoil of America. The next day seemed equally tranquil: Harold stopped off to swim in a river and in the evening, with the sound of a guitar coming from one of the other campers in the distance, they talked about their childhoods. Things seemed peaceful enough, but the tone of her postcard to Brenda and Stanley Haddon suggests that under the surface Beryl’s mood was far from benign: ‘Passed thru here on way to somewhere or other. Acres of black desolation. Like me. O the jolly camp fires at night, the blood-sucking mosquitoes.’26

  After crossing back into America at Sault St Marie, they ran along the length of the lower shore of Lake Superior, a distance of over 250 miles. Constantly camping by open water exacerbated the mosquito problem: ‘I am great bites all over – under my hair, my elbow twice its normal size, between my toes. One eye closing. I want to come home.’27r />
  As they passed through Jacobson, where they crossed the Mississippi, and headed through Chippewa National Forest, the relentlessness of the journey began to take its toll: ‘The Indian reservation we went through was just trees, miles and miles. We drove 370 miles today and saw few people and only about 2 cars on the road.’ The monotony of the seemingly endless driving added to Beryl’s physical discomfort and fuelled tensions. Entries in her journal become increasingly critical of Harold’s behaviour, the expressions of irritation more frequent. She began to see his urge to show her America, to be her guide, as an attempt to coerce and control her; she felt she wasn’t free to do what she wanted: ‘The only things we do are what Harold wants. He never asks if I would like to do anything. If I do ask he says no. Its a bit miserable, as I feel a bit far from home and I refuse to beg. I long to go into a café and drink coffee and talk to people. To see a picture or even just walk round a village or town. All we do is drive like hell and that makes me want to go to sleep.’

  After travelling for over 150 miles, driving through the Badlands National Park into Wyoming, they finally stopped at a post office in the town of Cody, which was full of ‘real westerners’ with ‘narrow suspicious faces, yellow under their stetson hats’. On the wall Beryl saw a wanted poster for James Earl Ray, the man suspected of killing Martin Luther King, and felt the urge to steal it, but her nerve failed at the last moment.

  They spent the night in Yellowstone National Park, and Beryl noted down her impressions, though apart from a brief mention of bears coming up to the truck, it was the human beings not the landscape that she found interesting:

  How clean are the Americans, as they sit and strain forward, peering thru binoculars, their underpants gleam, their shoes shine, the pink skin on their skulls glow through the crew cut hair. When they are small and slim they are very small, tiny wrist bones, anxious elderly youthful faces, when they are big and overweight they are enormous, great guts and forearms and jaws, and the women wear Bermuda shorts strained tight at the crotch. On most wrists bright big wristwatches, or name bracelets, huge camera, binoculars, transistors, fraternity rings, graduation badges . . .

  At night in the bigger camps they turn on the generators in their trucks, their Komfy Kampers, Rest-U-Easy’s, and the engines steadily hum, and they cook their hygenic steaks and drink diet cococola’s, and calory low beer, and calory free sugar and low content bread. The meat is always perfect, fat trimmed off, you don’t need to chew it at all.

  By now they were two weeks into the trip, and still had almost two thousand miles to go. From the Yellowstone National Park they pushed on into Idaho, through the volcanic formations of the ‘Craters of the Moon’, through Bliss and Boise. Beryl had given up trying to help clean the van, noticing that Harold, dissatisfied with her standard of cleanliness, would go over what she did a second time. So while he tidied up the camper, she wrote ‘copious notes for my new book’, though as she admitted to Austin ‘an awful lot would be unprintable’.28

  By the third week, her irritation with Harold was almost palpable, and to avoid overt confrontation she made increasingly wounding attacks on him in her journal, some of the unkindest things she had ever committed to paper. She lambasted him for being ‘inhibited’ and ‘immature’, resenting him for the sense of obligation she felt over the fact that he had paid for her ticket: ‘How many times have I walked and sat beside him and wished him dead.’

  His attempts at humour made things worse. She became irritated by what she saw as his constant reference to her knickers: ‘Whenever I washed out my pants and put them on a tree to dry he would giggle and touch them and ask about them – Gee! Knickers, he would say, over and over.’ But in her irritation she had forgotten that it was she herself who had started the joke, with the repeated allusion to her knickers in the letters she sent him before she arrived.

  In truth it wasn’t so much Harold’s words or actions that had prompted these outbursts as her own sense of guilt, the uncomfortable knowledge that she had led him on and then dropped him when Don had come along. Beryl knew she was being unfair, but rather than acknowledge the reason, she attempted to justify it through her feelings for Don: ‘This is vindictive but it helps to take away the HATRED. I want to be with DON.’

  As the journey neared its end, her mind kept reverting to Don. She worried that she hadn’t expressed her feelings to him strongly enough before leaving, and resolved to be more forthright when she returned: ‘If I ever get back alive and if I ever see him again I’ll tell him everything. Not be shy. Tell him what I felt. Tell him. One should. I should. Its important. Because we go out so quick like little lights.’

  The trip’s itinerary, which roughly followed that taken by Humbert Humbert in Lolita, gave her an idea for a novel: ‘Theme of the new book should be a journey but in what form? Lie in the truck all day and think of that. Be nice to write a simple story about living in the woods 100 years ago and being attacked by Indians. Or something called the Idyll. All about Don and tenderness. Something beautiful and without any analysis, at least not the sort I usually indulge in. Away with analysis.’

  With less than a week to go before they hit Los Angeles, they spent the night on the slopes of Mount Shasta in northern California. At this altitude it was very cold with snow on the ground; they kept a big log fire blazing and Harold thought he saw a UFO. The following day they descended to a camp in Humboldt State Park – the drive took nearly five hours and Beryl despaired of ever reaching it – from where they could look out over the North Pacific. This time the camp had showers, something of a relief as she was feeling distinctly ‘mucky’. Catching sight of her reflection in the bathroom mirror she experienced one of those existential jolts, a disconnect between her mental image of herself and physical reality: ‘We passed a party of Y.M.C.A. girls in the wood. All yellow and orange and bold. A shower and a hair wash amid a bevy of young and tanned maidens. Forthright, loud, polite, sexless young American girls. When I saw my own face in the mirror I got a shock. I’m not young and yet I feel it.’

  From Humboldt, they drove down through the Sacramento Valley to Mendocino Bay, and while stopping off to get supplies, Beryl was again thwarted in her attempt to get the elusive James Earl Ray wanted poster:

  We came to a tiny village right on the cliffs. A store and a post-office. The post office was terrific – stuffed deer head, squirrels, all round the walls, and queer metal lockers with numbers on and wooden raftered ceiling and all the wanted notices. For murder, for arson, for rape, for the suspected assassination of Martin Luther King. I could have taken the lot but I had to ask and she said, No, they were federal property and she had no right. I said, but they’ve caught Charles [sic] Ray in London. Is that so, she says, I couldn’t say, I’ve had no no-tif-ic-ation. Out I go.

  That night they camped on Manchester Beach, looking out over the Pacific and Mendocino Bay. After collecting some driftwood to make a fire, Harold set about cooking a frozen chicken, while Beryl, with thoughts of Don in the back of her mind and assailed by an assortment of sensations – the fog drifting in from the sea, the sound of the warning bell offshore, the smoke and sizzle of the chicken spitting on the grill – jotted down impressions in her journal.

  The next morning, as she went to the water tap to wash, she was still in a reflective mood and conceded that this ‘drift wood life’ wasn’t entirely unpleasant: ‘It has taken all this time to be released from the other way of life, I can see that even in such a way as this I could begin to think more creatively . . . there is so much time to let the brain think, no distractions of the children – no house-work . . . If I were at this point alone, maybe I could write poetry.’

  The journey was now reaching its end. At one of the stops along the way she achieved a minor victory, noting in her diary: ‘Pinched wanted poster Ray – Martin Luther King.’ Finally, on 21 June, they drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, ‘red like old rust’, past Alcatraz and into San Francisco. Although the Summer of Love of 1967 was well an
d truly over, and 1968 had already seen its share of political assassinations and violent protest, the tide of hippie culture in Haight-Ashbury was still high, so to speak, and Beryl took in her first sight of a whole new counter-culture:

  Little shops, posters, peace signs, a word like leaves sighing – acid – acid – a man in a sheepskin rug, nothing else. Hippie kids – 3 on a side-walk – very happy – a man saying hallo to everyone – a negro gives a boy on the pavement a dollar and he says ‘Why thanks man, gee thanks’. He squints up happily into the sunshine. ‘Forget it,’ says the negro, swelling with delight and swaggers away. Lovely girls, all clean and friendly and all the men looking like Don with brown faces, and bare feet in sandals and lying on the pavement in the sunshine. No babies, no one pregnant, that was a bit sad.

  This glimpse of such a different way of life made her uneasy about her own: ‘On a hill in San Francisco. Looking out over the city, wondering what the hell I am doing and who I am.’

  Then they met up with Don Wilson, another computer programmer Harold knew from his Westinghouse days. Harold had spent a month in San Francisco with Don in 1962, during the course of a visit to the Seattle World’s Fair, and had been determined to go back ever since. Waiting for Beryl at Wilson’s apartment was a letter from the other Don: ‘On Sunday night just lying in bed & loving you . . . why the fuck is it so hard to be with you.’29 Don had also included a drawing incorporating two small photographs of Beryl cut from a contact sheet and covered in gold leaf, on which he had written the unambiguous message: ‘Its impossible for me to write what I’m feeling. I just love you. THIS IS A LOVE LETTER. I love you.’

  The following day, after lunching at Fisherman’s Wharf, they headed out to Berkeley University, where Don Wilson worked in the engineering department, running the computers and teaching students how to programme them. As he was showing them the computer facilities, he asked Beryl to write a message, which he input via a punched computer card – or ‘coded and recorded on the huge dictation machine’, as Beryl put it. She had wanted to write a poem for Don back in Albert Street, but felt Harold ‘breathing over my shoulder’ and thought better of it.