Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Luckily Don happened to be up in London, and at the time of the shooting he was upstairs doing some decorating, painting the walls of the stairwell white. As if to give an added air of farce to the situation, he had stripped off and was wearing nothing but a raincoat – he didn’t want to ruin his clothes and had no overalls. Hearing the commotion, he rushed down and managed to get the gun off Nora on the first flight of stairs. Together, he and Beryl tried to calm Nora down with a cup of tea, but she ran out of the house.

  Not wanting to be late for work, Beryl headed off to the bottle factory, but a short time later the foreman came up and said she should go home immediately because the police were waiting for her. The police had picked Nora up – or rather she had flagged them down and told them she had shot someone. There then followed a comic scene, worthy of one of Beryl’s novels, in which the shooting was re-enacted with Don still in his raincoat and a policeman playing the part of Nora, holding one of Beryl’s handbags.

  Although the incident was sufficiently bizarre and unusual in itself, neither Beryl nor the journalists who took every opportunity of recounting it could resist embellishing their account still further. The story appeared under sensational headlines such as ‘The Day I Was Nearly Shot Dead by My Mother-in-Law’,20 and otherwise reputable journalists let their imaginations run riot, asserting that Beryl’s mother-in-law had fired ‘a shotgun at her, blasting holes in the wall’, or that she had been ‘blazing away with a revolver’.21 Beryl herself would later claim that the deflected gunshot had ‘brought down the ceiling’22 in the hallway.

  All of this was patent nonsense. The gun wasn’t a shotgun or even a revolver, but an air pistol. It wasn’t a bullet that was fired, but a pellet.23 It did not bring Beryl’s ceiling down and it would not have killed her, though it might, as they say, have taken her eye out. But despite retelling the story numerous times in the press, Beryl only once mentioned this fact, in 1989. But by then it was too late, the myth had taken hold. The idea of a gun-toting mother-in-law, and of Beryl’s narrow escape from a bizarre death, was too firmly established as a part of the legend.

  Although it spoiled the story somewhat to say so, Beryl not only knew what type of gun it was, she also knew that Nora, who by this stage was already having mental problems, wanted to shoot her. A month after the publication of A Weekend with Claud in June 1967, Beryl had received an unsettling letter from her, as she told Judith: ‘Nora read the book and wrote at once saying she knew where she could get an automatic and she was coming to kill me. I don’t know whether to feel flattered or not. It obviously affected her.’24

  The timing of the letter was not coincidental: in the novel Beryl had painted a searingly frank portrait of herself, and alluded plainly to the collapse of her marriage and the string of affairs she had had in its wake. Although Nora’s reaction was extreme, it is not difficult to see why she wanted to punish Beryl for having separated from Austin and to stop her making her infidelities public. Indeed, as the novel features its own shooting incident – Claud in a fit of jealousy tries to shoot Maggie’s boyfriend Edward with an air rifle – Nora may even have got the idea from reading the book. Beryl took the threat quite seriously: six months later she wrote to Harold and told him that Nora had come round to the house but, fortunately, hadn’t tried to shoot her.25

  While the incident had few emotional repercussions for Beryl herself, it did serve as a useful plot device in The Bottle Factory Outing. Ironically, the fictionalized version is both less dramatic than the newspaper accounts Beryl would later give, and in some senses more truthful: not only is it an air pistol that was used, the reason for the shooting in the book is that Brenda’s mother-in-law wanted to punish Brenda for leaving her husband. She felt that ‘Brenda talked too much’ and intended to silence her by shooting her in the vocal chords. Nora would certainly have felt that Beryl’s public account of her failed marriage to Austin in A Weekend with Claud was an example of Beryl talking too much.

  The shooting also formed the subject of one of Beryl’s most striking paintings, entitled Did you think I would leave you dying when there’s room on my horse for two, in which she represented both herself and Don as naked on the stairwell, with Nora coming up from below holding her gun.

  Using one’s own life experiences as the raw material for artistic creation is far from unusual, and one shouldn’t expect artists or writers to behave as mental-health professionals sorting out the problems of the people they observe. Nevertheless, the Nora incident provides a clear example of the way Beryl appropriated the traumatic experiences of others and used them either as comic relief or as colourful cameos to illustrate her own life. She knew of Nora’s mental instability, but made no attempt to find out what she was suffering from, where she lived, or whether there was anything that could be done to help her.

  On 6 September 1974, Nora was killed after being struck by a train at St David’s station in Exeter. Nora’s mental instability was almost certainly a factor in her death, precluding her from a rational judgement of what she was doing, a fact reflected in the open verdict that was given in the inquest after her death. Whenever Beryl recounted the incident, however, it would not be as a tragic aspect of Nora’s life, but as another proof of the comical bizarreness of her own.

  At the beginning of the new academic year in September 1970, Jo-Jo started at Hampstead Comprehensive, the same school Aaron had been attending since their return from Eaves Farm. This circumstance wouldn’t have been particularly worth noting if it weren’t for some entries that appeared in Jo’s diary over the next few months, though at the time the fact that Aaron had struck up a friendship with a boy in his year called William Haycraft, or that Jo had added a new name to her list of boyfriends, that of William’s younger brother, Joshua, would have meant nothing to Beryl. She certainly couldn’t have imagined that her children’s new friends would have such a dramatic impact on the course of her own life.

  A few months later, in early 1971, William was round at Albert Street playing upstairs with Aaron when the phone rang. It was William’s mother, Anna Haycraft, wondering what time her son would be home. The two women began to talk and after a moment Anna asked, ‘I recognize your voice, what’s your name?’ When Beryl told her that her maiden name was Bainbridge, Anna replied, ‘I’ve read your two books; they are pretty awful. Have you got anything else?’ She then told her she was the fiction editor of Gerald Duckworth Ltd., a publishing house run by her husband Colin Haycraft.

  That at least was the public version of events, as recounted by Beryl many years later.26 What was missing from her account – for understandable reasons – is the fact that the last time Beryl had heard anything about Anna was in May 1953. Then her name had been Anne Lindholm, the girl whose affair with Austin had led to such traumatic consequences. Even after so many years, Beryl’s realization that she was speaking to the woman who had caused her so much anguish in the past must have been difficult to take in. Anna, too, must have been in an unimaginable state of trepidation: in order to ring the house she would have seen the number listed under the name Austin Davies in the directory. Maybe she had hoped it was a coincidence of names when she made the call, but she could have been in little doubt who she was speaking to the moment Beryl started to talk.

  The situation was worse for Anna than it was for Beryl. The affair with Austin had been disastrous on so many levels and the abortion was something she never came to terms with emotionally. She had never admitted to it or talked about it in public, and its corrosive impact on her psyche was compounded by her public espousal of the Catholic faith. It had become a profound source of guilt, a shameful incident from her past that had to be kept secret at all costs. Later, when she became a public figure in her own right, Anna must have been acutely aware of the incongruity of being asked to talk openly about her Catholic faith and about Catholicism as a moral force, and repeatedly having to lie and give a false version of her own past. Catholicism was a religion founded on the notion of the forgiveness
of sins, but ironically she could never forgive her own.

  For most people, friendships are founded on a sense of openness based on mutual trust – the notion that one can talk to a friend about anything without fear of ridicule or embarrassment. With Beryl and Anna, the situation was almost entirely the opposite. From the very start, it was a friendship at the centre of which was a kind of mutual, unspoken pact: that both would never reveal the traumatic event that had linked their destinies. It was never openly spoken about between them, and each expected the other to keep quiet about it in public. So deeply ingrained was this feeling of secrecy that Beryl did not allude to the abortion even under the guise of fiction, and only referred to it in public once, several years after Anna’s death, in a series of interviews conducted by the British Library.27

  The gravitational force of that unspoken secret inevitably skewed the relationship between them, and their friendship was conducted almost entirely on Anna’s terms. It was always Beryl who would go round to the Haycrafts’ house in Gloucester Crescent: Anna would have found it unthinkable to go to Albert Street, where there was a possibility of a chance encounter with Austin. ‘I don’t remember ever seeing Anna in Albert Street,’28 Rudi would later recall.

  As it happened, Beryl did have ‘something else’ to show Anna. Her former agent, John Smith, had recently given up his position as managing director of Christy & Moore and he had returned the manuscript of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, which had lain in a cupboard ever since Graham Nicol turned it down in 1965.29 Not having heard anything about it for years, Beryl had assumed it was lost. She wondered whether Anna might be interested in it.

  She was.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Harriet Said

  At that time my wife (who is the brains of the firm and edits the fiction, while I do the business and the punctuation) happened to meet Beryl Bainbridge and was shown the manuscript. To her eternal credit, and to the much-needed credit of the firm’s bank account, she not only saw that it was a brilliant book (alas, not at all obscene), but knew at once that here was a real writer and one with a future.

  Colin Haycraft1

  Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. had been a well-respected publishing house during the first half of the twentieth century. Established by Gerald Duckworth in 1898, the firm had a distinguished list, including works by Virginia Woolf – Gerald’s half-sister – John Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence, Ronald Firbank, Evelyn Waugh and the Sitwells. After the Second World War, however, when Mervyn Horder became the company’s chairman, the firm began to lose direction. Horder, who became Lord Horder in 1955 when he succeeded to his father’s title, was not business-minded, being more interested in pursuing his own literary passions than in developing the company as a commercially viable publishing concern. By the mid-1960s the Duckworth list contained some worthy titles, but with so little connection to the main current of contemporary literature the firm seemed old-fashioned and irrelevant. In 1968 Horder finally conceded that he was better suited to writing his own books than publishing other people’s and began looking around to find a buyer.

  At about the same time Tim Simon, who had worked at both the Curwen Press and the Pall Mall Press, sounded out an old friend from Oxford, Colin Haycraft, on the idea of their setting up a publishing house together. Colin mentioned that Mervyn Horder was looking to sell Duckworth and asked Simon whether he was interested, the only problem as far as he was concerned being one of money: ‘Colin had no cash, but Tim was able to put up half the price, which enabled Colin to borrow the other half. So they acquired Duckworth and moved into its long-time premises in Henrietta Street where they inherited a languishing firm with a staff of fourteen people and a turnover of under £100,000 a year.’2

  But almost immediately tragedy struck. In the summer of 1970, Tim Simon caught pneumonia during a trip to New York and died. As Colin had an option on his shares, he consulted Clive de Pass, an old school friend who was also his solicitor; in exchange for 10 per cent of the shares, de Pass lent him the money to buy control of the firm from Simon’s widow. At the age of forty-one, Colin became sole owner of Gerald Duckworth & Co. – ‘All on borrowed money,’ he would later recall, ‘I’ve always been strapped for cash.’3

  If Colin Berry Haycraft was arguably the most influential independent publisher of the 1970s, he was certainly the most flamboyant and the most contrarian. Born in Quetta, on the borders of Pakistan in 1929, he was brought back to England by his mother when he was three months old, along with his older brother John, after their father, a major in the Punjab regiment, was killed on the parade ground by a Sikh sepoy resentful at having been passed over for promotion.4 Colin was sent to Wellington College, and then went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he gained a double first in Mods and Greats. He remained an enthusiastic classicist for the rest of his life, composing Greek verse and Latin epigrams – often in the bath, so it was said – and relishing any opportunity of displaying his almost flawless knowledge of the works of literary heroes such as Horace, Gibbon and Dr Johnson.

  Colin’s appearance later in life belied his physical abilities. Of modest stature and with the complexion and waist measurement of a seasoned claret drinker, he sported a bow tie, thick-rimmed glasses, and the kind of tweed jacket that denoted a desk-bound literary man. Yet he had been an accomplished rackets player and had not only won blues in lawn tennis, rackets and squash, but had played squash rackets for England. Michael Holroyd remembered watching him play in the 1960s: ‘He was very good, very clever. He didn’t bother to try too much or to run. To run after the ball was sort of undignified. So he did some marvellous shots – and would lose, but in such a way that you’d think “He’s the better player”.’5

  In the early 1950s Colin moved to London and began working for the Daily Mirror, as personal assistant to Cecil Harmsworth King, who was the paper’s chairman and also happened to be his cousin. After meeting, and then swiftly marrying, Anne Lindholm in 1956 – ‘I was sexually attracted to her and I liked her company. We got engaged within a week or so, married six months later’6 – Colin moved into publishing, first at Bodley Head, and then at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. George Weidenfeld, who described Colin as a ‘stubborn perfectionist when it came to quality’ and ‘merciless in his criticism’, would later recall the seven years he spent working with him as belonging to the most ‘exciting and gratifying’ period of his life.7

  In 1962 the Haycrafts moved their rapidly expanding family – William was born in 1957, Joshua in 1959, Tom in 1960 and Oliver in 1962 – from Belsize Crescent to 22 Gloucester Crescent, a large, rambling house located in a quiet backwater of Camden that seemed to act as a magnet for literary and artistic types: Jonathan Miller, David Gentleman and Ursula Vaughan Williams had houses further up the street, and Alan Bennett lived next door.8 Distinctive and inconspicuous at the same time – the trees in its small front garden shaded it from the street and gave it an almost perpetually dark and gloomy aspect – 22 Gloucester Crescent would become the setting for innumerable book launches, social gatherings and literary parties.

  There was one final piece in the jigsaw: in the autumn of 1971, Colin bought the lease on The Old Piano Factory, a twenty-two-sided building at the top of the Crescent, literally a minute’s walk from his home. In the first few months of 1972, Duckworth moved out of the Henrietta Street offices it had occupied since the founding of the company and into the grand open space of the Piano Factory’s middle floor: the eccentricity of the building was a symbol of the firm’s unconventional and idiosyncratic approach to publishing.

  At the same time, Colin set about reinvigorating the firm’s list, commissioning a range of works of classical scholarship and philosophy from respected academics such as Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Alasdair MacIntyre, Mary Lefkowitz, Kenneth Dover and Jasper Griffin. As Barry Baldwin, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Calgary, put it, Colin ‘transformed a publishing house whose former quiet ways had been the object of some affectionate satire in Anthony Powell’s e
arly novel What’s Become of Waring? into a classical powerhouse that reflected his own dynamism’.9

  Colin also appointed Anna as the commissioning editor for fiction, despite the fact that she had no formal qualifications for the post and had no prior experience in publishing or writing. Nevertheless, she was a keen reader and knew the market – or at least the fiction market – better than Colin, and her intuitive gamble on Beryl’s talent paid off. Beryl’s critical success was to give Anna immediate credibility in her role as editor, and over the next decade or so the firm built up a distinctive fiction list: by the end of the 1970s it boasted an impressive roster of names. After Beryl came Caroline Blackwood in 1973, Patrice Chaplin in 1975, and Penelope Fitzgerald in 1977 – the same year that Anna made her own debut as a novelist with The Sin Eater, published under the pseudonym of Alice Thomas Ellis.

  The predominance of women on the fiction list – the first significant male novelist would be Jonathan Coe in 1987 – led to Colin’s famous quips about novels belonging to the ‘distaff side of the business’, that fiction was ‘a branch of gynaecology’, and that he would unhesitatingly turn down any work of fiction by a man – and any work of non-fiction by a woman.10 These comments have frequently been used to attack his reputation as a publisher, though anyone taking such deliberately provocative statements seriously is missing the point. Colin loved to provoke, and politically correct views – or what he would have called ‘cant’ – were a prime target for his wit.