by Brendan King
In fact, as Beryl could testify and as the manuscripts of her novels show, Colin was an assiduous editor of fiction, whether written by a woman or not. It was he, not Anna, who copy-edited Beryl’s novels, and he did so with a subtlety and sensitivity that belied his public dismissal of the form.11 But it would be pointless to pretend that one can be neutral about Colin, or that opinions about him weren’t sharply divided. Although his wit and enormous erudition made him many friends, the arrogance with which he dismissed the pretentions of others and asserted his own intellectual superiority made him as many enemies. For every person who respected the way he continued to publish quality academic books in the face of relentless commercialism and the pressure to dumb down, there was someone else ready to point out that his business model was unsustainable and that he dragged the firm to the verge of bankruptcy. There were those who loved him and those who hated him, and both camps could adduce their own personal experience to make their arguments.
Once Colin and Anna had seen the manuscript of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, they agreed to publish the novel. Colin required some initial persuading, feeling that Anna was always trying to foist people she knew on him as authors, but after showing some of Beryl’s writing to a friend who assured him it was worth publishing, he was quickly convinced.12 From one of Beryl’s letters to Don it is clear that by the summer of 1971 she had abandoned ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’ and was revising ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ with a view to its publication: ‘I have started the book, not the American one, but redoing another one that was lost. Colin is buying an old paino factory for an office. He keeps asking me to read manuscripts. Anna and I drool over beer and leave the brandy alone.’13
Although the agreement to publish was made in 1971, a contract wasn’t signed until 2 June 1972, just three months before actual publication, when the revision was complete. This anomalous way of doing things established a precedent and the majority of Beryl’s books would subsequently follow this pattern: the writing would come first, then a contract would be drawn up and signed shortly before publication. The reason for this was partly Beryl’s peculiar attitude to ‘borrowing’ money. Although she needed money to live on while she wrote, she was never happy with the idea of an advance, feeling that it created too much pressure and that what she wrote might not be considered worth it. It was also a combination of her naivety in publishing matters – she didn’t have an agent for the first three Duckworth books so she let Colin negotiate rights for her – and Colin’s caution over money: as the firm had yet to prove itself commercially, not paying her an advance helped ease the cash flow.14
Instead of an advance, in the months leading up to the publication of the book, Beryl began working part-time at the offices of Duckworth itself. She had her own desk, and with Rudi now at school she could spend her mornings there, helping to deal with orders and invoices,15 or revising the manuscript of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, which was given a new title just two months before publication: Harriet Said.16
Because of the contrast between the two Hutchinson novels and the later Duckworth novels, with their sparer, more economical style, some people have speculated that it was Colin or Anna who shaped Beryl’s prose into its newer, leaner incarnation. This was not the case: it was the wordy, self-consciously literary style of A Weekend with Claud – written under the influence of Alan Sharp’s inventive and almost poetic use of language – that was the exception and which represented a departure from Beryl’s earlier writing. In fact with Another Part of the Wood Beryl had already begun to move back to a simpler mode of writing, and when she sent some draft pages to Judith for criticism she specifically asked her to comment on whether the ‘style and form’ were ‘more lucid’.17 What would come to be seen as the distinctive style of her Duckworth period novels was in fact her natural style, and Harriet Said marked a return to it, not a radical departure from it.
The evidence for this can be seen not just in the draft pages of the abandoned American novel, paragraphs of which remained substantially unchanged when Beryl inserted them into The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, but also through a comparison of the manuscript pages of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ sent to publishers in 1957 with the version published by Duckworth in 1972. There are, obviously, some significant differences between the two, both in terms of the novel’s structure – it was Anna who suggested the idea of the ‘flash forward’ opening chapter – and in the writing itself. Beryl was now a more experienced writer and it was inevitable she would want to rewrite sections during the process of revision. Nevertheless it is evident that the style so admired by reviewers in 1972 was essentially the same as that of 1957. This was something Anna immediately recognized: ‘It was she who told me to abandon the flowery and obscure style of my two later books and return to the simple structure of the first.’18
What is also clear from the manuscript, and from Beryl’s disappointed reaction to its repeated rejection, is that what she needed as a writer was a good copy-editor, and lots of encouragement. At Duckworth, this is precisely what she got: the former from Colin, the latter from Anna.
Beryl herself was clear about Colin and Anna’s respective roles, and about how important both were in relation to her development as a novelist. Observing Colin’s meticulous correction of her lax grammatical constructions and erratic punctuation served as an invaluable course of instruction, as she told The Times in 1981: ‘Colin dislikes such things as hanging nominatives, sentences without verbs and the historic present. In the beginning I used split infinitives. I didn’t know how to stop it because . . . I didn’t know what a split infinitive was. In ancient Greek, he said, the split infinitive is the height of idiomatic elegance, but in English it is plain barbarism.’
As for Anna, she was not a copy-editor and didn’t interfere with Beryl’s text, rather she provided support and general editorial advice: ‘In the initial stages I need to talk about what I am doing, to be told that I am on the right path (if I am). In other words, I need constant encouragement. This I receive fully from my editor.’
The impact that Colin and Anna had on Beryl’s career is obvious, but the impact Beryl had on Duckworth’s fortunes should not be overlooked. The relationship between author and publisher was a symbiotic one: without Duckworth, Beryl might never have become the writer she did nor enjoyed the success she did; but without Beryl, Duckworth’s literary reputation would not have been so high, and its financial situation would have been significantly worse. It is also a moot point whether Anna would have begun writing novels, or at least writing the kind of novels she did, without Beryl’s example.
Well before Harriet Said was published, Colin was already making plans to promote it. In April, having received a circular from the National Book League about the 1972 Booker Prize, he entered two novels: Harriet Said and John Symond’s Prophecy and the Parasites, even though neither had been printed at that stage, telling the NBL that he would get proofs to them by 1 July. There was a lot riding on these new productions. They were, as Colin pointed out in his covering letter to the submission, ‘the first new novels that Duckworth will have published in 4 years’.19
In the event, Harriet Said didn’t get on the shortlist, but its critical and commercial success was hugely important for Duckworth. This was brought into sharper focus in comparison with the fate of the other would-be Booker nomination. When it was eventually published in 1973, Prophecy and the Parasites received almost universally unfavourable notices – Auberon Waugh demolished it in The Spectator – and it sank without trace, leaving Beryl as the ipso facto face of Duckworth’s new fiction list.
Although Duckworth didn’t have a publicity department as such, an astute marketing plan was devised. Almost all the original letters from those editors who had turned down ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ had praised Beryl’s style, and said that they would be interested in seeing anything else she wrote. But such bland encouragement hardly made exciting publicity material, so Colin decided to ratchet up the supposed abuse h
eaped on the book and the controversial nature of its subject matter by carefully extracting the most damning sentences from the single critical response Beryl had received. This gave the book a whiff of scandal and a suitably alluring air of lasciviousness:
Harriet Said has a curious publishing history. When it was submitted to various publishers in the late ’fifties they all turned it down. ‘Your writing shows considerable promise,’ wrote the head of one firm, ‘. . . but what repulsive little creatures you have made the two central characters, repulsive almost beyond belief! And I think the scene in which the two men and the two girls meet in the Tsar’s house is too indecent and unpleasant even for these lax days. What is more, I fear that even now a respectable printer would not print it!’20
It was certainly effective. Almost every review and interview quoted the ‘indecent’ tag, and, as Colin knew, since nothing sells like sex the book was guaranteed healthy sales.
Although reviews were relatively few, those who liked the book were not only very positive, they would become enthusiastic advocates of Beryl’s subsequent work. A brief, but positive unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement was most probably by Arthur Crook, who became a champion of Beryl’s work. Following the book’s publication in America, Karl Miller, subsequently editor of the London Review of Books, championed her work in a similar way, calling her ‘the least known of the contemporary English novelists who are worth knowing’.21 During the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, Miller would give her work extensive and vital exposure in America.
Beryl’s revision of Harriet Said during the autumn of 1971 provided at least some distraction from thoughts about Don. If his visits to Albert Street hadn’t entirely ceased, they had tailed off considerably, so much so that at the start of the year Beryl began seeing someone closer to home. Graham Betts wasn’t Beryl’s usual type: several years her junior, he sported long frizzy hair, wore flares and tie-dyed tops, and drove a Mini.
Graham became infatuated by Beryl, almost excessively so, and his dog-like devotion eventually got on her nerves. He didn’t exactly displace Don in Beryl’s affections, but he was near to hand, and for a period his reliably constant affection provided a level of emotional stability that Don’s long-distance and necessarily erratic passions couldn’t. Don would still turn up sporadically at Albert Street, but when he did his presence had an unsettling effect on Beryl’s state of mind. As Jo-Jo noted in her diary on one occasion in May after he spent the night at Albert Street: ‘Mum will be upset when he leaves.’ Not only that, his visits provoked Graham to rages of jealousy: ‘Graham came in and said he would bash Don’s fucking face in. And almost strangled mum.’22
Although Beryl and Don would remain friends until her death – she would always refer to him as ‘Lovely Don’ – by 1972 their relationship had effectively petered out. Shortly afterwards, Don met the painter Janina Cebertowicz and this time the relationship lasted.
In many ways Don was Beryl’s last great love. Although she would continue to have affairs over the following years, the character of these relationships changed dramatically. After Don, she no longer allowed herself to be swept away by the idea of a fully committed romantic love affair. There were none of those desperate, pain-racked relationships, the ultimate break-up of which left her on the borders of despair: ‘That doesn’t happen any more,’ she told Molly Parkin in 1974, ‘I really believe that all that’s finished for me.’23
It was perhaps no accident that this stepping back from the disruptive world of emotional intimacy should have coincided with her new-found creative activity at Duckworth and the rise of her literary career. Beryl herself recognized the connection between the two: ‘I don’t need to get frighteningly emotionally involved any more. I’ll never do that again because if I did I’d never work again.’24 For Beryl, the enemy of art wasn’t so much Cyril Connolly’s famous ‘pram in the hall’ as ‘the gentleman’s suit in the wardrobe’.25
From now on she would have affairs with men she memorably referred to as ‘my Gentlemen Callers’.26 For the most part these would be conducted on her terms: men would be fitted around her life as a writer, rather than her writing taking second place to her emotional infatuations with men. Significantly, the two longest-lasting relationships she had after Don were both with married men, as if she had accepted that her relationships should have strictly defined limits – and no ultimate future. This change was not without its benefits, at least initially, as she told her friend Judith Kirk: ‘For twenty years (before writing) I was unhappy. Now I am happy because I’m doing what I want and because it’s being published and making money.’27 But if creative work offered a more tangible fulfilment than the tenuous fantasies of romantic love, the process was not without its downside: ‘I do get lonely, not having someone special,’28 she admitted. It was a lack that would increasingly weigh on her mind as she got older, to such an extent she later claimed that for all her success as a novelist, ‘I’d pretty much swop the lot for a settled domestic life. I’d probably get bored with it in ten minutes flat, but I think I would.’29
By the spring of 1972, Beryl had finished the revision work on Harriet Said. Even before publication the Australian film director and producer, Peter Sykes, wanted to turn it into a film, and Colin, who was effectively acting as Beryl’s literary agent at this point, arranged a joint meeting with Beryl to discuss the writing of the script. As Anna was in Wales, Beryl wrote to her to keep her up to date, both on developments with the film project and on Peter’s attempts to seduce her:
Anna Flower: You should be here, holding me hand or head or something, I can’t make much sense of it. He came the night before you went. Graham was there and about 15 dissolute teen-agers, also Austin and 3 neighbours, so we were’nt exactly au pair or de trop of whatever. All Graham’s shackles!! rose. He was most awkward. Other laddie knocked at door, seized me and came in. Face fell at music and bottles all over. Talked incoherently about book-film etc. Everytime we got rid of Graham for seconds he clutched me. All very dramatic. Oh yes he rang me at the panio factory again and when I got back this morning he rang. Would Colin and I on Friday meet some producer.
I am trembling at the knees because he’s so like all the ones I really know – if you follow me. I do feel he is proceeding without caution. He seems to be keen on the book. Or me. Or both. I do feel cheery though. Rosy cheeks and all.30
A week later, she sent Anna a follow-up to tell her about the meeting: ‘We went to Peter’s agent, and he asked Colin to discuss an option on the book for Peter for a film etc. I was bemused. Colin was terribly efficient and buisnesslike. We then went drinking and for a meal and talked about nothing but erections. Colin was so spot on.’
When they got back to Albert Street at midnight – minus Colin – she and Peter began talking, and much to her discomfort he told her he’d just read A Weekend with Claud and concluded she was only interested in transient relationships, that she ‘play-acted’ at love. ‘Very much put me in my place,’ Beryl told Anna:
Made me feel I had all the faults in the kingdom and that I was hanging on to him with a ball and chain. I was very depressed. I don’t know how to feel. He’s certainly very keen on the book. Ses he will do it. Wants to work with me. Ses I’m brilliant. I think he’s a very good man. So you see there is no need to worry. I just wish you were [here] to talk to as I am very low. Bit shattered. I just felt happy with him. I didn’t even want an affair. Someone jumped the gun, me in action, him in thought. I don’t know.31
Despite these emotional complications, a contract was drawn up, and Peter was given a free option for a year to get the project off the ground, with Beryl being paid £4,000 for the script if the project went ahead.32 There were more meetings to discuss the script, though as Beryl confided to Anna, she wasn’t entirely sure how things were going:
As I have never yet seen ‘our’ man without being pissed within seconds I feel it may be me attacking him not him me. It is a bit of a blur. Main points last time I
saw him. I am brilliant, the biggest thing to the film industry, I will be a sensation. Now I don’t know if I’m going to be an elderly starlet or what? He says he is fascinated but I don’t know by what – I think its me writing. I did ask him his intentions but I don’t remember what he said. He said we must be friends – him and me.33
Perhaps inevitably, mixing business and personal matters in this way wasn’t a good recipe for success, and in the end the project came to grief. Although Beryl wrote the film script, Peter had discussed it with her on several occasions, to the extent that he saw himself as a collaborator in the writing process. A short while later Beryl discovered that a version of the script was going round with Peter’s name listed on the front page alongside hers. Colin immediately wrote to his agent demanding that this be removed, and stating that the copyright of the script belonged to Beryl and Beryl alone.
Peter responded that owing to all the preliminary work he’d done with Beryl on the script and the way he’d guided her through the rewrites, the only fair reflection of his input would be an ‘in collaboration’ credit and a 25 per cent share of the price of the £4,000 screenplay.34 Neither side would budge. Colin wrote back to say that Beryl retained full copyright in the script, and that unless there was an agreement to that effect all copies of the script should be returned as soon as possible.35 And with that, Beryl’s first film project was at an end.
Since her return from Eaves Farm, Beryl had continued to paint and draw, even doing some etching after taking a local evening class. For the next few months she would ring Don for advice on hard ground etching, aquatint and other artistic techniques. Among her first experiments with etching was a reproduction of George Washington Wilson’s famous photograph of John Brown leading Queen Victoria’s horse – though in Beryl’s version, while Brown is depicted relatively faithfully, sporran and all, the lady on the horse is naked save for a large hat. The image stuck in Beryl’s mind, and twenty years later she would use it in the closing pages of The Birthday Boys, as Captain Oates’s final hallucination as he walked to his death.