Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  In 1971 Beryl got a chance to exhibit some of her pictures, and – more importantly to her mind – to sell them. Philip Hughes had been taking part in the annual exhibitions organized by the Medical Aid for Vietnam Committee since 1968. Thinking it would be a good way for Beryl to make some money, he encouraged her to do the same. The idea behind the exhibition was a simple one, to marry the commercial self-interest of well-intentioned art lovers to the political agenda of the organizers. The exhibitions offered a chance for collectors to buy reasonably priced works by well-known or up-and-coming artists – such as Eduardo Paolozzi, R. B. Kitaj, Victor Passmore and Jim Dine – with the artists then donating up to half of what they earned to the Medical Aid Committee.36

  Over the next few years, Beryl would contribute a number of paintings and drawings to these annual exhibitions. Perhaps the most commercially beneficial was that in 1971, held at Hampstead Town Hall: ‘I sent 15 paintings and sold the lot at prices ranging from £30 to £70, according to size’, as she told a Guardian journalist the following year.37 This was a slight exaggeration, but she did make £400 from the sale of her work, a quarter of which she donated to the Medical Aid Committee.

  Many of the paintings and drawings she sold at the show featured a character whom Beryl named Captain Dalhousie. He was represented in a series of scenes which, like the earlier Napoleon series, combined naked and clothed figures in a way that was both comic and slightly unsettling. Where the theme of the Napoleon drawings was predominantly sex or death – and sometimes sex and death – the Captain Dalhousie series seemed at first glance to be lighter in mood, featuring wedding groups or incongruous images of a naked Captain Dalhousie in the act of riding a penny-farthing bicycle, such as Captain Dalhousie preparing to mount. Playful though these watercolours and drawings were, there was often a darker undercurrent running just beneath the surface, which seemed to reflect the sadness Beryl felt that any hopes she had of marrying Don were over. In Wedding group in field with hen, for example, the bride has a blank expression on her face and a tear is rolling down her cheek.

  In the summer of 1972 Psiche and Philip again tried to give Beryl’s career as an artist another push, this time introducing her to Nigel and Sue Mackenzie, who ran a restaurant called The Hungry Monk in Jevington, East Sussex. The Mackenzies were painters and collectors themselves, and were very taken with Beryl’s work: ‘Her pictures were witty, beautifully painted, in a slightly sketchy style, which gave them a freshness and contemporary feel. In many ways they were like Beryl herself – irreverent, funny and highly original.’38

  Having set up the Monk’s Gallery alongside the restaurant, they invited Philip and Beryl to show jointly in an exhibition running from 10 September to 12 October, coinciding with the publication of Harriet Said. A few days before the exhibition was due to open, the Mackenzies telephoned Beryl to inquire whether the paintings would be suitable, not just the kind of thing that would go down well in London. As many of her pictures featured naked men and women, Beryl assumed they were worried that her work was too risqué and spent the night cutting out plastic fig-leaves: ‘I thought they might have wanted to dot one or two around in the appropriate places, but they didn’t.’39

  In fact the Mackenzies had no such qualms and the exhibition was a success: ‘The combination of affluent restaurant customers and a private view before Sunday lunch was a pretty potent sales cocktail.’40 Beryl sold around a dozen pictures, varying in price from £20 to £45, giving her a £250 profit after the gallery’s percentage. Following the exhibition Nigel wrote her a note: ‘I do hope we can do the same again next year.’41 But by 1973 Beryl’s writing career had already taken off and the experiment was not repeated.

  The Mackenzies weren’t the only gallery owners to be interested in Beryl’s work, nor were they the only ones to be frustrated by her success as a writer. Around the same time Penny Jones had given a dinner party and alongside Beryl one of the other guests was Eric Lister, the co-owner of the Portal gallery. The two had got on well and as Lister was intrigued to learn she was a painter, she took him next door to show him her paintings. He liked what he saw and asked her to bring some examples to the gallery the following week, which she did.42 However, like the Mackenzies, Lister was too late: Beryl was already committed to writing her next book for Duckworth.

  With the critical success of Harriet Said having boosted her confidence, Beryl began to think about what to write next. Initially she had thought about continuing work on ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, the American novel begun at Eaves Farm. She had even told the Liverpool Echo in September that her new book would throw a few knock-out punches at Women’s Lib: ‘I’m getting really enthusiastic about it. Women’s Lib is rubbish; they’re defeating their own ends.’43

  From the draft pages that remain, it is fairly clear why the novel would not have gone down well with feminists. The novel’s heroine, Alma Bickerton, makes a number of ambivalent references to women submitting to sex against their will, and she is herself subjected to what appears to be a forced act of oral sex. At one point a nurse questions Alma about the violence inflicted on her in her relationship with Dr Wheeler, and Alma’s response reveals a decidedly masochistic streak:

  ‘You look today pale today Alma . . . you’ll just have to put up with me poking my nose into your business . . . I can’t stand by and see the change getting worse in Doctor Wheeler. He’s like a man pocessed by the devil. I’m not a narrow woman, at least I don’t think I am but last nights carry on almost finished me. All that banging about and shouting and him roaring like some animal. And the chairs broken, the one by the door, and you look bruised all over . . .’

  I lean back against the settee so that she will see his teeth marks on my throat. ‘Its all right, really it is. Its just he keeps tormenting himself.’

  ‘But he was so tender with you before . . . now its all brutality . . . its not healthy.’ Worriedly she strokes her own untouched throat and wonders what is happening.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I tell her. Its true, I can take the violence projected at me by Dr. Wheeler. It both satisfied me and reassures me.44

  In one half-dream, half-fantasy sequence, typed out in red in the manuscript, Dr Wheeler tries to kill Alma out of sexual jealousy, by giving her a lethal injection. Again, Alma’s response is entirely passive:

  Dr. Wheeler was standing over her, face grave and freshly shaved. He was wearing a white coat with cloth buttons, there were shadows under his eyes. His cool fingers unbuttoned the front of her gown. Lie still, he bade her, lie still. Her breasts were splayed out under his hands, they burned against his chill palms, the nipples rose erect. Oh, she sighed. Nurse, he called in a low voice, fetch me a syringe. He was murmering in her ear that she was not to be afraid, that he alone would be in charge. Its unprofeesional I know, he told her, the dark lashes of his eyes trembling with emotion, but I’ve got to be the one. I cannot bear the thought of another man touching you, do you hear my darling? The nurse returned with the cruel hypodermic. He took it from her and holding Alma’s arm bent it at the elbow and slipped in the needle, deep into the vein. Her eyes widen with shock, he soothes her, careless of the fast dissolving nurse, telling her she is his younger than spring-time love, his true sweetheart, his till death us do part. Death, she murmers and her lips cease to move because he has withdrawn the syringe and with the rubbing of cool disinfectant on her skin, her mind ends and her lids close.

  Alma’s sexual masochism, her notion that the punishment handed out to her by men was justified and satisfied her feelings of guilt, seems to reflect Beryl’s own masochistic feelings engendered after the violent sexual assault in London in 1953.

  Whether she felt that the thinly disguised self-portrait in ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’ was too revealing or not, Beryl decided to abandon the book and began looking round for another subject. Although at first glance there seems to be little to connect the contemporary themes of ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’ to the wartime setting of T
he Dressmaker, there was a tenuous link. Bickerton, the surname of Beryl’s alter ego Alma, was also that of her dressmaking aunt, the one who had been left a widow after the First World War. It took only a small leap of the imagination to see in the story of herself as a girl on the brink of puberty and that of her two aunts, one a frustrated widow, the other an embittered spinster, a psychodrama in which the themes of sexual awakening and sexual frustration, of jealousy and retribution, could be explored. With its mixture of nostalgia and loss, The Dressmaker was a powerful evocation of the war years, and the tensions between repression and liberation of British society is subtly mirrored in the individual dramas of Nellie and Rita.

  It needed only a murder at the end to tie up the loose threads and as she had with Harriet Said, Beryl turned to old newspapers for inspiration in the library at Colindale: ‘I found one report of a Yank who had disappeared. Just disappeared. And I used that. Figuring in the book that who on earth would trace something like that back to an old dressmaker and her sister?’45

  The speed with which Beryl wrote The Dressmaker amazed even herself: ‘It took me no time at all to write because it just flowed on and on, almost of its own accord. I couldn’t believe I’d written it so quickly.’46 Although she would subsequently maintain an output of a novel a year until the end of the decade, she never again achieved this enviable fluidity. Writing the novel also established something of a precedent as regards her working method: ‘I take two months of thinking and three months of actual non-stop writing, from 11 o’clock at night till 4 in the morning.’47

  If Harriet Said had laid the groundwork for Beryl’s success as a novelist, The Dressmaker represented the harvest. It gained almost unanimously good reviews: Karl Miller described it as ‘a triumphant success’48 in The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement hailed it as ‘a remarkable achievement’.49 In the autumn of 1973 the news came through that the book had made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist.

  Winnie came down to London for the Booker Prize night, bringing a ball gown with her in the expectation that she would be invited to what was after all an important event in her daughter’s life. But Beryl was too embarrassed: ‘I told her that you weren’t allowed to take guests,’ she confessed to Anthony Clare twenty years later. ‘I was ashamed of her. I felt bad about that, that was wicked.’50

  The book didn’t win, but even so the publicity value of the Booker was almost worth the prize money alone, and it had a significant impact on both Beryl’s reputation and that of Duckworth. As George Yeatman suggested in his official interview with Beryl as a Booker nominee, the success of The Dressmaker constituted a ‘necessary renaissance’ for the firm.51 Added to this was the bonus news that George Braziller had sold the American paperback rights for Harriet Said for what must have seemed to Beryl like a staggering sum: $35,000, or £14,400. However, as it turned out, this had to be split 50-50 between George Braziller and Duckworth, before she herself received her share.

  After her low-key career at Hutchinson and her subsequent descent into obscurity, she now found herself, at forty years of age, a critically acclaimed novelist. Not only that, for the first time in her life she was financially independent: ‘I’ve earned a lot of money on the book,’ she told Judith, ‘1st money I’ve ever had . . .’52

  TWENTY-SIX

  Success

  I’ve just at last, late after 20 years of jittering about, found who I was, or at least what I wanted to do. So I write me books, and go to work and clean the house, never answer the phone or go out at all socially, lock the door, threaten the children with dire doom if they let anyone in to me. I don’t even open letters except just sometimes. This is all whilst I am writing a book, as I am now. I have a couple of gentleman callers on alternate Wednesday afternoons and I go to bed at four a.m. every night (or dawn) of the week and get up at seven. I look about 130. When I am not writing a book I sleep a lot, do a bit of painting, see just a few people and try to fall in love. But only briefly – no more terrible heartbreaks and pangs.1

  After the successes of the previous year, 1974 began somewhat inauspiciously. In the midst of her busy social schedule of bridge parties and trips to the theatre, Winnie died suddenly on 1 February after a heart attack. One of the last entries in her diary was a note about Beryl, or more precisely about the English paperback rights to The Dressmaker, which had just been bought for £1,000.

  The funeral was held at Holy Trinity church in Formby, and Beryl duly went up with the children. She had already started writing early drafts of what would become The Bottle Factory Outing in a notebook, and perhaps thinking to use the time on the long train journey up to Liverpool to write, she brought it along. Whether she was too distracted to think about the novel or too involved with the proceedings of the day, she instead scribbled down a hasty précis of events, perhaps as an aide-memoire that might come in useful at a later date: ‘Riding in train through rotting Liverpool. Puddles of rain. Bomb sites still there, craters of refuse and water. Broken cars. Train from London. The snow – the sun – Runcorn Bridge – the dirty yellow light, the whirling patterns of the bridge over the water.’2

  When she arrived at Formby station, she walked to Ravenmeols Lane, where her brother Ian was waiting for her and where Winnie was laid out in an open coffin:

  There was the walk up a dark, childhood street, the night ballooning with the sounds of a brass band rehearsing in the hut on the corner, followed by the pushing open of a gate and a light coming on in the round window beneath the porch, I did think then of all the times we’d been scolded, my brother and I, for daring to enter through the front door.

  I took my shoes off when he let me in, so as not to mess the carpet, even though my mother wasn’t there to shout, ‘Hello stranger . . . the back door not good enough for you?’ That night my brother slept in the lounge and I dossed down among the snuffling velvet cushions of the settee in the dining room, although none of us, except on Boxing Day, had ever lounged or dined in either.

  We didn’t admit it, but both of us were scared stiff of sleeping upstairs. There was no one there; my father was long since dead and my mother laid out, cold as marble, the hard centre of an Easter egg, in a coffin frilled at the edges with white paper. All the same, the house was full of ghosts, not least of ourselves when young.3

  When they arrived at the church the next day there was a group of mourners outside, among whom Beryl noted four ladies in flat hats and tweed coats, and her Uncle Len, his tinted glasses giving him a ‘flavour of the American’. With the wind blowing the cellophane-wrapped flowers laid in tribute, they formed up behind the coffin and went inside: ‘Jo sniffs. Aaron sings. Some confusion about kneeling. Man behind sings beautifully. Responsibility of being chief mourner. Follow coffin. Back into car. Long slow drive.’4

  Winnie, like Richard, died at the age of seventy (five weeks short of her seventy-first birthday to be precise), leaving Beryl an orphan at forty-one, a relatively young age to lose both parents. Despite the closeness she had felt to Winnie as a child, she had grown emotionally detached over the years. Winnie’s censorious attitude irritated her, and their relationship had reached a low point in the debacle over Alan and her jibe that Beryl was ‘nothing but a prostitute’.5 There were bitter feelings on both sides and neither was able, or willing, to bridge the gap:

  Such was the unfinished business between us, my mother and I, the unresolved, ambiguous love, the resentment – she seemingly disappointed in me, naggingly expecting something I couldn’t give, I equally aggrieved, waiting for that one sentence, that all-embracing hug that would make everything okey dokey – that I had imagined her death would fill me with terror and guilt. I didn’t feel guilty when she died; I simply grieved, mourned that we were so close that touching we bruised.6

  Right up to the time of her death, Winnie had visited London every few months, and indeed had planned to see Beryl in March. A flavour of these frequently strained encounters is given in a story Beryl wrote the following ye
ar, which captures the tone of condescension and disapproval always lurking below the surface of Winnie’s attitude towards her:

  At two o’clock the taxi arrived with my Mum. She stood on the pavement, nylon wig motionless, fox fur quivering in the sunlight. She laughed shrilly like some animal caught in a trap when I embraced her. I touched her frozen curls and buried my mouth in the soft fur at her neck. How we hugged each other, how we began sentences and never finished them, what a noise she made; how she teetered between the cracks in the flagstones of the tiny garden. She had painted her nails scarlet and she wore her serpent brooch and her pearls and her second-best watch. I carried her two suitcases inside and left them in the hall alongside the hat box in which she kept her Joyce Grenfell wig.

  ‘Don’t leave my cases there, dear,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’7

  Winnie’s death clearly prompted reflections about Beryl’s own shortcomings as a mother: one of the things that haunted her, especially during the latter period of her life, was the idea that she had let her children down, that they had suffered as a result of her failed relationships and the subsequent emotional fallout they had to go through. She blamed herself particularly with regard to Aaron, who as the eldest had borne the brunt of her emotional distress: ‘He’s had a rotten adolescence . . . a bawling screaming Mum,’ she told Judith, ‘but I guess he will come out of it.’8

  In the short term, however, Winnie’s death acted as a psychological release from what Beryl called ‘the scenes and demands and whatnot’9 of an emotional relationship that she had come to consider ‘so harmful’10 to her own state of mind. Significantly, it also freed her from the image of herself that Winnie constantly projected onto her, allowing Beryl to reinvent herself and her own past. Or as she put it: ‘And then she was dead, so I could do what I liked.’11