Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Her uncertainty about the novel was reflected in her indecision over what it should be called. She had told a newspaper reporter that she was at work on an anti-hero comedy called ‘Unjust William’,39 but by the time she had finished, this had been dropped and a definitive title still seemed elusive, the manuscript’s first page simply listing five alternatives: ‘The Trick Cyclist’, ‘Michaelmas Daisies’, ‘Sweet William’, ‘A Travelling Man’, ‘The Man on the Bike’. Anna preferred ‘Sweet William’, so that was the one which was chosen.

  As if picking up on Beryl’s hesitations about the novel, reviewers hinted at a slight feeling of dissatisfaction. The Times Literary Supplement, while still generally positive in its praise, felt obliged to state ‘this is not Beryl Bainbridge’s best book’.40 Peter Ackroyd in The Spectator went a step further, and although he appreciated parts of it he concluded that it made ‘no real advance upon her earlier novels’. Ackroyd divined that in this instance Beryl seemed to have had problems transmuting her lived experience into an autonomous fictional narrative, and that her inability to be emotionally detached from the story had impacted on her telling of it: ‘It may be that Beryl Bainbridge is too close to the experience to give it those hard edges and that strain of wilful comedy which generally mark her work.’41

  Alan himself felt the novel’s weakness lay in the fact that ‘the anodyne Ann is nothing like Beryl’, that Beryl had in effect ‘left herself out of the story’. It also seemed to him she had made no ‘attempt at understanding or depicting the roots of [William’s] behaviour’, and to his mind this refusal to engage seriously with the psychological complexity of the two main characters added up to ‘a complete avoidance of the reality we both inhabited’. But then, as he admitted, Beryl hadn’t set out ‘to render a portrait of a relationship, but to write a comic novel’.42

  The success of The Dressmaker and The Bottle Factory Outing had brought Beryl to the attention of the arts establishment. At the start of 1975 she was invited to participate in ‘Writers on Tour’, a six-day literary tour of Northumberland and Tyneside, jointly arranged by Northern Arts and the Arts Council. The four other writers involved were Michael Holroyd, who had recently been commissioned to write a biography of George Bernard Shaw; Ronald Harwood, the author of a number of screenplays and four novels, the most recent of which was Articles of Faith; David Harsent, the youngest of the five, who had already established a reputation as a promising poet; and Joseph Hansen, an American who had made his name with a series of cultish noir thrillers featuring a gay insurance inspector called Dave Brandstetter.

  The tour itself, billed as a chance to ‘discuss the satisfactions and problems of creative writing with internationally known writers’, ran through the first week of March and took in Bellingham, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Morpeth, Wooler, Walbottle and Killingworth – an itinerary that involved travelling around 200 miles between events.

  None of the writers had met before – and most were unfamiliar with each other’s work – but in this instance the mix of different personalities and the pressure-cooker environment of touring and travelling was conducive to an almost immediate sense of camaraderie between them. Joe Hansen and Beryl immediately hit it off. He found it easy to talk to her and on the train up confided in her about his emotional problems.43

  Beryl struck the others as quite unlike anyone they had ever met. Ronald Harwood’s first impression was that she was ‘as mad as a hatter. I didn’t think she could write a proper book, she seemed crazy to me.’ Later, he came to realize that there was an element of pose in her scatty forgetfulness: ‘She seemed to take pleasure in being daffy.’ When he told her his latest novel was called Articles of Faith, she made as if she had never heard the word ‘articles’ used in this context and joked, ‘You mean, like articles of clothing, like knickers?’ After which the book was habitually referred to as ‘Knickers of Faith’.44

  David Harsent, who had already read some of her novels and was aware of her reputation for eccentricity, had a similar feeling:

  On one occasion we were crossing the road in Newcastle and Beryl was searching in her handbag for a letter she’d had from Jimmy Boots, which she’d misplaced or couldn’t find. She was so distracted by this and so determined to find it she sat down in the middle of the road, fishing about in her bag for this letter. There was a bit of a wind and things were whipping off down the road, like money and other bits and pieces from her handbag. I suppose it would have been pound notes in those days, I can’t imagine Beryl had a fiver on her. Eventually she was encouraged to get off the white line and go to the pavement, but the letter from Jimmy Boots did seem crucial.

  Although he felt her ‘scatter-brained attitude and eccentricities were absolutely genuine’, Harsent also recognized that she was ‘bloody good at projecting this image of herself’, and that somewhere within her ‘there was a steel core’.45

  Beryl got on well with the others, but it was with Michael Holroyd that she was particularly taken. The connection between them was immediately apparent: ‘Anyone who was involved in the tour was aware of it,’ Ronnie recalled. ‘Neither were very good concealers.’ Consequently, there was a certain amount of ‘toing and froing between the bedrooms’. Even so, Ronnie didn’t think the affair would last, feeling that deep down they weren’t well suited: ‘They were both complex personalities, but complex in different ways. I didn’t think the ways were compatible.’

  The tour was a memorable one, but the successive days of drinking with Joe (‘He got very pissed all the time, he drank like a fish . . .’)46 had taken its toll. Back in London, Beryl wrote to tell Ronnie: ‘Children pleased to see me but thought I looked raddled with the drink.’47 The drinking did not stop with the end of the tour, however, as Joe was currently working in London on a Fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. ‘Joe and me are dipsomanic in Soho’,48 she informed Ronnie in another letter a fortnight later.

  Beryl had also been seeing Michael, but any hopes she had that things between them might develop further were quickly dashed. In order to be close to the research material he needed for his life of Shaw, Holroyd had taken a house on the outskirts of Dublin and was due to move there at the end of March. As Beryl mournfully told Ronnie: ‘I love the boy Holroyd and he loves me, but he is going away.’

  Although she knew that Michael found her fascinating and enjoyed her company, Beryl also sensed that her affections were more engaged than his. After he had left for Dublin, she sent him a long letter telling him her news (‘An exhausting day with Joe – crying and things . . .’), at the end of which she couldn’t help referring to what was uppermost in her mind, blurting out in a postscript: ‘None of this is what I meant to write. I did write another one but I tore it up. It’s snowing here – I love you but it doesn’t matter.’49

  Over the next month or so Beryl lost herself in trying to finish Sweet William. Although the book was nominally based on her ex-periences with Alan, her feelings for Michael were beginning to distort her portrayal of William: ‘The book is very disjointed. All about you and Samuel Palmer, I keep thinking you’re him under the moon. Its a rotten book. Disjointed. The main character has moved from Rudi’s Da to J. Boots, to you. I have another 30 pages to do and am staying up all night mostly. I will send you the proof or whatever those lavatory pages are, with pages of you duely marked.’50

  Beryl’s American publisher, George Braziller,51 who had bought the rights of all her novels up to this point, was trying to get her to come to America in April to promote the launch of The Bottle Factory Outing.52 This wasn’t practical as she was still writing Sweet William, so he suggested a tentative date of August instead. As Michael had told her he too had to go to America, she thought they might be able to synchronize her trip with his and maybe even travel together. Arranging it was not so easy, however. Not having heard anything from Beryl for a few weeks – during the opening of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery she had got drunk and lost her address book – he somewhat ra
shly and extravagantly booked a double cabin: ‘I am going on the QE2 at immense expense – 1st CLASS, one way, on 19 August.’53 It would be, he said, trying to persuade her, a ‘unique’ experience, and ‘of course, intensely romantic’.54

  But this wasn’t practical for Beryl, as Aaron and Jo, now old enough to travel on their own, were going to Greece for the whole of August, leaving her with ten-year-old Rudi to look after. To Michael this left only one alternative: ‘I think it’ll have to be aeroplane: we can swallow each other’s tablets, hold each other’s hands (no difficulty there).’55 But Beryl hated flying, and in any case if they went in August there would still be the problem of Rudi, so she now had to consider the possibility of taking her with her.

  She had recently had lunch with the poet and critic Dennis Enright, during the course of which she had told him about her predicament, and in a letter shortly afterwards she alluded to her uncertainties about Michael and her frustration at the situation:

  I don’t know about Mr X. From a shy retiring sort of fella he is turning out to be a Mr Bluebeard. He says we must fly now. But even if I got up, to get to him I have to go down again at Dublin and get up again (how rude it sounds) and I would die of shock I fear. And I may have to take my smallest one with me and she is dreadfully pocessive. Also I fear he may be a TORY. How can one love a TORY? Its an Oxymoron – like a family holiday etc. I am a bit down at the moment.56

  By now, Joe had returned to America. He had travelled by way of a Russian ship, the MS Mikhail Lermontov, which gave Beryl the idea of an alternative to flying. Its September departure date meant that Aaron and Jo would be back in time to look after Rudi. She wrote to Michael to explain why she couldn’t fly and to tell him her new plan:

  Now flower . . . I wonder if you will be in the States in Sept, or will you have gone on to famous research centres? Because on Sept 7 the Russian boat goes to New York. Even if I could get on a plane it will go up and down won’t it? I mean to get [to] you. And I don’t suppose they stop anyway at Dublin. Even if I got on one I can’t possibly land and go up again in one day. The shock would kill me. And we can’t do anything on an areoplane. Not after I’m drugged up to the eyeballs.

  But can you come back to New York or would you want to in Sept? I mean if you were not proud I could pay the hotel . . . You are a bit difficult Michael Holyroyd. I mean I think I know who you are but as you are so polite and I am too . . . it is akward to know what you are thinking. I mean I would like to be just friends and gallop over New York with you, I am sure we could have a lovely time, but I don’t know if you want that. But I would be happy being with you in a foreign land.

  I want to meet you in New York about Sept 16 or so. Do you not want that? It would only be for a week to 10 days as I have to get back for the children. When are you going? Oh do write and tell me what to do?57

  But Beryl sensed that Michael was not really interested romantically. In June she wrote to tell Joe how the plans for America were going and added: ‘I realise now never never go with a Virgo. He’s a darlin’ boy but obviously regrets jumping in with both feet. I am jolly sober and sleep a lot and wait quietly for the next disaster to hit me.’58 Nevertheless, whatever Michael’s feelings towards her were, it looked like Beryl would have to follow through with her plans to go to America, and a few weeks later she wrote to Joe again, still feeling deflated by it: ‘The children leave for Greece this week for the summer and then I am going to take Rudi to Venice, and then later, get on the boat. I am scared to book as I do not know what to do when I get there if Michael is not about. He is so beastly vague . . . Apart from a broadcast next month sometime, I am doing nothing at all, and for the first time in my life I am actually begining to feel lonely. I think I shall have to look for someone else with eyes as soft but true etc etc.’59

  But despite the months of complicated arrangements, the American trip had still not been arranged by the end of that summer. George Braziller had fallen unaccountably silent, so Michael flew out alone. ‘The boy Holroyd rang to say he was off on the 28th,’ she wrote to tell Joe, ‘I still think he is beautiful but as a memory. Maybe I am fickle or maybe I see him clearly, and we are as Ronnie said, disasterous together.’60

  At the start of September copies of Sweet William arrived and Beryl sent one to Michael, along with a note saying that a visit to America looked unlikely: ‘Dearest Boy – For what its worth – book. Due out 2nd Oct. Book, not me. Doubt if we shall ever meet again – at least in this life . . . Your loving friend. Beryl.’61

  This vague feeling of disillusion leaked over into a general weariness with the whole process of writing, and when Joe wrote to tell her that he was blocked, that his head was empty and he didn’t know what to write,62 she replied: ‘I cannot think how to cheer you up, as I am not in the highest spirits myself. Gloomy about me book, I suppose. I think for people like us, fulfillment only comes out of more work, and the gaps in between are hell and the times doing it are hell as well – so where’s the fun?’63 Another reason for her lack of high spirits which she didn’t mention, was the thought she might be pregnant. But the test in January proved negative, and once again it turned out to be amenorrhoea.

  As if fated to be continually out of step, by the time Beryl’s visit to America was arranged at the end of February 1976, Michael had returned to Dublin. He wrote and invited her to come over, but she wasn’t sure about the idea, telling Joe: ‘Its too long ago and I should be shy I think.’64 What with her work and having got used to an independent life, maybe relationships of that kind were just too complicated. She still had Clive, and for the moment Clive would have to do.

  Beryl’s next novel was to be ‘the story of a family living in Lancashire thirty years ago’.65 She had originally intended it to be called ‘Semi-Detached’, but during the writing process it acquired the more evocative title A Quiet Life. One of her motives for writing the book – described by The Spectator as ‘a tragic, comic study of what has been called “the psychosocial interior of the family”’66 – was to make amends for the misleading impression she’d given of her parents elsewhere. Having made her mother a comic figure in Sweet William and in Tiptoe Through the Tulips, a television play broadcast earlier in the year, she had begun to feel guilty about having caricatured her for the sake of ‘cheap laughs’. ‘I would dearly like to stop being so comical,’ she told Joe, ‘and be more heavy-weight.’67 As a consequence, she wanted to treat her parents seriously in A Quiet Life, telling a reporter from the Radio Times that the book would be ‘an attempt to do them justice, to portray them sympathetically, as they were’.68

  In the event, however, the novel ended up reinforcing the distorted portrait of her parents she had initially said she wanted to avoid. As she admitted in an interview shortly after publication, space constraints meant the book tended to present a one-sided view of family life: ‘Since I write to a very short time limit, I had to leave out so many of the nice things, the fact that they were good parents whom I liked. So one only sees the gloomy parts.’69

  As domestic conflict is inherently more dramatic than domestic harmony, her emphasis on the more confrontational side of life was perhaps inevitable. In any case, as Alan had noted in respect of Sweet William, Beryl was writing fiction, not autobiography. She was not bound to strict factual accuracy or even fidelity of experience, but to the dramatic exigencies of telling a story.

  One of the ways this heightened sense of drama was achieved in A Quiet Life was through Beryl’s decision to write the book from the perspective of her brother. This allowed the reader to take a more nuanced view of Madge than if she had been presented through a first-person narrator, one of the conventions of autobiographical fiction. In interviews Beryl would frequently assert that ‘all the facts were true’ in A Quiet Life, but this categorical assertion is undercut by the novel itself, in which ‘facts’ seem to be infinitely interpretable, each character having their own version of a reality that is at odds with everyone else’s.

  By now, glow
ing reviews had become such a fixture that she told a Newsday reporter: ‘I think if I got a bad review, I’d get a hell of a shock.’70 Although there had been some slight quibbles over the issue of whether Beryl’s style was achieved at the expense of characterization, the reviews for A Quiet Life did not disappoint: Hugo Williams in the New Statesman described it as ‘a near perfect book’,71 and Francis Wyndham in The Times Literary Supplement called it ‘a truly remarkable insight’.72 But while the subtle black comedy and the bleak, generally downbeat tone of Beryl’s novels went down well with newspaper critics, these were not characteristics that tended to endear them to the larger buying public.

  The Newsday piece had been tellingly entitled ‘A writer whose public consists of critics’, hinting that in America, as in the UK, Beryl was still considered something of a niche writer. What was troubling – for Colin if not for Beryl – was that her resounding critical success was not being translated into commercial sales. Over the last five years she had produced a string of novels that had made her name and given her a reputation as one of the country’s leading novelists. But the sales figures betrayed a disturbing tendency: while print runs had progressively increased – from Harriet Said, with a modest 2,600 copies, to Sweet William and A Quiet Life with 8,000 copies apiece – sales had stalled, and those of the last two novels had even declined after the high point reached by The Bottle Factory Outing. For the moment it didn’t seem too much of a problem. Paperback sales were healthy and the sale of American rights and translations helped make up any immediate shortfall in revenue. But for a publisher working on small margins it was a worrying trend.