Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Writing Life

  My face aches with the effort of smiling and answering formally yet one more speech of welcome. I have had a wonderful time though, with immense hospitality and lots of drink and food which I can’t appreciate because I am so busy attempting to be charming, interesting and amusing all at the same time. I have had press conferences, slittered about on the ice being photographed, been on Tele, climbed near a ski jump, gone 12 hours in a train through the frozen wastes and now lie dying in bed after yet another party. I am friends again with Clive, though the love is now friendship on my part, and I am trying to start writing Hitler.1

  Although Beryl had frequently drawn on her experiences with men in her fiction, it was invariably only after the relationship had ended: she and Austin had divorced by the time she portrayed him as Joseph in Another Part of the Wood, her affair with Mick was already over when she depicted him as the Wild Colonial Boy in A Weekend with Claud, and Alan had long since disappeared from the scene before she attempted to write about him in Sweet William. For her new novel Injury Time, however, she not only began using her ongoing relationship with Clive as material, she also began to mention him in interviews: ‘We lie awake at night talking about Trust Funds,’2 she told one journalist, caricaturing him as a man obsessed by finance.

  Originally, the intention was to base the novel on the events of her previous year’s holiday in Crete, which she had thought ‘might make rather a good setting for the passions and tensions in the relationships of three middle aged couples’.3 But in the end she decided on the more familiar setting of Albert Street. As in Harriet Said and The Dressmaker, the domestic backdrop was framed by an external plot device, this time based on the Balcombe Street Siege, a stand-off in December 1975 between the Metropolitan Police and four members of the Provisional IRA, who had taken two people hostage in their own home. The six-day siege was widely covered in the media and its dramatic, and peaceful, conclusion was relayed on a television news broadcast that was watched by millions.

  In the novel the terrorists were replaced by bank robbers on the run, but the central idea remained the same, the sudden elevation of private life into the public arena: ‘What was going to be this quiet dinner party is suddenly on nationwide telly.’4 Consciously or unconsciously, Beryl’s fascination with the notion of the private suddenly becoming public went well beyond its attraction as a dramatic or novelistic conceit. At some level she must have been aware that she was upping the ante on Clive’s commitment – or lack thereof – and Clive must have felt that not only were her references to their affair in public unwise, but that the novel was in some senses a wish-fulfilment for a public exposure of their relationship.

  If Injury Time, like most of Beryl’s novels, was a finely crafted fictional narrative rather than a slice of autobiography, it nevertheless captured something of Beryl’s frustration with Clive, her feeling that their relationship wasn’t really going anywhere. Significantly, at the end of the book, Edward is jettisoned from the robbers’ speeding getaway car, a fate that symbolically prefigured Clive’s own.

  For the last couple of years she and Clive had continued to see each other in their affectionate if fractious way. The constant friction between them, rooted in their different personalities and their shifting levels of commitment to each other, meant there was rarely a dull moment and Beryl was not above using the resulting dramas as comic material for her fiction. A rare dinner party, to which Clive was invited, became the inspiration for that depicted in Injury Time – and then there was the time she persuaded Clive to join her on holiday in Corfu. In order to get away he told his wife he was going on a fishing trip to Ireland, and then had to spend a week in the sweltering Mediterranean heat hiding from the sun, so as not to acquire an alibi-breaking suntan. The dramatic and comic potential of this incident was such that Beryl used it not only in Winter Garden but also in her short story ‘The Man who Blew Away’.

  By the summer of 1976 the relationship was already showing signs of unravelling. Clive’s constant hesitancy, his continual projection of a future in which he would leave his wife for Beryl though never quite having the nerve to do so, began to wear thin, and the arguments between them became more bitter. When the contentious issue was raised during a particularly drunken evening, Clive walked out, as Beryl explained to Penny in a note she typed immediately afterwards, her spelling even more erratic than usual as a result of the drink:

  I have had a violent argument. Suprise – he takes off his bliddy golishes and lies down. Alright if he’s paying the bills, but wot a romantic set up, if he is my sooter. I have sed his hair cut is losey . . . andd I will neffer wash his underdrawers, not if he is paralised. He ses I have holes in my jumpers. But I sed I am an orther, and they have holes. Silence. Then he said he is telling the butler to go. I said why did you not tell the butler you were leaving your wife? Confusion. He has gorn orf.5

  Although Clive didn’t want to break with her, he couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife and children either; he was, as he put it himself, ‘utterly snookered’.6 He was aware that Beryl found his prevarication humiliating, and that he couldn’t keep repeating the same scenario over and over again: ‘I can’t promise again and fail again.’

  Yet part of Clive’s failure to commit to Beryl was his feeling that she wasn’t absolutely committed to him, that she didn’t really want him: ‘If only you’d whisper in my ear you love me,’ he told her. In this he was at least partially justified. While Beryl frequently castigated Clive for his lack of courage, shouting at him and calling him a cheat and a fraud, for the past few years she had nevertheless been content to accept his vague assurances of a shared future because she herself was unsure she wanted to change the status quo.

  Now she decided to force the issue, though the oblique way in which Beryl told Clive she was emotionally committed to him seems to betray her own lack of resolve:

  During the last six months you have talked possibly unwisely about your committment to me. You have on one occasion got rotten drunk and tripped repeatedly over your braces. Nasty words were said. I beleive the term was ‘ugly old bitch’. However when I saw you the following day I think I forgave you rather prettily and more or less instantly. I did not lecture you. Practically every time I have seen you in the last six months or legal session, you have thrown at me the desire to be with me more permanently and added, ‘But you won’t have me will you? You won’t tell me.’ Out of a mature sense of the rightness of things I held my tongue even if I did not cross my legs. Finally on the 19th I was carried away enough, before Vodka mind you, to tell you that I did want you. In the past I had implied that I didn’t want you and that it was impossible anyway. On the 19th I thought I implied that I wanted you but it was impossible. This should have transported you to whatever heights there are, but it seemed to me you were appalled by my protestations.7

  Clive sought advice from Anna Haycraft, who tried to reassure him, telling him he should have no fear that Beryl would be anything other than an ‘utterly faithful companion’.8 But this didn’t persuade him either. Perhaps part of the reason for this was that he suspected he wasn’t the only person sharing Beryl’s bed. ‘If you hadn’t been sleeping around,’ he told her by way of excuse, ‘I would have come. I think in time I should have had to have made the break.’

  In the event, the relationship dragged on for another two years. By 1978 they were both getting to the stage where they’d had enough. ‘The last two years have been misery,’9 as Clive bluntly put it in a letter that served as a post-mortem on the failed relationship. ‘I don’t know whether it matters to you now,’ he wrote, explaining how he felt, ‘but it was the rows, the hassle, the dark thoughts and not answering back, the fear of being humiliated if I had, the trying to get away, if only for your sake, and not being able to . . . all mixed up together in an indigestible mess, sitting on my chest, suffocating me for months and months.’10

  There was a last-ditch attempt to save
the relationship, with Clive flying out to Corfu to be with Beryl on holiday, but it was to no avail. Two days after his arrival he felt ill and was already looking to return: ‘Clive may or may not be going home. He’s very undecided’,11 as a friend of the family staying with Beryl at the time put it. When he got back, Clive wrote a long letter effectively drawing things to a close. He conceded that perhaps Beryl was right in thinking they were ‘bad for one another’,12 but felt they should have been gentler, less impatient with each other – by the end they’d both been ‘hacking away at the mental bond so that it hardly exists’. There were faults on both sides: he knew his prevarications had humiliated her and made her suffer, but he also felt that she was too controlling and too quick to attack him. If anything Corfu had made things worse. At least in London when she got drunk and shouted at him he could walk out and it would be alright in the morning. But in Greece he couldn’t, and in front of other people he found her treatment of him too much to take: ‘You’re not always right and just for once you should have kept your mouth shut if you couldn’t keep off the booze!’

  ‘Let’s call a truce,’ he concluded, which they did. Despite the insults that had frequently been exchanged over the years, both in person and in letters, they would remain friends long after the affair was over.

  One of the consequences of Beryl’s literary success was that she started to take on the role of a professional writer, with all that this entailed. She was now regularly being interviewed and profiled in the press, and would often be asked to write articles on issues related to family life or her childhood experiences. She also began to be invited to give public readings and take part in literary events, both at home and abroad, as her international reputation grew. From the mid-1970s onwards these engagements would form an integral part of her life: between 1977 and 1979 alone her foreign itinerary included Budapest, Israel, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, America and Russia. It was, as she wrote to Judith, a full-time occupation, but one that had its drawbacks:

  I really do work very hard. I have been to America, to Scotland, to Greece, to Belgrade, to Suffolk, to Yorkshire, yes for a split second, to Liverpool, in the last 8 months, plus two tele scripts, and one novel and the children and the house. Not to mention my gentleman caller. I get anything from 50 to 75 letters a week and I refuse to go mad and have secretaries or cleaners or anything, and mostly I just work and work (though I don’t call it work) and things like friendship seem not to be part of my life anymore. I see the children, the next door neighbour, Clive and that’s it. I don’t go out to dinner or lunch’s or party’s. At first it was exciting but now it also a very real race to earn the mortgage and everything.13

  Beryl’s theatrical background inevitably contributed to her success as a performer onstage. The openness with which she talked about her life experiences and her work enthralled audiences, and she was an accomplished reader of her own prose, her incantatory reading style echoing the manner in which she would compose sentences and recite them in her head in order to get the rhythm right. A. N. Wilson, who as literary editor of the Evening Standard invited her to be a guest speaker on a number of occasions, recalled that ‘she held the audience like a diva. She had a particularly actressy voice, but it was actually a very beautiful and euphonious voice.’14

  In 1976 Beryl sufficiently overcame her fear of flying to go to New York to see George Braziller and promote the American edition of Sweet William. Although she failed to meet up with Joseph Hansen, as they had tentatively planned, because she couldn’t work out the American phone codes, she wrote to him from the Royalton hotel to tell him what she’d been doing: ‘I had a most beautiful time. I had a suite in the hotel opposite the Algonquin – and lunch everyday in the Algonquin. I had interviews and photies every 45 mins for 4 days – plus theatres and concerts and a party for me and radio – saw Newsweek, Sat Daily Post, Newsday, Publishers Weekly, New York Times and some others. Then I flew to Chicago to the Tribune and on something called Bob Cromie’s Bookbeat on tele.’15

  She was on her best behaviour – ‘I didn’t dare drink in case I disgraced myself’ – and the only embarrassing moment of the trip came when she let her guard down and went to a Japanese restaurant after drinking with some English friends from Newsweek and fainted four times: ‘They called a doctor and he said I was anemic. I wasn’t – I was drunk. I was a pale silver colour and bright blue lips. Three glasses of bourbon and a bucket of salted raw fish in a Japanese restaurant. I think I was highly controlled not to throw up all over the kimono’s.’

  The following year the Israeli cultural attaché in London, Moshe Don, invited Beryl to take part in a tour of Israel. Other writers on the trip included John Bayley, Melvyn Bragg, Iris Murdoch, Bernice Rubens, William Trevor, Fay Weldon and Ted Willis – ‘as alluring a panel of British writers as has ever collected on one platform’,16 as the Jerusalem Post noted in its report of one event.

  Like the Northern writers’ tour of 1975, the trip to Israel introduced Beryl to writers who would become lifelong friends, most notably Melvyn Bragg and Bernice Rubens. Bernice’s first encounter with Beryl at the airport was indicative of things to come. Their flight had been delayed, and the party was shunted into a hospitality lounge and drinking ensued: ‘I don’t remember much about the very moment I met Bernice,’ Beryl later recalled, ‘because I disgraced myself . . . I was wheeled to the aircraft on a luggage trolley and slept on a small bed at the back.’17 Bernice was not, however, unduly put out by Beryl’s unconventional behaviour: ‘I warmed to her because it was pretty apparent she was cuckoo.’ When she had sobered up, Beryl found out that she actually knew Bernice’s brother, Cyril, a musician in the Liverpool Philharmonic; Austin had met him through the Greens and painted his portrait in the late 1950s.18 Bernice, too, was a skilled musician, playing the cello, or, as Beryl would refer to it, ‘the banjo’.19

  After their arrival at Ben-Gurion international airport and their first night at the Plaza hotel in Jerusalem, the delegation got straight into their impressive – and impressively thorough – itinerary. The ten-day trip was meticulously planned down to the last detail, a punishing schedule that could not have been more structured if it had been organized by the Politburo. Most days, the schedule of events began at 8.30 in the morning, though 7.30 was not unusual, and almost all involved a full twelve-hour programme.

  Visits to places of cultural or political significance – the Israel Museum to see the Dead Sea scrolls, a refugee camp in Gaza, Yad Vashem holocaust museum, the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, a tour of the holy sites and the Sea of Galilee – were usually followed by a formal dinner in the company of some functionary, followed by a visit to the home of a local notable or worthy.

  ‘The trip was a great laugh,’ as Beryl would later recall, but it was not without its awkward moments, at least initially. Beryl saw herself as the ‘new girl’ and she felt rather nervous and in awe of the rest of the group. Nor did she and Bernice hit it off straight away (‘It wasn’t like we got on amazingly at first . . .’),20 and had Bernice been less accommodating she might have taken offence at Beryl’s somewhat enthusiastic, tourist-like insistence she come with her to see the Yad Vashem holocaust museum. In the event, Bernice refused and Beryl went on her own. At the time Beryl couldn’t understand her attitude: ‘She told me afterwards, that she couldn’t because it was too much, too brutal for her’, that while it was ‘comparatively easy for a non-Jew to feel emotion at man’s inhumanity to man . . . for Jews tears are not enough and can never lessen the pain’.

  Despite their differences in temperament, after returning to London Bernice and Beryl would remain friends until Bernice’s death in 2004. Beryl was a frequent guest at Bernice’s dinner parties in her flat in Belsize Park, and it would be at Bernice’s that she first came into contact with a range of new writers outside the Duckworth circle, including Howard Jacobson and Paul Bailey, who would become a close friend.

  The visit to Israel was undoubtedly a factor in the
choice of subject for Beryl’s next novel, Young Adolf, published the following year in 1978. The catalyst was a book she read shortly after her return, Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, which contained ‘a paragraph . . . about Hitler coming to Liverpool’.21 This struck her as a great idea for a novel: ‘I couldn’t really miss a chance like that. It had all the ingredients, it had Adolf, and my father’s time and my own city.’22 Payne was the first biographer to publish the information, which he had come across in a diary purportedly written by Bridget Hitler, née Dowling, who had married Adolf’s half-brother Alois Hitler in 1910, and who claimed Adolf had visited them in Liverpool in 1912.23 There is no evidence to back up her version of events and most historians now regard it as bogus, though this does nothing to detract from the novel’s brilliant evocation of Edwardian Liverpool, which was informed by the stories Beryl’s father had told her when she was a child.

  Young Adolf took longer to write than usual. Not only was Beryl tackling a subject outside her immediate experience for the first time, the moral and ethical dimension of depicting Hitler was also causing her difficulties. ‘It’s a very difficult problem when you think of it,’ she later told an interviewer who asked about how she arrived at her portrayal of Hitler in the book, ‘the world thinks of a monster, and you’ve got to make a character out of a younger man who is not yet a monster. That was a great difficulty. In the end I think I bypassed it, I failed there.’24 She had initially thought to use her father as a model for Hitler, but in practice she couldn’t do it: ‘I love my father so I would have been too sympathetic to Adolf.’25 As a result she had to take a step back and rewrite it: ‘I had to decide . . . that my Adolf Hitler was going to be a much more cardboard figure, almost a clown.’26