Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Colin’s handling of Watson’s Apology wasn’t Beryl’s only cause of discontent. For the last few years she had been paying what she considered ‘huge sums’ in tax, and despite the high amounts she was earning on paper, she still seemed to be having money troubles. Following the publication of Watson’s Apology, she complained about the situation to Colin: ‘After twelve books I still can’t pay my bills,’ she told him. ‘I’m not blaming you, I’m simply saying I need help or advice or something, to stop me feeling so worried.’33

  In some senses the problem could be said to go back to Beryl’s time at Hutchinson. Her inability to cope with the irregular payments involved in being an author during this period had left her feeling hard done by, resentful of publisher and agent alike. This residue of distrust over money matters had influenced her financial arrangements with Duckworth from the very beginning.

  When Beryl first started at Duckworth the firm was in the process of re-establishing itself in its new incarnation, and money, including that for advances, was tight. As Harriet Said was the first new novel Duckworth had published in years and as Beryl was an unknown commercial quantity, the idea for her to work as a clerk in the company while she prepared the book for publication, rather than pay her an advance, had seemed a reasonable compromise.

  After the publication of Harriet Said this evolved into a mutual agreement run on similar lines. In lieu of the more usual form of financial arrangement between publisher and author – an advance before publication which was then paid back from royalties on sales – Colin and Beryl agreed that Duckworth would pay her a standing order for a fixed amount every month, giving her a secure income, rather than the variable uncertainties of the advance system. All she had to do was produce a novel a year. This suited Beryl and for the first few years it seemed to work: the regular income provided a level of stability that enabled her to write, and her critical and commercial success repaid Duckworth for their original outlay in the system. ‘It was a marvellous idea,’ Beryl said. ‘It stopped me getting too euphoric over royalty cheques and spending all I had.’34

  During this early period Colin had also effectively acted as a literary agent for Beryl’s novels (while Jenne Casarotto at Douglas Rae Management handled television and film rights). Despite the conflict of interest this presented, he had been efficacious in promoting her work internationally and pushing for higher advances for translations and paperback rights. Indeed, it was in his interest to get the best deal he could, as paperback advances were shared between Duckworth and the author.

  As Beryl became more successful her financial arrangements grew more complex and more difficult to keep tabs on. In 1978 she wrote to Colin with a list of petty grievances: she couldn’t understand the Duckworth statements, some of the sales figures seemed to be missing, and she hadn’t received an amended contract that was due: ‘I am also worried about VAT, whatever the bleeding thing is, and though I know its my problem I just feel its all too much to bother about. I must get everything put straight. Clive doesn’t seem to be able to, and you and I have these turgid discussions which never amount to anything.’ Feeling she needed someone outside of Duckworth to handle her literary affairs, she told Colin: ‘I’ve decided to move everything to Jenne Casarotto in the hopes that she will sort it out.’35

  But this didn’t produce quite the results Beryl was hoping for: relations between Colin and Jenne don’t seem to have been particularly warm and a repeated theme of the correspondence between them was Colin’s tardy responses to her letters. In April 1979 Jenne had written to him about Beryl’s earnings, demanding information that needed clarifying so that Beryl could be registered for VAT and her accountant could determine what was eligible for which tax year.36 Six months later, after several letters urging him to respond, she still hadn’t received a reply: ‘I am now extremely perturbed about the lack of communication from you on various matters. Despite letters from me, promises from you to rectify the situation, and now untaken telephone calls from me, nothing has happened. We simply cannot continue to operate this way.’37 Although such delays probably had little effect on the Inland Revenue they gave Beryl the impression that Colin was being uncooperative or inefficient in dealing with the situation.

  Between 1978 and 1979 Beryl’s income nearly doubled, as it did the following year. But with the ongoing confusion over Duckworth’s financial statements Beryl found it difficult to work out how much she was earning and, equally importantly, how much she should put aside to cover her tax bills. These turned out to be much higher than she expected and she struggled to find the money to pay them.

  In 1982 she moved to a new accountant, Malcolm Gunn, who gradually began sorting out her finances and found that she now owed over £8,500 in tax, including nearly £2,000 in interest charges for late payment. Beryl had to use most of the money she earned from presenting English Journey to pay this off in December 1983 and July 1984, but by then she was due to pay another £8,000 in tax for the current tax year, money that she no longer had. In September 1984 she was obliged to borrow £5,000 from Philip and Psiche Hughes in order to help clear her outstanding debt.38

  Desperate about the financial mess she was in, she wrote to Michael Holroyd for advice, hinting that her inability to deal with it effectively was linked to her feelings for Colin: ‘I do wish I could get my life sorted out satisfactorily – a lot of the time it all seems absolutely senseless. I shall sort this tax business out and maybe in doing so I shall sort the other, more pressing problem out once and for all. I feel totally imprisoned in something of my own making, a web of intrigue and fantasy and obcession. I despise myself for it but feel powerless. I don’t know where to turn when I feel like this.’39

  Yet there was no need for things to have reached this state, at least as far as money was concerned. Throughout the 1980s Beryl’s income averaged over £30,000 a year, three times the national average. So why were her finances in such poor shape? Confusion and inefficiencies in the Duckworth accounting department didn’t help matters, but in truth the situation was the result of two factors, the first being the informal and non-standard arrangements by which Beryl was paid and which she herself had agreed to.

  The advance for English Journey was a case in point. In December 1984 Beryl asked Jenne to press Duckworth for a supposedly outstanding advance, but Colin had to remind her that she’d agreed to a convoluted scheme to get more money out of the BBC:

  Jenne has been on to us about the remainder of the advance ‘due’ for English Journey. You have so far been paid £6,666.66 for this book, of which £5,000 was contributed by BBC Publications and £1,666.66 by us. The contract stipulated a total advance of £10,000, but the reason we didn’t pay you the remaining £3,333.33 was that you and I had agreed that we needn’t. As it was a joint publication, the only way we had been able to get the BBC to stump up a large advance was for us to appear to be paying a large amount ourselves. I managed to get the overall figure to £10,000 (after Jenne had failed to do so) and as the BBC had to see the author’s contract that figure had to be in it.40

  Even if carried out with the ostensible intention of helping the author, such ethically dubious arrangements were counter-productive and made accounting difficult: what figure would be used on royalty statements, for example: the amount listed in the contract or the amount she’d actually been paid? In the end Colin conceded to her agent that ‘in view of the complexity of Beryl’s contracts’41 it would perhaps be simpler if he paid the outstanding £3,333 after all.

  The non-standard system of standing orders that had worked so well at the beginning also became a major part of the problem, as it was not well adapted to large swings in earnings. In the early days Duckworth had effectively subsidized Beryl to write, the standing orders being paid out before receipts from book sales and paperback rights came in. But as Beryl’s commercial standing grew, the pendulum swung the other way: at one point in 1981 she had been told she was owed £18,000.42 Duckworth had simply held on to the money, like a ba
nk, paying out her standing orders as agreed and seeing any excess as a reserve out of which she would be paid in the future. Over time, the standing orders were increased to compensate and continued even after Beryl’s yearly output of novels stopped in 1981, with the result that by the end of 1983 she was in the ridiculous situation of actually owing her publisher something in the region of £6,000.43

  The second major factor in the increasingly volatile state of Beryl’s finances was her own inexperience in dealing with money. During the 1970s and 1980s she had spent money as it came in rather than putting aside sufficient to cover her income tax, which at the time was levied at a rate of around 30 per cent. ‘As I never knew what I was earning, and was in any case in receipt from Duckworth of more money than I had ever had in my life, it never bothered me,’44 she told her agent.

  Had things been less tense between Beryl and Colin in the wake of the furore over Watson’s Apology, Beryl’s financial affairs might have been resolved more amicably. As it was, her long-simmering resentments about money and what she regarded – not always fairly – as poor treatment by Duckworth, boiled over.

  On 9 January 1985 Beryl’s accountant told her she would be facing another large tax bill, and by coincidence Colin’s letter responding to her query about the English Journey advance arrived the same day. Colin made the mistake of telling Beryl that her novels were hard to sell: ‘Concerning Watson I have heard from the Little Brown agent that he does not think that the book is commercial in USA’, he explained and added that ‘translation offers haven’t been good’.45 Anxious about her tax and irritated by Colin’s seemingly unconcerned attitude to her problem and his high-handed tone – ‘Your calculation seems to offer confusion worse confounded’, his letter began – she hastily arranged a meeting to discuss the matter with him at the Duckworth offices the next day.

  The meeting, in which Colin again told her that her books were selling poorly, did not go well and ended in an argument. Beryl took his comments not just as a slight on the quality of her novels but also as a personal attack. Back in Albert Street – and almost certainly after a swig of whisky – she vented her anger to Colin in a letter that she had ‘thrown’46 through his window:

  You mentioned that Sweet William was something of a flop, as indeed were most of the others, and that the sheets piling up in the warehouse are costing you money in storage, so I suggest you pulp them. Nor should you bother to do another reprint of Harriet. As you also say that Fontana are disatisfied with the books and nobody wants to buy them, and as I know by George’s statements that he too makes a loss, I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t take up a different career, one which wouldn’t cause so much aggravation and hardship to publishers in general. Unfortunately the contract has been signed with Fontana, and unfortunately I can’t afford to return the money, otherwise in the mood I’m in I would certainly tell them I didn’t want Watson to go into paperback or any of the other five titles. My heart bleeds for them when I think of the effort and cost that will go into their selling of them and how poor the returns will be . . .47

  The follow-up to English Journey had just being mooted by the BBC and Beryl concluded her letter by hinting that if Colin didn’t want it, she would take it elsewhere: ‘If this new BBC series gets off the ground, plus book to go with it, then I will get in touch nearer the time to find out whether you might be interested in publishing it. Having told me to fuck off twice yesterday, something which I have had the feeling you’ve been actually saying, though not verbally, for some time, I shall do so, though I cannot pretend that I don’t love you and Anna very much and that the whole thing saddens me greatly.’

  Despite this peevish outburst, relations between them quickly returned to normal, and over the course of the next few months her financial situation was gradually straightened out. Part of this was the result of having moved to a new agent, Andrew Hewson of the John Johnson literary agency. Beryl had met him previously at a party a few years before for another of the authors he represented, Joseph Hansen, but Andrew had been particularly recommended to her by Leon Garfield. Beryl had come to the conclusion that Jenne wasn’t dealing effectively enough with Colin, so after a meeting with Andrew on 22 January 1985, accompanied by Michael Holroyd for emotional support, she decided to leave Douglas Rae Management.

  However, Beryl’s habitual inability to confront awkward situations meant that while she had unofficially moved to Andrew in January, and had already begun sending him her correspondence with Duckworth, marked up with her spider-crawl handwriting to explain anomalies and errors, it would be nearly six months before she informed Jenne of her decision. ‘I still haven’t the nerve to tell her I’ve gone to you,’ she confessed to Andrew in February, ‘but will tell her next month when I’ve said I’ll have lunch with her.’48 At the end of the month she drafted a letter to Jenne citing a long list of grievances, and concluded by admitting that she wasn’t an easy client:

  I went to you simply because I found it too embarressing to ask Duckworth for money when I needed it. I always thought, and still do, that I was lucky to be published and particularly by them, and I hoped you would take over the odious buisness of asking for money. But after the first year or two you too forgot to ask for the royalty statements, and as I didn’t know any money was due I took on more and more outside work to cover paying my bills.

  To be fair to you I have always balked at you trying to get advances from Duckworth or from a publisher in the States other than George Braziller. It cannot have been very satisfying for you, and I think perhaps that is why you became a bit dispirited on my behalf. Also I don’t think many people could ever deal with Colin unless with a sledge hammer when it comes to the Royalty statements.49

  But at the last minute Beryl lost her nerve and didn’t send the letter, perhaps feeling it was too critical. Only at the end of July did she gather up her courage to write again, though the reason she gave for moving to Andrew was hardly likely to have endeared her to Jenne: ‘He seems to be able to handle Duckworth,’ she told her, ‘perhaps its because he’s a fella.’50

  Despite the move to the new agency, and the reasons behind it, Beryl limited Andrew’s freedom to act on her behalf as far as Duckworth and her American publisher were concerned: ‘I don’t want advances from them (they can’t afford it) unless I get absolutely broke. Nor do I really want to leave George [Braziller] ever. I do think one should be loyal, and I hate having given Jenne the push. I really do have a funny thing about money – I never think I deserve it, and what I want is someone to think ahead for me and persuade me that I do deserve it and that noone is being exploited.’51

  Beryl’s attitude to Duckworth and money would remain a contradictory one. After the standing orders were cancelled at the start of 1985 so that all amounts outstanding could be paid off, Colin offered to return to the standard set-up of advance and royalty: ‘For future books you will be paid all subsidiary money when it comes in and we can also pay you advances if you want them,’52 he told her. But Beryl declined and a few months later she returned to the system of standing orders, now set at £700 a month.

  The resentment she felt over her treatment by Duckworth during this period would remain at the back of her mind, and would flare up again whenever she suspected the company, or rather Colin, of not acting fairly with her. After Colin’s death Duckworth’s poor treatment of her would become an accepted myth, in large part due to her repeated assertions in the press that Colin never printed more than 3,000 copies of her books and never paid her more than £2,000 for a novel – both of which were demonstrably untrue.53 Beryl was incapable of realizing the damage she could do to other people’s reputations by unguarded and inaccurate statements that were offered off the top of her head in order to make a dramatic point about herself.

  Colin had justifiable reasons for feeling irritated by Beryl’s complaints about lack of money. As the 1980s progressed it became increasingly clear that Duckworth was having financial problems of its own.

  When
Colin had told Beryl that her novels weren’t selling particularly well he wasn’t making a personal attack, but stating a simple, if inexplicable, fact. For Duckworth, the turning point was the decision to produce revised editions of Beryl’s earlier work. Up to 1977 Beryl was Duckworth’s leading commercial asset: her reputation in both critical and commercial terms had been growing year by year, and sales had been correspondingly marked by a steady increase.

  With the increase in sales, the print run of her books had also increased: 2,600 in 1972 for Harriet Said, 4,000 in 1973 for The Dressmaker, 5,000 in 1974 for The Bottle Factory Outing, and 8,000 in 1975 for Sweet William. The initial print run for Harriet Said may seem laughably small in hindsight, considering the reception it received, but it was on such small margins that Duckworth had managed to survive. Prudence in not printing more than it could sell ensured that debts didn’t spiral out of control.

  Given the progressive momentum in Beryl’s sales, Colin’s decision in 1978 to increase the print run for Young Adolf to 10,000 was not a rash one. But despite healthy critical notices, the book didn’t sell quite as well as it should have, leaving Duckworth with just under 5,000 unsold copies after the first year. This was a warning shot across the bows, yet it would not have been a problem if Beryl’s next novel had continued on an upward curve. But the decision to follow up Young Adolf with a revised edition of Another Part of the Wood, as a quick way of producing a novel and allowing Beryl to concentrate on television work and on the film script of Sweet William, turned out to be a costly one.