Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Taking a gamble on Another Part of the Wood, Colin stuck with a print run of 10,000 copies. This time it was a more serious mistake: with sales of just over 2,300 copies in its first year, it not only left a considerable hole in his budget, it started to create problems in terms of storage. Although Colin attempted to remedy the situation with subsequent books – Winter Garden was scaled back to 7,100 copies in 1980 – it still wasn’t enough. Sales of Winter Garden were not even up to Injury Time levels, and the even poorer figures for A Weekend with Claude, despite a reduced print run of 5,400 copies, exacerbated what was now becoming a snowballing problem.

  Reducing the print run of Watson’s Apology to 4,000, the lowest since The Bottle Factory Outing in 1974, did little to help, and in any case such measures are always self-defeating: by definition the lower the print run, the more expensive each book becomes to produce, and profit margins are accordingly reduced. As if to rub salt into the wound, Watson’s Apology actually did sell out of its initial print run, with the result that Colin was forced to print an extra 1,600 copies, but this simply incurred extra costs without any meaningful profit. Despite Beryl’s high critical standing, her commercial stock seemed to have fallen. Inconceivably, by the early 1980s she had become a money loser rather than the spectacular moneymaker she had previously been.

  The seriousness of the situation was compounded in no uncertain terms when Duckworth went into collaboration with the BBC to produce the books of her two television series, English Journey in 1984 and Forever England in 1986. Once again, despite the critical success of the series and the anticipated publicity that television exposure should bring, sales were disappointing. Worse still, the BBC had insisted on a print run of 15,000. It was hardly a surprise a few years later to find that both English Journey and Forever England had been remaindered, the only time Beryl’s books had suffered such an indignity.

  For many publishers, and for most people looking from outside, the deal with the BBC seemed like a good one – exposure on national television would surely guarantee higher sales. But despite the quality of the books they were producing, Duckworth was still a small operation, and it simply didn’t have the marketing and distribution channels to reach the wider audiences generated by BBC publicity. Instead, the BBC joint productions became a millstone around its neck.

  Duckworth made a loss on English Journey, which was compounded by a similar loss on another BBC joint production, Orwell: The War Broadcasts. By 1986 Duckworth owed the BBC so much that it was forced to use the advance on another joint edition – based on the forthcoming Forever England series – to pay off the outstanding debts it had already contracted.54 Although there were many other factors that led to Duckworth’s decline over the next five years, such losses were indicative of the difficulties small independent firms faced in a market that was increasingly coming to be dominated by aggressively commercial multinationals. By the end of the decade Colin was embroiled in what would become a disastrous sequence of financial deals aimed at keeping the firm afloat. But these would eventually, and almost inexorably, lead to Duckworth’s demise and his own death, brought on by stress and anxiety.

  If Beryl had hoped a session with Anthony Clare might cure her of writer’s block, she was to be disappointed – at least as far as novels were concerned. There had been a four-year gap between her last two original novels, Winter Garden of 1980 and Watson’s Apology of 1984, and as the decade wore on there was no sign of another novel, or even a desire to write one. Instead, it seemed as if Beryl preferred to turn her hand to any other literary form. Aside from her two non-fiction documentaries, she prepared a collection of previously published short stories, Mum & Mr Armitage – despite her dismissive contention that short stories were ‘a waste of a good idea’55 – and tidied up a piece of juvenilia, ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwistle and Martin Andromiky’, which was published as Filthy Lucre. Neither did much to restore the critical momentum – and perhaps more crucially for Duckworth, the sales – of her best work of the 1970s.

  This drift away from fiction looked set to continue. In June 1986 Andy McKillop, who had published Beryl’s first novel in paperback while at Panther and was now the commissioning editor at William Collins, asked her whether she would be interested in writing a book on Liverpool, as part of a forthcoming series in which established authors would write about a city they had a close connection to. The book would be part history, part observation and part reminiscence, McKillop told her, offering a £15,000 advance.56

  Worried that Colin might feel she was being poached by another publisher, Beryl asked Andrew what she should do, and he reassured her that it didn’t compromise her option to write novels for Duckworth in the future. In any case, the money was too good to turn down and Duckworth was hardly in a position to make a counter-offer ‘given the precariousness of their finances’.57 On 19 December 1986, therefore, she signed a contract for a book of around 100,000 words, provisionally entitled ‘Liverpool’, the manuscript of which was to be delivered by September the following year.

  At the time it seemed like a good idea, but her enthusiasm for the book never took off. She began some initial research – reading James Picton’s Memorials of Liverpool and Grace Wyndham Goldie’s history of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre – but as the months passed Beryl still hadn’t written anything and became increasingly anxious about the approaching deadline. She told Graham Greene about her dilemma and he wrote back with the admirably simple advice: ‘Do give up Liverpool & write another novel.’58

  TWENTY-NINE

  Goodbye Mr Chips

  My thing about ageing was brought on by the realisation that it’s now all over, and that I still ‘love’ you know who and that its still hopeless, also that we’ve damaged our children. Our parents harmed us . . . and we pass it on. I’ve started another novel. I go out a bit, I drink a lot. I live in the past – but then, I always did.1

  Acting on Graham Greene’s advice was not as easy as it sounded. Beryl had already taken the first third of Andy McKillop’s advance – amounting to £5,000 – and she wasn’t in a position to pay it back. The sense of financial obligation, on top of her already real, if slightly neurotic, aversion to letting people down, made it seem impossible to get out of the contract, with the result that the book about Liverpool, or rather her inability to write it, hung over her for the next two years.

  After the original September deadline had come and gone, Beryl admitted to Andy McKillop that she was having difficulty – though in typical fashion she told him, as a kind of token of good faith, she’d written fifty pages when in fact she hadn’t written a word – and he agreed to a year’s extension. But it did no good. Lacking the desire to write it, Beryl was plagued by writer’s block and towards the end of 1988 she backed out of the project and paid back the money.2

  However, Beryl’s research, particularly on the history of the Liverpool Rep, had prompted the idea of a novel, or rather the return to an idea she’d had two years previously. ‘What I really want to do is write a novel about Peter Pan and James Barrie, on whom I’ve gone nuts,’ she had told the Literary Review in 1986. ‘It could be called something like An Awfully Big Adventure – The Lost Boys has already been used. I love the bit where Peter brings down a Mummy to the boys and one of them shoots her and says something like “Oh, Peter I’ve always wanted a Mummy, and now when you’ve brought one, I’ve shot her, Peter!”, although God knows how I’m going to write a book that I can get that into. Perhaps I could set it in a rep company.’3

  But while the idea for the novel gradually took shape in early 1988, there were other factors that got in the way of writing it. The deteriorating financial situation at Duckworth had led to an increasingly desperate search for books that might have a commercial appeal, and another non-fiction project was put forward. One of the packers at Duckworth had met a man who said he was the illegitimate son of the painter Walter Sickert, and had brought him round to Gloucester Crescent to see Colin. Joseph Sickert, as he called hi
mself, had been the source for Stephen Knight’s best-selling book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, in which the Ripper murders were alleged to have been carried out to cover up a secret marriage between Queen Victoria’s grandson, then second in line to the throne, and a working-class Catholic girl. Sickert had subsequently retracted the story, saying it was a hoax, but now he said he wanted to reveal the truth behind the Ripper’s identity and that he had documentary proof to back it up.

  From the start the project had a dubious air about it: not only were there doubts whether Joseph Sickert was who he said he was – his real name was actually Joseph Gorman – but his far-fetched conspiracy theory involving Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, seemed equally suspect. Nevertheless when Colin told Beryl about the story she became enthusiastic and it was suggested she should write a kind of biography: Sickert would recount his life story onto a tape-recorder, and she would then turn it into serviceable prose. Sickert accordingly turned up at Albert Street looking every inch the bohemian, dressed in a fawn corduroy jacket, waistcoast and cravat, and with his moustaches twirled up at the end in flamboyant dandy fashion. The only thing that detracted from his striking appearance was the fact that he didn’t have any teeth, which gave his speech the flabby tone of the dentureless. After the first recording session it quickly became apparent that it was a bad idea – Sickert had no ability to create a scene or invoke a sense of place and he seemed to have no memories of his own. Nor could he provide the documentation – a diary written by one of the police inspectors investigating the original Ripper murders – which he claimed proved his story. After a few sessions the whole idea was dropped.4

  Since the beginning of 1987, Beryl had been writing a weekly column for the London Evening Standard. Coming on top of the increased exposure she’d received from the two BBC series, it would cement Beryl’s new identity as a media personality, transforming her from a well-known figure within the narrow confines of the Camden Town literary set, to a writer with an audience of over a million Londoners.

  The column for the Standard was well paid and not particularly onerous – Beryl could write it in a morning – giving her both a sense of financial security and the time to work on her novel. If her money anxieties didn’t entirely go away – by now Duckworth had stopped paying her their standing order of £700 per month, effectively halving her income – journalism nevertheless allowed her to focus more on writing than on trying to earn a living through Duckworth.

  By the end of January 1988 the overall structure of the novel was all but worked out, after an accident prompted the idea that would give the novel its original plot twist. According to one version of the story, Beryl had tripped over some books while drunk and banged her head. Slightly concussed, she had tried to use the phone but had kept getting through to the Speaking Clock.5 This gave her the idea to make the novel’s central character, Stella, the daughter of the woman behind the voice of the Speaking Clock.

  But if finding a plot was relatively quick and easy, writing the novel wasn’t, and during the course of 1988 she was plagued by writer’s block. Beryl struggled to get the right tone, complaining that she’d written the opening page eleven times. Part of the problem was her decision to go back to a past she found it increasingly difficult to remember, as she told Tony Wilson in an interview the following year: ‘I must be mad, I’ve gone back to Liverpool again. It’s the most ridiculous thing to do. I can’t remember who I was.’6 Her mood was hardly improved when Colin sent a contract for the new novel, offering an advance of £100, which, as she angrily put it, ‘wasn’t worth the paper it was written on’.7

  Nevertheless, An Awfully Big Adventure was well received by reviewers when it was published at the end of 1989, and importantly for Duckworth, it also sold well. Many critics were impressed by how convincing its portrait of theatrical life was, but also by the economy and subtlety with which the various strands of the novel’s plot and the psychology of its characters were woven together, like ‘an intricate piece of emotional clockwork’.8

  The success of the novel was sealed when it made the short list for the Booker Prize – the first of Beryl’s books to be selected for over fifteen years. Welcome though the announcement was, at the time Beryl was more concerned about the row she’d had with Colin the night before, after he’d commented on her being drunk when he called round to Albert Street: ‘I don’t know what happened last night,’ she told me, ‘you should see the kitchen, it’s a real mess. I think I must have been throwing things at him. There are shoes and papers all over the floor. I think I told him to piss off.’9

  As Duckworth’s financial situation worsened, Colin embarked on a series of what would prove to be disastrous business deals and partnerships in an attempt to save the firm from collapse. To give a full account of these complex financial arrangements, which invariably ended in either legal disputes or personal acrimony – or both – would take up too much space here. But the sequence of events has to be covered, as Beryl was an active participant in much of what went on, and it profoundly affected her personal and professional life at the time.

  The beginning of the long and painful slide into the firm’s eventual demise was Colin’s meeting with Roger Shashoua, at the beginning of 1988. Shashoua was an Egyptian-born businessman from a well-to-do Jewish family who had ‘made a fortune out of buying, developing and selling inventions and patents’10 in America during the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1980s, however, he was looking for a new business opportunity after being ‘frozen out’, as he put it, from the exhibition management group he had set up. Shashoua was captivated by Colin and saw in Duckworth not just an opportunity to publish a book he had written about himself, but, more damagingly, a chance to get a foothold in the publishing market. When Colin told him Duckworth was short of money, Shashoua seized his opportunity and offered to purchase a 45 per cent stake in the firm.

  At the time it seemed like a mutually beneficial partnership, with each playing to their own strengths, as Colin himself described it: ‘I should stick to the publishing side, of which I had total control, and he would do the finances, which he would control. He knew nothing about books and I knew nothing about money, so there would be a perfect division of labour.’11 But Shashoua’s knowledge of business law far outstripped Colin’s, and when he drew up an agreement proposing to increase the share capital Colin realized he had been outmanoeuvred. In a fatal move on Colin’s part – he later admitted that he signed the agreement without consulting his solicitors – he sold sufficient shares to Shashoua to effectively give him a controlling interest in the company. Although Colin’s financial difficulties were such that desperate remedies were called for in order to pay off his mounting debts, and technically he had Shashoua’s assurance that the partnership could be dissolved if he became dissatisfied with the arrangement, it was still a risky move and proved to be a costly one.

  From the start Beryl distrusted Shashoua, or ‘Roger the Lodger’ as she would call him, and was antipathetic to the ostentatious marketing schemes he tried to introduce at Duckworth, which he vaunted as a means of saving the firm but which in reality dragged it further into debt. She refused to interview Shashoua for the Independent or give him any publicity when Colin published his book, The Paper Millionaire. When, at the launch of Anna’s novel The Fly in the Ointment, he took Beryl aside and tried to reassure her there would be sufficient money for her next novel, she told him bluntly: ‘I don’t want your dirty money.’12

  Shashoua returned the feeling. When Colin brought him to Albert Street to discuss the situation at Duckworth, his first words to her were: ‘I don’t know why I’m wasting my time coming round to talk to you . . .’13 He most probably had no idea who Beryl was and in any case would have regarded her, not without a certain justification, as completely unbusinesslike and unprofessional. Years later, when he came to write about his experiences in publishing, Beryl’s name was not even mentioned.

  Shashoua’s penchant for flashy promotional events a
nd marketing hype was the very antithesis of everything Colin and Duckworth stood for, and over the following year the relationship between them became increasingly strained. Things came to a head in September 1989, following the launch of one of Shashoua’s new initiatives, held at great expense at the Hammersmith Palais, during the course of which Roger told Beryl: ‘Colin doesn’t pull his weight, he doesn’t do anything, and if he doesn’t knuckle down that’s it, he’s out.’14

  A few days later a report of the event appeared in the Evening Standard which, rather than swallowing the line about Duckworth’s rosy future, pointed out the fact that the firm was in ‘financial straits’. A letter was fired off by Shashoua’s ally, Jonathan Reuvid, threatening legal action if the comments weren’t withdrawn. Reuvid went on to state that what he called the ‘Duckworth Group’ – Shashoua had registered variants of the company’s name to give the appearance that the firm was expanding – now had five subsidiaries: alongside Gerald Duckworth itself there was Duckworth Production Ltd., Duckworth Investment Division, a Euro-Distribution division, and even a supposed Italian subsidiary, Editione Duckworth Italiana SRL.15 All this fooled no one and in The Times Ned Sherrin ridiculed Shashoua’s hubris: ‘Today Duckworth – Tomorrow the World.’16

  Colin, too, was unimpressed by Shashoua’s costly and ineffective schemes to make money, and at a board meeting a week later on 21 September, he told Shashoua he was unhappy about his methods. Shashoua angrily called his bluff: ‘That’s it – if you want to take the company back then just give me the money. You’ve got seven days.’17 The meeting was a fractious one: Shashoua’s wife wrote to Colin that he had humiliated her husband in front of the other directors,18 and Reuvid complained about the distasteful manner in which Colin had conducted proceedings.19