by Brendan King
The next thing she did, when she was made to put the boots down, was to crawl over to Bernice’s cello – which was Bernice’s most prized possession – and knock it over. There was this great crash . . . it was just awful. After that, I said: ‘I think you’re behaving so badly I’m going to take you home.’ I just thought it was so cruel to Bernice.31
One problem was that Beryl found it hard to stop drinking once she started, and as she wasn’t physically able to handle drink, these bouts led to lapses of memory and occasionally even to blackouts. She found these experiences humiliating to recollect, especially when they happened in public, such as the time she interviewed Julian Barnes at the King’s Lynn Literary Festival in 2004: ‘The Julian Barnes thingie is a closed book. I was so nervous I bought a half of whisky ½ an hour before, and have no recollection of the interview.’32 Although the organizer tried to reassure Beryl that those who witnessed it ‘agreed they had never laffed so much since the war ended’, it didn’t stop her feeling deeply ashamed of these losses of self-control.
Consequently, she would continually resolve not to drink in public, but this resolve was easily overcome by the persuasion of those around her. Things were made more difficult by the fact that Beryl’s reputation preceded her, and she had to face the situation many public figures with a weakness for drink find themselves in: having alcohol forced on them by people who expect them to live up to their hard-drinking reputation. She grew to dread public occasions such as lectures, where she might be given a drink before the event had even begun, and literary festivals, where well-intentioned hosts would welcome her with a bottle of whisky – as if she was a connoisseur who drank for pleasure rather than as a psychological aid to help her through difficult social situations.
Those who gave Beryl drink were rarely the ones who had to deal with the emotional (and sometimes physical) fallout. On one occasion in 1988 Beryl was invited, along with the actress Beryl Reid, to take part in a BBC Review programme discussing Beryl Cook’s paintings. Beryl arrived on time, but as Reid was late the producer asked her whether she wanted a drink. She put it off for as long as she could, but then gave in. By the time Reid arrived fifteen minutes later, Beryl was already tiddly. They were then both given more drink: brandy for Beryl Reid, and whisky for Beryl. On the way home after the programme she was so drunk she fell over in the street and bruised herself – she had a vague recollection of passing out on the Tube, but couldn’t remember how she got back.33
Beryl’s drinking was one of the principal causes of arguments with her children, most particularly with Rudi, whose experiences as a child had left her with a lifelong aversion to seeing her mother drunk. Beryl was acutely aware of Rudi’s disapproval: ‘She goes on and on about my drinking. She can’t stand it. She’ll snatch my glass out of my hand and pour it down the sink. And she always knows when I’ve had one secretly, she can spot it a mile off. And I don’t mean getting drunk, I mean having a drink. There’ve been times when I’ve been walking down the street, not staggering or anything, and she’d go “Muuuum!” and come running towards me and then stop dead, toss her head and flounce off. And she was always right.’34
Drinking is often a way of alleviating bouts of loneliness and depression, feelings that Beryl was increasingly subject to in the years following Colin’s death, so much so that she was sometimes overwhelmed by thoughts of suicide. One evening, while working for Beryl, I returned home to find a message from her on my answer machine – when she was writing she would frequently call about changes she wanted making to her text – but this time it wasn’t about work. Instead she sounded depressed and clearly inebriated: ‘I’m just . . . I’m not sure that I can go on,’ she began, before pulling herself together and adding, ‘No . . . forget this, I’ll be perfectly alright in the morning.’35 It was close to midnight, but she seemed so desperate I immediately went round to Albert Street. The lights were out and there was no sign of life, so, apprehensively, fearing I might find her stretched out on the floor in the hall, I let myself in, bypassing the security chain on the door that was so long you could reach in and unhook it. I called her name softly, in case she was awake and thought I was a burglar, and went upstairs. She was asleep in bed: I listened to her breathing for a few minutes to make sure she was all right and left. Although this turned out to be a false alarm, it was a reminder of the fragility of Beryl’s emotional state.
In an interview with Melvyn Bragg around this time, Beryl alluded to these gloomy feelings: ‘Sometimes I even think it would be preferable to die, because more and more as one gets older, one knows about the terrible things that happen, the sudden accidents, the dreadful calamities, the diseases that befall one – and that has one in a state of permanent worry.’36
At first glance, the idea of Beryl writing about the Crimea seemed a strange one – apparently even to herself: ‘I don’t know how the blinking Crimean War cropped up,’37 she told one journalist shortly before Master Georgie was published. A few years before, however, in 1992, she had claimed that her fascination was of much longer standing: ‘I’ve always been interested in the Crimean War’, and she included Michael Barthorp’s Heroes of the Crimea among her favourite books of that year.38
Beryl’s initial interest in the subject may have been stimulated by her fascination with medical books – George Lawson: Surgeon in the Crimea, a series of letters written from Sebastopol and Balaclava between 1854 and 1855, featured in her library – but the catalyst for the novel was the work of the Victorian photographer Roger Fenton. She had been struck by Fenton’s images of the Crimean battlefields, particularly one that depicted the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’, void of all life and scattered with hundreds of cannonballs. It was Fenton’s static, carefully posed photographs – exposure times in those days required subjects to be perfectly immobile – that would inspire the idea of structuring the novel around a series of still images.
It was also after seeing Fenton’s photographs that she decided to make the novel’s central character, George Hardy, an amateur photographer. Beryl wrote to Pamela Roberts, curator of the Royal Photographical Society in Bath where a major collection of Fenton’s work was housed, for more information: ‘I am about to start a new novel on the Crimean War and have decided to include a fictional assistant to Roger Fenton. I would be most grateful if you could recommend to me the most helpful book on the technical and chemical processes of the time – and where I might borrow one. If that is not possible, would I be able to come to Bath and take notes?’39
A photographic image was also the inspiration for the novel’s other main figure, Myrtle. During a trip to the Isle of Wight with Mike and Parvin Laurence (to whom Master Georgie would later be dedicated), Beryl went to Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater, which displayed a collection of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. ‘There was this amazing portrait, a black-and-white portrait of a girl. On the back of the photograph, it explained about her: She had been married three times . . . She had finally run away to sea, and then she died of typhoid, all by the time she was 27. So I bought a postcard of it, and that was Myrtle. That was one way of getting a character.’40
Interestingly, despite the fact that most people would be hard pushed to detect in Master Georgie any trace of autobiography, or any hint that her own life experiences formed any meaningful parallel with those in the novel, Beryl would continue to insist that what she was writing wasn’t fiction. To understand what she meant by this one has to try and make sense of her idea about imagination and the role it plays in the creative act. Beryl claimed not to ‘believe’ in the imagination. Imagination to her was synonymous with ‘the person you were from the past’. It was ‘sort of like a bucket’ that gets ‘filled up with memories and impressions and stuff’, and it was from this well of experience that writers drew; they didn’t simply ‘make things up’.41 At one level this was a truism – we are all the product of our experience and all writers and artists create, directly or indirectly, from that experience – and to that degree
all art is autobiographical. This is perhaps little comfort for anyone looking to read Beryl’s fiction as disguised autobiography, as by definition there is no direct relationship between the lived experience and its fictional representation.
At the end of 1997, with the book almost completed, the South Bank Show invited Beryl to the Crimea and filmed her visiting the battlefields of Sebastopol, Balaclava and Inkerman, as part of a programme about her forthcoming novel and her writing process. There, in the freezing sub-zero temperatures of a Ukrainian winter, as she struggled to finish the book, she got the chance to compare reality with the fictional landscapes she had created in her head. On her return, she handed the 132-page manuscript, now complete, to Robin.42
When it was published in April 1998, the book was overwhelmingly well received, with some reviewers regarding it as her best yet.43 More good news came in September when it was announced that Master Georgie had made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist, the fifth time Beryl had been nominated. As one of the judges was Valentine Cunningham, who had given Harriet Said a good review back in 1972, and another was the former Duckworth author Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl considered that this time she had a good chance of winning: ‘I’ve been lying down. I get terribly excited the day they announce the shortlist. It’s always between 3.30pm and 6.30pm. You can’t bear to be away from the phone. So I attacked the vodka. Then I had to go out to dinner. Now I’m feeling very groggy, but cheerful.’44
For Master Georgie the level of expectation was raised higher than usual, not just because no one had been nominated five times before and it was assumed Beryl would get the Prize as a kind of lifetime achievement award, but because she was also being touted as the people’s – and the bookie’s – favourite. Julian Barnes was sufficiently convinced of the result to put £40 on Beryl to win.45 But she was denied again, this time by Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. Although McEwan was considered a worthy winner in many people’s eyes, there was nevertheless a faint whiff of scores being settled behind the scenes about the verdict, with a finger being pointed at Penelope Fitzgerald as the culprit. Fitzgerald had herself been nominated for the Booker in 1978, for her novel The Bookshop. In a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Cunningham had somewhat unfortunately described the book as an example of ‘the Beryl Bainbridge school of anguished women’s fiction’,46 a description Fitzgerald didn’t find flattering: ‘I’m said to be of the Beryl Bainbridge school,’ she remarked cattily, ‘which is a good corrective to vanity, I expect.’47 It seemed an unfortunate coincidence, therefore, that Cunningham and Fitzgerald should be on the same judging panel, as it gave the latter a chance to show the former she was nobody’s pupil, least of all Beryl’s. Whether Fitzgerald’s vote was decisive or not – the chairman, Douglas Hurd, confessed his preference was for Master Georgie – the prize went to McEwan.48
Although both of Beryl’s novels published under his tenure at Duckworth had been critical and commercial successes, there were increasing signs that Robin Baird-Smith’s vision and objectives for the company were out of step with those of Stephen Hill.
This was made abundantly clear in an event organized by Stephen to mark Duckworth’s centenary at the end of 1998. The fact that it was a glitzy celebrity function held at the Dorchester Hotel perhaps gives some indication of the disconnect between what most people considered to be Duckworth’s literary heritage and core values, and the kind of image of the company that Stephen wanted to project. He seemed to believe that if Duckworth simply acted like a big-shot media company it would be seen as a serious player in the media business, a pretension that was cruelly lampooned in the press:
Duckworth this week celebrated its centenary with a dinner for 300 at the Dorchester. It also marked the launch of Duckworth Literary Entertainments, a film division headed by Tom Hedley of Flashdance fame. MD Robin Baird-Smith looked embarrassed to be there, Anna Haycraft (novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, widow of Colin Haycraft who ran the company for 30 glorious years) was visibly disapproving, while star author Beryl Bainbridge seemed to find it eccentric even by her standards . . . Many of the guests appeared to be B-list celebs – among them punk svengali Malcolm McLaren. Heaven knows what he made of the specially-written grace by Jasper Griffin, Public Orator at Oxford, which was delivered in Greek.49
Over the next few months the situation worsened and Robin confided to Beryl his growing dissatisfaction with the way things were going: ‘Sometimes I feel I am being torn apart here – a slow crucifixion.’50 Matters came to a head the following year and in a move that seemed like history repeating itself Stephen unceremoniously sacked Robin, as the book page of the Guardian reported:
Beryl Bainbridge’s publisher, Robin Baird-Smith, has been ousted as managing director of Duckworth, apparently having failed to move the company forward fast enough – or to be infected by the funky vibe of the new Duck Editions imprint. Duck is certainly taking the genteel publishing house in new directions – highlights from its Spring 2000 programme include Tramp L’Oeil: Memoirs of a Door Bitch (a revealing tale of ‘glamour’s underbelly’ at Tramp nightclub) and the latest masterpiece from yoof style goddess, Bidisha, which, Lord help us all, is billed as ‘a Tarantino-esque reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends set in contemporary London.’ Offerings like these are not obviously to Baird-Smith’s taste – and the prospect of bedding down with such stable-mates might not appeal to Bainbridge either, especially as her contract only extends to her next novel.51
The subsequent history of Duckworth Literary Entertainments and Duck Editions proved that Baird-Smith’s scepticism about these ventures was justified: as of 2014 the former had no assets and liabilities of over £188,000,52 while the latter has published only two books since 2004 – both by Stephen Hill. As for Duckworth itself, the firm went into liquidation in March 2003 and was bought from the administrators by Peter Mayer a few months later.
With Robin gone, Beryl was back in the situation she had originally sought to avoid and once again began sounding out ways to leave Duckworth. She asked Andrew Hewson to write to Stephen and tell him that her new novel about Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale – the last in the projected three-book deal – would be considerably delayed, as Robin’s departure had brought on writer’s block. Stephen didn’t ‘buy’ this line for a moment and curtly reminded Andrew that ‘Beryl is contracted to us’ and that Tom Hedley, who Stephen had appointed as Chief Executive, would only consider releasing her from her contractual obligation to Duckworth for a ‘large cheque’.53
The breakdown in relations between the two sides was epitomized the following year when the Duckworth catalogue not only misspelled the title of Beryl’s novel, but also described its eponymous character – Mrs Thrale’s daughter, Queeney – as a servant girl. In a bad-tempered exchange of letters, Andrew Hewson’s wife Margaret, who was now working full-time at the agency, complained to Stephen about ‘the incompetent blurb writers at Duckworth’, and he countered with the accusation that her firm was ‘unilaterally seeking to break a solemn contract in writing with Beryl’.54
By this time Andrew Hewson was in discussions with Richard Beswick at Little, Brown, who were interested in taking Beryl on, and negotiations on a suitable ‘transfer fee’ were opened. Beswick eventually came up with sufficient money to satisfy Stephen, and it would be Little, Brown, not Duckworth, who published the book.
While all this in-fighting was going on, Beryl had been trying to write her novel. It had initially been entitled ‘Dearest Sweeting’, from Johnson’s habitual manner of addressing Mrs Thrale’s daughter in his letters. After the first chapter was completed, however, it acquired a new title, According to Queeney, which more aptly reflected one of the underlying themes of the novel: the subjectivity of experience, particularly in the matter of relationships.
In the same way that both The Birthday Boys and Master Georgie had required an organizing principle around which the narrative could be structured – the birthdays of the five men in the case of the former, and a sequence of photograp
hic images in the latter – the breakthrough with the novel came with the idea to structure it around a series of definitions from Johnson’s Dictionary. They would serve as a kind of commentary on the events of each section.
After the debacle over the original Duckworth blurb, Beryl decided to write her own for the Little, Brown catalogue. Although it wasn’t used, her synopsis – which she found ‘far more difficult than writing the dam book’55 – shows what Beryl herself felt the novel was about:
The comically cruel candour of this story of unrequited love, passion, rejection and possession, explores the sexual tensions that lie beneath the ordered surface of everyday life. The widower, Dr Johnson, shuttling between his own household of bickering dependents and the comforts of the Thrale establishment, deceives himself into thinking he and Mrs Thrale will never be parted. The narrative leads us on a dance of thwarted relationships interrupted at intervals by the wittingly misleading letters of Mrs Thrale’s daughter, the aggrieved Queeney.56
As Beryl herself later admitted, writing a book about Dr Johnson wouldn’t have been possible if Colin had still been alive. To have attempted it would have risked a repeat of the acrimonious bickering over Watson’s Apology: ‘I’d have felt I didn’t know enough. Or he would have told me I didn’t know enough!’57 Colin was nevertheless the presiding spirit behind the novel and served as a model for its central character: ‘With his acerbity and his intellectual sharpness, he was really rather like Johnson. I still miss him and I’d have loved him to have read According to Queeney.’58