Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Beryl had worried that Colin’s death might irreparably damage her ability to write: ‘I was scared that I wouldn’t know what to write or who I was writing for.’ She had seen the end of her relationship with Colin as the end of herself as an active sexual being, and in her mind sex and creativity were closely connected: ‘I think all creativity comes from the sexual urge . . . I was quite frightened that when I got older, and all that was over and done with, I’d not be able to do anything.’59

  According to Queeney was the last of the three books Beryl had projected while Colin was still alive. Finishing it therefore represented a symbolic conclusion to her relationship with him, as well as to the whole Duckworth period. This sense that a vital part of her life was now over contributed to her subsequent struggle to find the motivation and energy to write. Beryl was approaching her seventieth birthday; she had long found the mental and physical effort of writing a strain, but in the last decade of her life this would be exacerbated by other, more pervasive problems that frequently come with old age – loneliness, feelings of depression and ill-health.

  In August 2001, as part of the publicity campaign surrounding the publication of According to Queeney, Beryl agreed to an interview with Graham Turner of the Daily Telegraph. When it appeared, however, it provoked a furious reaction from Anna, and she wrote an accusatory letter to Beryl that effectively marked the end of their friendship.

  It is not difficult to see why Anna was so incensed by the tone of the article in general, and by Beryl’s comments in particular. The interview began innocuously enough, covering the familiar tropes concerning Colin, Duckworth and Beryl – that he had been a kind of Svengali figure in her career, and that the firm had treated her badly in financial terms – but then, whether the subject was prompted by Turner or whether Beryl was simply caught off-guard, she began to talk about Colin and Anna’s domestic life, their disagreements and the breakdown of their marriage, and even alluded to the effect on them of their son’s death: ‘I was often piggy in the middle when they were having tremendous rows – either about religion (Colin disapproved of the whole damn thing) or who was to blame for the tragic death of their son Joshua, who fell through a roof after going for a walk at three in the morning. I never said anything because they’d have told me to shut up. Their marriage was never quite the same after Josh’s death.’60

  Turner then put it to Beryl that she had been Colin’s mistress. Although she vehemently denied it in print, and later claimed she hadn’t initiated the topic and that she had been misquoted, the damage had been done, at least in Anna’s eyes.

  Anna wrote to the Daily Telegraph, saying she had been ‘sickened by the grossly impertinent’ reference to her son, before going on to refute the points made in the article and denying that Colin had had any influence on Beryl’s career: ‘Colin is now being described as a Svengali figure,’ she wrote, ‘which is odd since he took little interest in individuals and did not care for fiction.’ The letter ended with a backhanded swipe at Beryl’s loyalty to Colin and the firm, saying that Colin had alienated most of his authors and that Beryl was ‘almost the only novelist sufficiently docile to put up with what could be described, I suppose, as his scholarly approach’.61

  Although the published version of the letter was heavily edited, Anna sent an uncut version to Beryl, along with a letter telling her in no uncertain terms to shut up. It opened with a harshly worded assault on Colin (referred to as ‘Horace’ because of his near-infatuation with the Latin poet), Beryl’s literary agent and Beryl herself: ‘Was it your idea to go on about poor Horace or did the P.R. girl suggest it? Your agents wrote to D’worth when they wanted a reason to flog you to someone else saying he’d “guided your career” – which is twaddle. He didn’t give a toss for careers or novels, yours or anyone’s. Particularly not in the last years which were devoted to the meticulous pursuit of self-destruction.’

  Adducing Colin’s erratic behaviour to a series of strokes that had left him ‘pretty mad’, Anna added, ‘I really don’t want him talked about any more.’ The letter ended with a piece of haughty advice for Beryl: ‘So be a duck and natter about something else. Any mention of Col must turn some light on the family and having spent a lifetime (despite the home lifes and all the publicity) keeping private life private, it makes me not best pleased.’62

  Stung by Anna’s scathing tone and the implication in her letter to the Telegraph (actually cut from the published version) that it had been Beryl who had brought up the subject of Joshua’s death, Beryl typed out a reply fuelled by her own barely suppressed resentments:

  Dearest Anna, I guess I should have ignored your letter, in that I’m the sinner, and you have every right to chastise me. But there was something about your letter that made me cross. There were so many things that you got wrong. I know you were hurt by that fucking article, and quite rightly, but your letter didn’t mention the thing that most upset me – the bit about Joshua . . . You seem to think I’ve encouraged these personal interviews. Stop nattering, you say. I have never yet given an interview without giving full credit to your part in my literary suxcess. You must admit this. If they don’t care to print your part in my career, that is not my fault . . . In your letter you say something about my agents ‘trying to flog me somewhere else.’ The reverse is the truth . . . It was not my agents who ‘flogged me’ but Duckworths. I am now with Little Brown because Duckworth sold me to them. Neither my agents or me received a penny for this transaction. When I told you that Duckworths (Stephen) was after my house, you said that was never serious. I have all the letters from my bank and my solicitor to prove it.

  Money was a sore point with Beryl, and she couldn’t stop herself bringing up Duckworth’s slackness in paying her while at the same time finding money to fund expenses incurred by Anna’s house in Wales:

  When you write that, yes, Colin was bad about money as regards me, but that he treated everyone the same, you seem to forget that the majority of the other authors were acedemics receiving Univervisty saleries. I was supporting three children, and while the Welsh house was being given money to rebuild it – Clive was on the board and told me of the sums side-lined to this enterprise63 – I was being denied royalties. I don’t mind any of this. I don’t care – not until you try to suggest that my ‘nattering’ is upsetting you and is somehow linked to a ‘silliness of mind.’

  In the end Beryl wisely decided not to send the letter, realizing that her counter-accusation about Anna’s behaviour towards Colin – that she had encouraged their children to be ‘appallingly disrespectful’ to him and that this had so upset him Beryl had seen him weep as a result – overstepped the mark and would only aggravate the situation. Rereading the letter in the cold light of day, she may also have noticed that it closed with an incongruous attempt at self-justification, one that was plainly untenable given her relation to Colin: ‘I have never knowingly betrayed you, and would never.’64

  THIRTY-ONE

  Illness

  Dear God! it is no joke getting old, but I often wonder why we want to go on living when all the bits that made life sparkle – sex, ciggies, drink – are all banned or else no longer have appeal.1

  After the publication of According to Queeney, Beryl settled down to a spell of painting, an activity she had sporadically indulged in after completing a novel, at least since The Birthday Boys. Both the race to the Pole and the sinking of the Titanic had provided plenty of scope for reworking the iconic images associated with them: one of the paintings for the Antarctic series was based on Herbert Ponting’s famous photograph of an ice sheet, for example, while one of those for the Titanic series, The Sinking, was based on an illustration of the upended ship disappearing into the water that had featured on the cover of the video of A Night to Remember.

  On the face of it, Dr Johnson offered less in the way of familiar iconography, and perhaps as a result the paintings based around According to Queeney were less purely illustrative of the novel itself and had a more personal, aut
obiographical element to them. Dr Samuel Johnson in Albert St with his cat hodge features the habitually gregarious Johnson sitting alone at Beryl’s table in her front room, looking decidedly gloomy. The whole painting is surrounded by black, an almost physical representation of the encroaching depression and thoughts of death that haunted Johnson and – increasingly – Beryl herself. Another, Colin Haycraft, Dr Samuel Johnson and me, learning Latin in Gloucester Crescent, shows Beryl seated across a table from Colin, a bottle of Bells whisky (Beryl’s usual brand) between them, while the figure of Johnson, holding a cameo of Mrs Thrale over his heart, stands next to Colin. The parallel between the two couples seems intentional, but whether the painting is meant to express an equivalence – that Beryl is to Colin what Mrs Thrale was to Johnson – or a difference – that she and Colin remained separate with only a bottle of whisky to unite them – is open to interpretation.

  The themes expressed in these paintings, of lost love and of the imminent approach of death, were indicative of feelings that had been building over recent years. Even before she began writing According to Queeney, Beryl had confessed to Melvyn Bragg her sense that her life was reaching its inevitable conclusion: ‘The struggle’s over, the struggle money-wise, partially, and life-wise is over. One is going towards the edge of the cliff. I mean there’s not much ahead.’2

  There were objective signs, too, that her career as a writer was reaching its apogee. In the late 1990s Michael Holroyd, in his capacity as President of the Royal Society of Literature, had submitted Beryl’s name to the honours committee, and encouraged other influential figures – including her agent – to write to the Central Appointments Unit and offer their support. The campaign bore fruit in 2000 when Beryl was made a DBE. Although she was slightly embarrassed by the formality and vague pomposity of the title ‘Dame’, she was nevertheless proud of the award.

  Another sign that her career was drawing to a close – in the eyes of others at least – was winning the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2003, a biennial literary award given to writers in recognition of an entire body of work. The prestige of this was slightly diminished by having to share it – and the prize money – with the poet Thom Gunn.3 Not that Gunn wasn’t equally worthy of the award, just that both deserved to win it outright. In any case such ‘lifetime achievement’ awards are always double edged, the implication being that its recipient’s productive life is to all intents and purposes over – and indeed Thom Gunn would die a year later in 2004.

  After finishing According to Queeney, Beryl was now in the situation – for the first time in many years – of not having anything to write about, a problem she hadn’t had to consider since coming up with the plan of the three-book deal nearly a decade before.

  To give herself more time to think of a suitable subject, she reverted to an idea that had long been in the back of her mind, that of turning Injury Time into a stage play. With its small cast of characters, its unities of time and place, and its farcical set pieces it seemed ideal. Beryl hoped that a theatrical adaptation might even be commercially worthwhile, especially given the recent success of a revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, which had been running since October 2000 and showed no signs of flagging in popularity. Initially, the idea was to offer the adaptation to Alan Ayckbourn to produce at his theatre in Scarborough, and, if it was successful there, move the play to the West End. But the completed script provoked little in the way of a positive response. Whether the play’s 1970s setting now seemed too out of date, or it was felt that the drama of the novel didn’t translate into a piece of theatre, nothing came of it.

  Another theatrical project begun around this time did, however, have more appeal. It was initiated by Richard Ingrams, who had the idea of creating an evening’s entertainment on the theme of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale. A former president of the Johnson Society, Ingrams had edited a book of Mrs Thrale’s anecdotes about Johnson over a decade before the publication of According to Queeney, so it seemed logical that he and Beryl should write something together. The intriguing part of the whole enterprise was that they would act in it themselves.

  In April, Richard visited Albert Street to discuss the project and Beryl was struck by his somewhat abstracted air: ‘He didn’t notice the buffalo or the new wallpaper, or anything. I do think the upper classes are very unobservant, or are they just withdrawn?’4 Shortly afterwards a script was hastily put together, with Beryl cutting and pasting Richard’s suggested photocopies from his book and adding linking bits of dialogue. Music was to be provided by Raymond Banning, a piano teacher and friend of Richard’s. An inaugural performance was set up by Clive Conway and on 15 August 2002 the unlikely trio stepped out onto the stage in front of an audience of 350. Beryl later gave an account of the night’s events to her agent:

  Performance of ‘Dr J and Mrs T’ at the New Vic Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, went surprisingly well, seeing that there had been no rehersals and I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do. I wrote the script, to Richard’s confused guidance, and then this nice chap who does music turned up to play Hydn, Bach etc in between.

  Richard (shirt hanging out and hoisting trousers): ‘The programme ses this is The Tragedy and Triumph of Dr Johnson . . .’ (pause to consult notes and hitch trousers, also clearing of nose) ‘. . . but it isn’t. It’s to do with the friendship between Mrs T and Dr J.’

  (Music): A lot of it.

  Me: ‘But for James Boswell etc who would have heard of Samuel Johnson.’ And so on.

  Interval came after journey to France. Huge applause (God knows why) and we bowed. On our return more music to introduce death of Henry Thrale. Then introduction of Piozzi, then marriage of Mrs T to Piozzi. Johnson’s death, more music. Then questions, and they were numerous: ‘Did Johnson f . . . Mrs T?’ ‘Was Boswell a drunkard?’

  Then Richard, trousers really in a bad way, rose to announce he and Raymundo would play a duet. At the end applause was tremendous. Talk about achieving something by the seat of one’s pants.5

  For a short period there was talk of staging a series of performances, but despite the relative success of the evening it was an experiment that wasn’t repeated.

  By now thoughts about a new novel were beginning to take shape. In conversation with Susan Hill at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, Beryl admitted that she had an idea for a book, but that it was ‘complicated’, being about ‘parallel universes, that sort of thing’.6 This was an allusion not to the parallel worlds of science fiction but to J. W. Dunne’s theories about the ‘serial’ nature of time. Dunne had proposed that time wasn’t linear, it was just perceived that way by consciousness, and that in ‘reality’ all moments in our lives, past, present and future, existed simultaneously. The most famous proponent of Dunne’s theory was J. B. Priestley, who had used his ideas as a plot device in ‘Time plays’ such as Time and the Conways and Dangerous Corner. Beryl’s own ‘particular preoccupation’7 with Dunne’s ideas had been rekindled when writing about her youthful theatrical experiences in An Awfully Big Adventure, as she had learned parts of Time and the Conways in 1944 for her drama exams and served as prompt for Dangerous Corner while at the Playhouse.

  Another play that Beryl had performed in during this period, Dear Brutus, provided the title of the new novel. This was a fantasy by James Barrie in which the characters are given a brief chance to experience the life they might have had if they’d made different decisions. Beryl had played the role of Margaret, the ‘dream daughter’ imagined by an unhappy artist after his estranged wife hints that things between them might have been different if they’d had children. Later, when it dawns on Margaret that she is a figment of the artist’s imagination and that on his return to the real world she will cease to exist, she exclaims: ‘Daddy, come back; I don’t want to be a might-have-been.’ The line had struck Beryl as particularly poignant when she delivered it in 1951 and had stayed in her mind ever since.

  For the moment the question of how all this would fit into a novel was one she couldn’t an
swer. In truth Beryl would rather have been tackling a less abstract, less philosophically complicated subject. ‘Wish I could do Colin and Anna and me,’8 she confided to Margaret Hewson, but her self-imposed proscription about dealing with the contemporary events of her private life meant this was effectively off-limits.

  Another element of ‘Dear Brutus’, in which Beryl loosely portrayed herself as a girl called Rose, was her trip to Paris in 1953 with George Greggs, the ‘Tsar’ of Harriet Said. But the catalyst for the novel, the event that tied various disparate ideas together and gave it its structure, was an unwelcome – and literal – accident. On 11 March 2003 the taxi Beryl was in was rammed by another car just yards from her house in Albert Street. As she wasn’t wearing a seat belt Beryl was propelled forward into the glass partition between driver and passenger, which shattered on impact. She was left with ‘multiple facial lacerations’,9 a black eye, a swollen nose, and a deep cut requiring several stitches over her top lip, which ballooned up to twice its size: ‘I don’t have a mouth anymore, more of a pig’s snout.’10

  As if this wasn’t bad enough, a subsequent X-ray revealed that there was still a fragment of glass in her lip and she had to undergo an operation at the end of May to remove the shard, leaving her with a small but permanent scar. Although this was not, for obvious reasons, stated in the novel, it was the origin of Rose’s self-conscious habit of touching her lip.

  At some point in the course of the following months ideas about her 1953 trip to Paris, her car accident, and her recent visit to Paris with Psiche Hughes, during which she’d been to the site of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed in 1997, all merged in Beryl’s mind. The Paris of the past and the present could be linked in parallel fashion, the slippage from one to the other triggered by passing through the Parisian underpass. At the time, it seemed like a good idea for a plot: ‘I’ve just had a shot of genius,’ she told a friend, ‘anyway, I think it’s brilliant. Hope I don’t go off the idea.’11