by Brendan King
But as it turned out these speculations were academic. The next morning she had a relapse, falling into a state that bordered on unconsciousness. For years, despite her shortness of breath and her cough, despite her smoking and drinking too much and eating too little, despite even her cancer, Beryl had seemed indestructible. Now it was clear there was little chance of her pulling through. The next day I went in again to say goodbye, holding her hand as she lay there, frail and almost immobile.
For Aaron, Jo and Rudi, the final parting was much harder, a gruelling day and night vigil would follow, in which Beryl’s emaciated body refused to give up its final breath, improbably hanging on to life in a way that was deeply distressing for those who had to witness it. Finally, in the early hours of 2 July, Beryl stopped breathing and was at last at peace.
AFTERWORD
Beryl had spent a long time thinking about her death and making preparations for it. She had written letters to be posthumously given to those close to her, tucking them away in the top drawer of the huge scroll-top writing desk1 in the front room. In one of the larger drawers further down she kept a folder containing all her legal documents – deeds of the house, will, bank statements – ready to be passed over to her solicitor. She had also put aside a building society passbook, earmarked to cover the cost of her funeral. She had been topping it up with money over the years, though in fact it represented only a fraction of the price of a burial plot in her preferred resting place – Highgate Cemetery.
The day before the funeral, she was laid out in an open coffin in the front room of Albert Street, and her family and some of her close friends came to pay their last respects. In death she was as defiantly anti-conventional as she had been in life, and the viewing of her embalmed corpse was not to everyone’s taste. Afterwards those who braved the ordeal sat on the front steps of the house, talking and drinking, as they had many times before, only for once Beryl remained inside.
The funeral was held at St Silas’s in Kentish Town, after which she was interred in Highgate Cemetery. At the graveside, the band of mourners sang for the last time ‘Did You Think I Would Leave You Dying (When There’s Room On My Horse For Two)?’, as they had at Beryl’s parties in the past.
The news of Beryl’s death provoked an outpouring of affectionate recollections, both from those who knew her well and those who had only met her once but who had never forgotten the experience. She was described in the press as ‘much loved’ – a term one couldn’t imagine being applied to Iris Murdoch or Doris Lessing – and referred to as a ‘national treasure’. In what seemed like an access of guilt, the Booker Prize committee decided to award her a posthumous Booker, leaving it up to the public to decide which of the five previously shortlisted novels should win – the vote went to Master Georgie.
A decision had to be taken about the manuscript of The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, so tantalizingly close to being completed. No one wanted to let all the work Beryl had done on the book, the time and energy she had spent on it over the last years of her life, count for nothing. As I had been editing the book since its conception, I prepared a final version from my working manuscript, incorporating the last pages she’d worked on and making some of the adjustments I’d talked about with her before she died. The sequence of events now ran from Rose’s first meeting with Harold at the airport up to the moment prior to the shots being fired.
Had Beryl lived the ending would undoubtedly have been different. At one point she talked of Rose knocking Harold’s gun just as he was about to shoot Dr Wheeler and that this would accidently kill Robert Kennedy. But I doubt the solution would have been quite so simple or so convenient if she’d got round to writing it. Would Rose’s shot have anticipated those of Sirhan Sirhan, who was also in the room, armed and ready to kill, or simply added to them? We will never know. Beryl often said the end would be easy to do, but whenever she was blocked and I suggested she write it, she would always demur. I suspect she meant that while she didn’t have the ending planned in detail, she trusted to the fact that it was almost always the easiest part to write, because by the time you get to the final page all the narrative problems have been solved and the logic of events takes over.
It is never ideal to publish an author’s work in an unfinished state, but sometimes there is little choice. The best one can hope for is that the pleasure to be gained from the quality of the writing outweighs the disappointment of its lack of completeness. There was at least, as Ruth Scurr remarked in her review of the published novel, a certain appropriateness in its final state: ‘It seems fitting that the novel which eluded Beryl Bainbridge for four decades should be published after her death as a testament to unresolvability, or the impossibility of ending.’2
Throughout her writing career Beryl encouraged the notion that her books were straightforwardly autobiographical. ‘I can’t write fiction,’3 she would tell interviewers; ‘my life’s all in the novels.’4 If this biography demonstrates one thing, it is that there is a more complicated relationship than has commonly been supposed between the facts of Beryl’s life and the representations of it contained in her fiction. In truth this should come as no surprise. However closely a novel seems to be based on real-life source material, it is not a slice of authentic autobiography. To function as a novel it has to be shaped, it requires narrative structure, form, plot and character – and in this fictionalizing process the truth of an individual’s experience is inevitably distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. The fact that Beryl worked in a wine-bottling firm does not make The Bottle Factory Outing a trustworthy guide to the emotional circumstances of her life at the time, any more than the fact that she was an actress at the Liverpool Playhouse makes An Awfully Big Adventure a reliable source of information about her adolescent experiences as a student there.
This is not to say that Beryl’s fiction wasn’t shaped by her experiences, but if parallels are to be drawn between the two, then at the very least they need be based on something more substantial than the anecdotes and stories she published in newspapers. Like many literary celebrities, Beryl was in a position where the things she said about herself and her motivations as a writer acquired a public prominence – and therefore a historical permanence – that was out of all proportion to the casual and often off-hand manner in which they were recounted.
In presenting Beryl’s life honestly and openly for the first time, therefore, I hope this biography will help dispel the myths that surround her name and lead to a fresh evaluation of her, both as a woman and as a writer.5 Only by understanding how the emotional traumas she lived through shaped her complex, contradictory personality can we begin to unravel the process by which she converted these experiences into the novels for which she will be remembered.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BL Beryl Bainbridge collection, British Library, London
JH Joseph Hansen papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California
INTRODUCTION
1 Interview with George Yeatman for the Booker Prize in 1973.
2 Willa Petschek, ‘Beryl Bainbridge’s tenth novel’, The New York Times, 1 March 1981.
3 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 66.
4 Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre, Continuum, 2005, pp. 2–3.
5 ‘The year I grew up’, Independent, 11 July 1999.
6 See ‘The non-fiction film in post-war Britain’ by Leo Enticknap, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1999.
7 The only reference in her early writing to these events is in a fictionalized account of her relationship with a German prisoner of war, ‘My Song is Done’, written in 1949. Although it contains a grim description of a prisoner of war camp in America, concentration camps are only mentioned in passing, not described: ‘Often [Loo] would ask him about Germany and the narzis and the concentration camps.’ ‘My Song is Done’, BL MS 83743.
8 Diary entry for 17 February 1944. BL MS 83816.
9 ‘The year I grew up’, Independent, 11 July 1999.
&n
bsp; 10 The closest Beryl gets to such a statement is in her 1949 diary, under the date 3 June, when she comes home to find her father hasn’t washed or shaved since the previous day and she remarks: ‘I loathe him at times.’
11 Diary entry for 23 January 1946. BL MS 83817.
12 ‘True colours’, Guardian, 14 February 2004.
13 Beryl got the date and information about the numbers killed from her copy of the Chronicle of the 20th Century, Longman, 1988, p. 572. Also see note 15.
14 ‘The year I grew up’, Independent, 11 July 1999.
15 See Chronicle of the 20th Century, Longman, 1988, p. 621. While the information she copied about Mussolini and his mistress being killed on 28 April is true, the Chronicle does not mention that it was actually the following day on which their bodies were taken to Milan and strung up, and not until the start of May that British newspapers printed the grisly photographs.
16 ‘Rubble, toil and troubles’, Evening Standard, 21 April 1988.
17 Diary entry for 15 June 1953. BL MS 83819.
18 Compare the paragraph printed in ‘Beryl Bainbridge says . . .’, The Times, 3 September 1981, with that contained in the published edition on p. 54.
19 This and the subsequent quote: Authors’ Lives, British Library sound recording (Track 2, December 2008). The passage has been edited to remove hesitations and repetitions.
20 ‘My week’, Observer, 6 July 2008.
21 Mark Bostridge, Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, Continuum, 2004.
22 These annotations are often subject to the same carelessness with regard to fact as her published memoirs. This is especially true of those added in 2003–4 to the material bought by the British Library. She had been encouraged in this practice by Austin, who told her to write biographical information on the backs of her paintings as it would make them more valuable when she came to sell them. As Beryl did not bother to research or check the details beforehand, many of them are wildly inaccurate.
CHAPTER 1
1 Journal 1955–65. BL MS 83820.
2 William Foster, ‘Childhood stories’, Scotsman, 15 October 1977.
3 Daily Mail, 10 March 1992.
4 Martyn Harris, ‘Biting hard on the bullet-hole’, Sunday Telegraph, 24 March 1991.
5 Alan Franks, ‘Act one, scene two’, The Times, 7 April 1992.
6 Quoted in ‘The sad, mad, funny world of Beryl Bainbridge’, interview with Pat Garratt, Woman’s Journal, 1979.
7 ‘My father, cabin boy’, Sunday Telegraph, 5 December 1999.
8 William spent the last years of his life working as an ‘ale store keeper’ in Romilly Street. After his death his effects amounted to £154.
9 Although it should be noted that these genealogical databases are themselves minefields in which it is easy to come a cropper. The sheer repetition of names within a family and the small errors that creep into official records mean that everything has to be confirmed by secondary sources before it can be relied on.
10 The cause was given as kidney failure, though it is hard not to think that bearing thirteen children before the age of forty wasn’t a contributory factor.
11 There was a seven-year gap between the birth of Marion (also known as Miriam) and that of Ellen’s second daughter, Deborah, so it is likely that Marion was not William Bainbridge’s child. In any event, Deborah, though born out of wedlock in 1875, was christened a Bainbridge, whereas Marion had been registered as a Kidd.
12 ‘Pinny for your thoughts’, Evening Standard, 23 February 1990. Beryl also mentioned her father’s singing of ‘Lily of Laguna’ in A Weekend with Claud, p. 57.
13 A Weekend with Claud, New Authors, 1967, p. 45.
14 ‘Learning to live with my mum and dad’, Observer, 23 December 1984.
15 ‘Made in England’, Arts Council, 2008.
16 See ‘Facing backwards’, New Review, October 1977; ‘The year I grew up’, Independent, 11 July 1999; ‘How landscape influences an author’s work’, unpublished draft, c. 1986.
17 ‘Made in England’, Arts Council, 2008.
18 Among the hundreds of other bankruptcies during this period was the creditor who pulled the plug on Bainbridge & Co., Thomas Gascoign. He was declared bankrupt on the same day as Richard. The slump affected every aspect of Richard’s business life: Bickerton & Co., for whom he had acted as director, a position presumably gained through Margo’s in-laws, was also wound up in February 1931.
19 Programme for Little Women, Salisbury Theatre, March 1953.
20 Information gathered from ‘Ridge Hill Mine, near Chirbury: introduction & background’ by Ivor Brown, in Quarterly Journal of the Shropshire Caving & Mining Club, Spring Issue, 2009.
21 Liverpool Daily Post, 13 June 1916.
22 Letter from Winnie Bainbridge, 10 March 1948.
23 Hilary Abbott, conversation with author, 13 May 2015.
24 Letter from Trevor Baines to author, 6 January 2014.
25 ‘Home is where the hearth is’, Evening Standard, 17 March 1989.
26 See Winnie’s letter to Beryl, c. 2 February 1948: ‘I have been to Waterloo Hospital this morning to see a Dr. Plevin . . . He took a blood count & blood test and will communicate the result to Dr. Smythe tomorrow. I am feeling very much better but Dr. Smythe wants me to keep on with the injections, gradually lessening them to one a month.’
27 ‘Home is where the hearth is’, Evening Standard, 17 March 1989.
28 Liverpool Daily Post, 11 September 1915.
29 Prospectus, Institut Notre-Dame aux Épines, 1920.
30 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, pp. 13–14.
31 Beryl’s recollection that Winnie was ‘on the rebound from a cad called Walter who played tennis on the Isle of Wight’ when she met Richard (see ‘Women behaving badly’, unidentified magazine, 1996), had at least some foundation. Photographs of Winnie on the Isle of Whithorn in July 1924 show her holding hands with a young man named Wallie. Given the similarity in the sound of the two place names, it seems probable that Beryl simply got them confused.
32 ‘Women behaving badly’, unidentified magazine, 1996.
33 Significantly perhaps, given Beryl’s later health problems, Ellen died from cardiac failure brought on by asthma and bronchitis.
34 Despite this, Beryl claimed that Winnie couldn’t remember the names of her dead siblings.
35 Some of what Winnie felt during this early phase of her life with Richard is captured in a short story Beryl wrote in the mid-1960s, in which an older woman reflects on her past and recounts the moment she realized the future she’d dreamed of had been taken from her: ‘I had a house, a whole house. I had a maid. In those days one could afford a maid you know. And I had a loving husband, and of course there was the baby . . . But one day when the baby was quite small, I woke up and I had the most curious feeling that I had lost something . . . or rather that something had been stolen from me. I played with the baby and I told the maid what we should have for dinner and I wound the clocks and dusted the ornaments, and I felt . . . cheated . . . it was all so boring, one man, one house, one child.’ ‘A walk in the park’, BL MS 83793.
CHAPTER 2
1 ‘A treatise on justification’, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
2 ‘Sweet and sour idylls’, Daily Mail, 13 November 1993.
3 Hilary Abbott, interview with author, 13 May 2015.
4 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 30.
5 Letter from Southport General Infirmary to Dr Kovachich, 4 March 1954.
6 ‘My Little Room’, BL MS 83793.
7 Forever England, Duckworth, 1987, p. 41.
8 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
9 Diary entries for 10 and 13 January 1949. BL MS 83818.
10 Diary entry for 4 March 1949. BL MS 83818.
11 Quoted in ‘Yolanta May talks to Beryl Bainbridge’, New Review, December 1976.
12 The Times, 7 April 1992. There are a number of inconsistencies in Beryl’s account: first she says she was four
teen at the time, then that it happened while she was at the Playhouse, when she would have been between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.
13 ‘Drape expectations’, Evening Standard, 4 January 1991.
14 ‘A treatise on justification’, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
15 ‘Memories’, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
16 ‘More memories’, in ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
17 Diary entry for 31 January 1949. BL MS 83818.
18 Liverpool Echo, 20 December 1973.
19 ‘Fragments 1951–53’. BL MS 83745.
20 Diary entry for 2 March 1960. 1955–65 Journal. BL MS 83820.
21 Quoted in ‘Yolanta May talks to Beryl Bainbridge’, New Review, December 1976.
22 Quoted in ‘Beryl Bainbridge: an ideal writer’s childhood’, interview with Craig Brown, The Times, November 1978.
23 Letter to Richard Bainbridge, c. 1948.
24 ‘Facing backwards’, New Review, October 1977.
25 ‘I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering’. BL MS 83793.
26 ‘Another Friday’, unpublished radio play. BL MS 83793.
27 Letter to Judith Shackleton, c. October 1963.
28 Authors’ Lives, British Library sound recording (Track 2, December 2008).
29 Postcard to Winnie Bainbridge, c. 1944.
30 Birthday card to Winnie Bainbridge, c. 1948.
31 Letter to Winnie Bainbridge, January–February 1948.
32 A. N. Wilson, interview with author, 4 March 2015.
33 Letter to Judith Shackleton, c. 1 April 1965.
34 Beryl would frequently state that he was five or six years older than her, showing the extent to which, psychologically at least, she regarded him as being that much more mature than she was.
35 There was also no doubt an element of gender bias in this: Richard and Winnie simply expected more of Ian as a boy than of Beryl as a girl, or as Beryl put it: ‘Boys were the ones that were supposed to achieve, then.’ ‘Mastering the art of the impossible’, Independent, 24 August 1994.