A Writer in Hiding

I first saw A. L. Barker’s books lined up in a row on a shelf in the University of East Anglia library, their dust covers removed, their red, blue and green cloth bindings faded, their pages clean and unmarked – it seemed as if they’d never been read. I borrowed the books and read them one after another. Here was a writer who clearly deserved attention. Her fiction seemed so contemporary, not in terms of style but because of the ideas with which it grappled: the strangeness of so-called ordinary life; the dangers of ignorance or innocence; the consequences of taking, and not taking, action.

I wanted to know more about her but there was little information available ‒ a few obituaries, a couple of mentions in academic monographs. The bare facts were these. Audrey Lilian Barker was born in 1918 at St Paul’s Cray in Kent and grew up in Beckenham. She left school at 16 because her father, a railway worker, didn’t believe in further education. During the war she served as a Land Girl and married. The marriage was not a success and she later said that it failed because she was selfish: for her, writing was the main thing. She worked for the BBC for three decades, including five years as a sub-editor on The Listener. After the war she lived with a friend, Dorothy McClelland, and achieved the domestic stability that she needed to write. In all she wrote nine short-story collections (including ghost stories) and eleven novels, published over a period of fifty years. She died aged 83 in Sutton, Surrey, only sixteen miles from her birthplace. In the late 1930s A. L. Barker worked with an all-male team of girls’ fiction writers in the department of juvenile fiction at the Amalgamated Press. The experience is hilariously described by Barker in her autobiography and short-story collection, Life Stories (1981). The time she spent writing the adventures of idealized child figures with names like ‘Sally-Never-Grow-Up’ influenced her subsequent lifelong interest in writing stories about children for adults, a fine example being her first short-story collection, Innocents (1947), which won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award and allowed her to travel in France and Italy. Speaking about ‘The Art of Fiction’ in the Paris Review in 1981, Rebecca West said of Barker: ‘She really tells you what people do, the extraordinary things that people think, how extraordinary circumstances are, and how unexpected the effect of various incidents . . . The people come off the page to tell you what this would be like. You feel: Now I understand this better.’ High praise indeed, though Barker must have been surprised as well as delighted by West’s account of her as a writer focused on the extraordinary and unexpected. In Life Stories, she insisted that she had no desire to write about the events in her ‘predictable’ life; readers, she felt, ‘were accustomed and entitled to lives that were rich and/or strange’. Much to her dismay, however, she did want to write about how the events in her life had affected her writing. Her anxiety about doing so stemmed from the idea of ‘all those pages, x-hundreds, it could be x-thousands, peppered with I’s’. Bearing in mind that by this point Barker was in her early sixties, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN and the author of a novel that had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, her reticence is surprising. For Barker, though, privacy was key. Her inhibition about revealing herself on paper started at an early age. In Life Stories she writes: ‘When, for the first time, something I had written appeared in print I hid it. Seeing my thoughts on a page was humiliating. One of two courses was open to me: I should have to destroy whatever I wrote, or I should have to write like someone else. I wanted nothing of myself on paper.’ In the short stories, especially, Barker experiments with writing ‘like someone else’; but, of course, she could not avoid putting herself on paper – and much of her best writing is clearly marked by a profound dissatisfaction with that self. In The Middling (1967), for instance, as Ellie Toms waits in her ill-fitting school uniform to collect third prize in the County Literary Festival Essay Competition, she sees herself through the eyes of the usher: ‘I looked like a number three, third-prize material, well down the scale, at the bottom, in fact, of this particular one because there were no Consolation Certificates. I hated him and everyone there . . .’ Ellie’s sense of being third-rate, both socially and intellectually, is echoed in Barker’s description in Life Stories of her secondary schooling at a girls’ grammar school: ‘I felt mandatory, the pip put in to show that the jam was made with real fruit.’ And later, in a statement tinged with her customary wry humour: ‘I had got a scholarship on a mistaken estimate of my abilities . . . I was at that school, that stronghold of knowledge and wisdom and the future, under false pretences. The Authorities had been grossly deceived. When I left . . . I imagined them saying: “We won’t be caught like that again.”’ Social class played an important role in Barker’s sense of herself as an interloper. Her background was unusual considering her profession; female working-class writers were rare in the 1940s and 1950s. In Life Stories she lists the staff at the house where her mother worked: ‘a nurse, a cook, a house-maid and a gardener, and my mother to do the rough cleaning’. As well as reminding the reader of the still-rigid hierarchy of British society in the early 1920s, Barker emphasizes her parents’, and her own, place within it. But unlike her mother and aunts, who ‘all had self-sufficiency and were happy about themselves’, Barker’s awareness of her social class – and her adolescent attempts to distance herself from it – resulted in feelings of estrangement from both school and home. Navigating literary London was clearly a trial for a young working-class woman with such a sense of intellectual and social inferiority. In the spring of 1948, soon after the success of Innocents, Barker attended a party at the West London home of John Carter, the manager of Scribner’s London rare book business, and his wife, the journalist Ernestine Carter. Barker was taken ill at the party, and afterwards was haunted by the idea that perhaps Ernestine and John thought she had been drunk: she had to be reassured by her editor and friend, Norah Smallwood of the Hogarth Press. Such an acute concern for how people perceived her must have played a part in her position on the margins of the literary scene. Avoiding social events in London, she preferred to remain at home in Carshalton Beeches. Of course there were also practical and financial reasons for her absence from the city: she worked full-time in various secretarial and assistant roles, which were not well paid and left little spare money, time or energy for socializing. One can’t help but wonder, though, how Barker saw herself in the eyes of people like Ernestine Carter. Most of the literary people she knew were from upper- or middle-class backgrounds. Perhaps she felt about the literary scene the way she felt about her grammar school – the pip put in to show that the jam was real. Barker’s writing, like her writing life, is characterized by a tension between revealing and concealing. Although the short story was her preferred form, the finest examinations of secrecy and self-censure are in her novels. In The Joy-Ride and After (1963), for example, Alice Oram’s role as a housewife and mother in middle-class suburbia constrains her when she discovers that her husband is having an affair:

She ached for violence, to beat out the other woman like dust out of a carpet. She wanted to strip the place clean of Lilly Warren, her hands yearned to start. She thrust them under her armpits and the energy ran up her arms and exploded inside her head. She fell back on words. They came off her tongue, breathy at first, then like a flock of dirty birds – words decent women find they know when put to it. It was some relief to utter them until they started dropping back – slut and harlot and whore came plumping all round her. In the thick of it she caught sight of her daughter.

Alice’s subsequent switch back into her role of the ‘decent woman’ and ideal mother doesn’t fool her teenage daughter, Grace. Committing thoughts to words transforms the private into the public, uncovering a secret self that, once revealed, cannot be pushed back under the surface. Barker’s fiction reflects her awareness of the irreversibility of self-exposure. Her writing checks itself and keeps aloof, cautious about revealing too much. There is a quietness to her work that is often mistaken for conservatism, a lack of energy, or disengagement from social and political concerns. In a review of A Source of Embarrassment in the Financial Times in 1974, Isabel Quigly wrote of ‘the almost impenetrable inner world of A. L. Barker’ and noted her ‘quiet reputation for sharpness, precision, perfect finish’. Reviewing the same novel in the Observer, Anthony Thwaite described Barker as a ‘delicate, muted novelist’ who ‘writes in a witty undertone, stylish, oblique, with a sense of claws beneath the surface . . . like a 1970s Jane Austen’. Barker always considered herself to be a ‘spare-time writer’ and her fiction to be somehow different or apart from that of other highly regarded writers. In her archive in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, I found what appears to be her response to a list of questions about her writing from an academic researcher: ‘V. S. Pritchett, Walter de la Mare, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Daphne du Maurier – and a host of others classic and modern – I admire and envy because they demonstrate how it should be done.’ The words in italics replace the original phrase, ‘but cannot think they have influenced my work’, which was crossed out. Barker’s reluctance to admit the influence of other writers on her work is yet another example of her underestimation of her talent. She feels that these writers 'demonstrate how it should be done’, suggesting that her own writing falls well below this ideal standard. I disagree with Barker about the merit of her work and hope that, over time, others will not only appreciate her writing but also recognize her importance. As Norah Smallwood put it in a letter to Barker in 1951: ‘For a distinguished Prize winner your modesty is unequalled. And never have I met a more self-critical writer . . . But that’s why you’re so good.’ Like Smallwood, I admire Barker because she wrote despite a sense of inadequacy, harnessing the pernicious voice of self-criticism rather than allowing it to silence her. She is a writer who kept aloof – but kept going. She wrote through her own and others’ doubts about her writing, during all those years of commuting from Surrey to poorly paid jobs in London. Barker is a writer for all those readers, writers and thinkers who feel uncertain, insignificant or overlooked, who are haunted by the spectre of an ideal standard and how things ‘should be done’, but who keep on reading, writing, thinking and talking about books regardless, and eventually find their audience.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 56 © Kate Jones 2017